I remember being a kid and watching the seasons come and go in the Lutheran churches we attended, but nobody ever made sense of the seasons for me and certainly never answered the question what use they might be for me as a Christian. This was the case far too often in church for me especially around church culture and traditions. The answer to my many questions of “why?” were met with the lazy parenting response of “because I said so.” (Although believe me, now that I have children, I do have empathy for this response.) 
At times, I have also been terrified at my own relative apathy. When we slip into apathy, we stop asking questions. We may say that we don’t ask questions just because we’re comfortable, but apathy is never the result of comfort, it is instead the result of distrust. We stop believing that there should be meaning and fullness and depth in everything that we do and say and see at Church, or at least that there should be obvious attempts towards those things. That’s a part of our Lutheran heritage. Luther changed the perspective of what happens in public church functions from “we just do that, in Latin, which by the way only the priest needs to really understand” to “this is a communication tool, this is a training and learning experience, it is important that this stuff be clear.” After all, try as you may, you won’t be able to find Scripture that tells us to set aside four weeks before Christmas and call it Advent. And so if we’re going to do that stuff, we need to be constantly asking the question, “why are we doing this? what is this communicating? is it doing what it is supposed to?”
So this is Advent, starting this Sunday. This is the great time of year to be asking questions. In fact, that is what Advent brings us that no other calendar really does. Advent is a time for bold questions, a time for questioning the status quo, a time for being the annoying kid who asks “why? why? why?” incessantly until he or she gets a satisfactory answer. It is not a comfortable season, it’s a season of stirring things up – even the prayers in Advent traditionally start off “Stir up, O Lord, ….” Because Advent is a season of the Church that challenges apathy. It’s not just “pre-Christmas” but precisely because Christmas is a time where Jesus’ birth shakes the foundations of God’s relationship with man, it is a time of shaking our own foundation and tearing down our golden calves and idolatrous temples to make room for him.
So this Advent, let Advent be Advent. Let it be a time where you ask hard questions of the world, of the Church, and of yourself. Find some holy discontent this season. Pray to God that He would stir up in you an awareness that breaks through the glue of apathy that holds your distrust together for you. Let this be a time where you model John the Baptist for yourself – call yourself out into the wilderness and ask the tough questions. Cut through the noise and the clutter and the “we’ve always done it that way.”
And when you inevitably find that the answer to some of your questions is “because I sin,” then take heart, because you know a God who refused to be apathetic. You know a God who asked hard questions, and who continues to do so, but who also provides you with the solution of His world-shaking Son born an ironic king in a backwater stable so that you would have to answer questions about what kind of a king is born this way. This is Advent, put your apathy to death and make room for the birth of the Life of the World.