Advent

 First Monday in Advent

Colors: Blue or Purple

Monday is Faith Journey Narrative day on the blog. Now with the long, long season after Pentecost (a.k.a. ordinary time) over, we begin a series shorter seasons focused on the life of Christ. In my growing up in Ardmore Methodist Church in Winston-Salem in the 50's and early 60's, I don't remember ever any mention of the church seasons. I do remember the colors of the paraments changing, but I didn't know or think to question why. Christmas and Easter were the extent of my knowledge of the Christian Year. 

I don't remember ever learning about the church seasons in Divinity School. I never took a course on worship. The 60's launched something of a liturgical renewal movement in Methodist Church. By the.  mid-70's I had begun to catch on.

Crucial for me was the publication of the COCU (Consultation on Church Union) Lectionary in 1974, although I did not become aware of it until I attended a Continuing Ed workshop for pastors led by Will Willimon, who at that time Director of Continuing Education at Duke Divinity School. The lectionary is based on the seasons. The two go hand in hand. About that same time I was reading Thomas Merton and Henri Nouwen. Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain is one of the classics of Christian Spirituality, right up there with St. Augustine's Confessions, books you should put on your 2021 reading list, if you haven't read them already. It was another Merton book, The Sign of Jonas, that enabled me to see the year as the Christian Year. 

It was hard at first, but I began to preach my sermons based on lectionary texts. That forced me to preach on the Biblical texts themselves, rather than my getting a sermon idea and then finding a text to hang it on. In 1983 the Revised Common Lectionary was published. It is used in all the mainline denominations today, although required only in the Lutheran and Episcopal denominations. 

I started going to seasonal pastor's workshops, some conference sponsored, some at Duke Continuing Education. I began to understand the meaning of the seasons in ways I had not before then. I learned that Advent was not Christmas.

Advent is a season of expectation, of waiting for the coming of Christmas, of waiting for the coming of Christ in history, of waiting for the coming of Christ anew in our lives, of waiting for the second coming of Christ in history or metahistory, of a poor pregnant teenage girl waiting for the coming of her angel announced baby, and for a small child's waiting for the coming of Santa Claus. 

The central themes of Advent are waiting, patience, expectation, hope. These themes suffuse our great Advent hymns, O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, and Come, Thou Long Expected Jesus. 

But it is so hard for us, especially us Americans, to wait. We are the nation of instant gratification. There is something of an old saying among wine lovers, "The average amount of time between the purchase of a bottle of wine and its consumption is for a Frenchman six years; for an American six hours." There is a long-standing, almost mythical, feud between pastors and choir directors and their congregations, over when to start singing Christmas carols. Pastors and choir directors want to start singing Christmas carols on Christmas Eve, Advent hymns up until then. Church members say there aren't enough Advent hymns to make it that far. What seems to happen is that a Christmas carol sneaks in the second Sunday of Advent, more the third Sunday, and all the fourth Sunday. 

Advent is in its way a somber season, a minor key season. It is a season to observe, not to celebrate. It is a deeply spiritual season. 2020 has been an Advent year. 2020 is a year we are all waiting to get over. 2020 had a long and bitter election season. 2020 has the Coronavirus. Our hopes and expectations for the end of the pandemic seem more and more real as we await the vaccines. But still, we do wait.

Advent. We wait.

Faithfully,

Christian