Advent

We invite you into a season of Advent. Here you will find some curated resources to guide you through the upcoming four weeks including reading, poetry, music, and family resources.

“Come, Lord Jesus!” In this time between Christ’s first and second coming, we know that through his death and resurrection Jesus has won a decisive victory, and although we see some definite and significant effects of that victory, we still wait for its consummation. Though he has torn down diving walls of hostility, we still feel the alienation and injustice of functional walls. Though he has erased the guilt of our sin and fully reconciled us to the Father, we still feel the effects of sin and darkness in our lives. Advent gives us space to name those tensions and to cultivate anticipation for the One who will come and bring full, glorious resolution to it.

The liturgical calendar exists so that we can order our worship and our lives around the regular and dramatic telling of the story of our Lord Jesus—his birth, life and ministry, death, resurrection, ascension, and his promised second coming. The Christian year begins with Advent, which consists of the four Sundays leading up to the celebration of our Lord’s birth at Christmas. Just as Lent prepares us for Easter, Advent is a season in which we cultivate longing for the coming of our Lord. As the people of God in the Old Testament expected the coming Messiah, we let their expectation train our hearts to expect his promised second coming. And that means doing the work to prepare our hearts not only for the celebration of Christmas, but also for the many ways that Christ breaks into our world—past, present, and future—to rectify that which is wrong.

Advent crashes into our world, suddenly. There is a quick swing from the festivity of Thanksgiving to the starkness of advent—from feasting to fasting. Advent is traditionally a season of humility and preparation, a mini-Lent. It’s a season to take stock of our interior life and bring our whole self before God. Fleming Rutledge says:

“As we prepare to enter the Advent season, the Church hunkers down. The [Anglican] Church in America has been known for being really scrupulous about observing Advent; it’s one of the best things about us. We don’t decorate the church during Advent; we don’t sing carols; we don’t move to Christmas until the eve itself. Advent is a time for making a fearless inventory of the darkness. This is a call for character and courage...At no time is there a greater contrast between what the church teaches and what is going on all around us.”