Archives For Advent

Advent: Look What You’ve Gotten Your Children Into

Chris —  December 13, 2010

“Here am I, and the children the LORD has given me. We are signs and symbols in Israel from the LORD Almighty, who dwells on Mount Zion.”

Isaiah 8:18

When we hear Isaiah was a prophet, we might think of a person hearing voices and preaching on a street corner.  But for Isaiah, it was commitment he made for his family, that they would stand as representations of God’s message.  How would Isaiah’s audience know what God was telling them?  By looking at Isaiah, his family, and how they lived.

If Advent is about waiting, the question becomes, how do we wait well?  The answer is, we turn our lives, and thereby lives of those closest to us, into previews of the kingdom of God.  Our culture sometimes frowns on parents passing their faith onto their children.  And when all they do is enforce a moralistic code (“we don’t do that in this family!”), maybe culture is right.

But what if our individual lives, and those we have the most affect on, were models of what humanity could be? What if, in our closest relationships, we were examples of speaking and acting in love, caring for the poor, and living as if all our possessions belonged to God?  The world will know what Jesus was talking about, not by hearing a sermon or reading a book, but by countercultural way we lead our lives and our families.

Related Posts:

– Advent: What God Wants for Christmas
– Advent: Is God a Referee?
 – The What and How of Advent

In Life
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Posted Elsewhere: The What and How of Advent

Chris —  December 3, 2010

My Community here in Austin is celebrating Advent, and allowed me to write two articles about it.

What is Advent?

Four Ways to Practice Advent

Marantha.

In Church, Life
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Advent: Is God a Referee?

Chris —  November 30, 2010

I reared children and brought them up,
but they have rebelled against me…

The ox knows its master,
the donkey its owner’s manger,
but Israel does not know,my people do not understand…

Why should you be beaten anymore?
Why do you persist in rebellion?
Unless the LORD Almighty
had left us some survivors,
we would have become like Sodom,
we would have been like Gomorrah.

— Isaiah 1

The big idea behind Advent is waiting.  We submerse ourselves in scriptures about when Israel was waiting on the Messiah, and promises that he will return again.  Through learning to wait for Christmas, we learn to wait well in life in general.

Israel couldn’t wait.  They refused to do things God’s way, and found themselves devastated. Their cities demolished, their people only a remnant, surviving by the skin of their teeth.  Without any note of the coming Messiah, it seems strange to think of this as an Advent scripture.  But maybe the point is to show that God is waiting, too.  Patiently standing by for us to turn away from our self destructive patterns, and embrace the life he has for us.

I don’t like rules.  I don’t like being told what to do.  The idea of God as some cosmic referee, making sure we color between the lines, holds no interest for me. But, like the people of Israel, I’m tremendously self destructive.  Left to my own devices I will alienate the people around me, flounder and fail at the tasks I’m given, and suffer in endless loneliness and depression.

God doesn’t want us to follow his ways because he’s keeping score.  It’s because he built us. He know’s who we are, what we’re capable of, and how the world really works.  Perhaps, like the Israelites, he’ll intervene before we completely destroy ourselves.  But in the meantime, he’s waiting on us, promising “there’s a better way.”

Related Post and Link:
– A Guide to Advent
– 2010 Advent Reading Calendar


In God, Life
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That’s My Kind of Baby.

Chris —  December 25, 2009

The people who walk in darkness
will see a great light.
For those who live in a land of deep darkness,
a light will shine.

For a child is born to us,
a son is given to us.

The government will rest on his shoulders.
And he will be called:
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

His government and its peace
will never end.
He will rule with fairness and justice from the throne of his ancestor David
for all eternity.

Blessings on you and yours.

Marantha.

In God, Life , ,
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A Guide to Advent For Us Ahistorical Evangelical Types

Chris —  December 10, 2009

For hundreds of years, Christianity was organized by a calendar of fasts and feasts and their corresponding texts, called the Liturgical Calendar. Luther’s reforms trimmed some fat off Christianity.  Americans, with a limited sense of our place in history, have often separated themselves from liturgical traditions to distance themselves from  religion, and seek a purer relationship with Christ.

However, in recent years, many evangelical Christians have found that adopting traditions from ancient streams of Christianity helps them order their lives in a way that brings them closer to God.  I first learned of Advent a few years back from Kester, and have found that commemorating it helps me realize the importance of Jesus in my own life.

Some records may indicate that by the second century A.D., the great missional church in Antioch may have celebrated the Feast of the Nativity on December 25.  Constantine made Christmas official and the council of Tours noted Advent in 567 A.D.

Advent is the beginning of the Liturgical Calendar, which leads Christians through the story of Christ and his Church. The four weeks prior to Christmas are spent imagining what it must have felt like to be a Jew, waiting for Messiah to come.  The lectionary contains readings from the Psalms, prophets, gospels and Revelation.  By identifying with what it felt like to wait on the first coming of Christ, we deepen our desire for his return.

Advent traditions you may be familiar with include candles, wreathes, colors and calendars.  You begin greening up the place, placing wreathes and other greeneries in the church to symbolize new life (beautifully ironic in the dead of winter,) and draping the cross in blue.  The Advent wreath includes five candles, often four in blue and one in white.  The first candle is lit on the fourth Sunday before Christmas, which is spent focusing on Hope.  Subsequent Sundays might be spent on other gospel stories like John the Baptist of the angel appearing to Mary.  Some families use a calendar that has a reading for every day of the month and a piece of chocolate.

The beauty in Advent is that it is a very visceral reminder of the importance of waiting. As calendar teaches children the value of delayed gratification it reminds me that God is not finished, with me or this world.  There is much in store; in the mean time we must learn to wait, and wait well.

In Church , ,
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