Each week in Advent has a particular theme attached to it, such as faith, hope, joy, or peace. Some traditions also associate these themes with characters and places in the Christmas story, such as the prophets or shepherds, Mary and Joseph, or the angels. Your Advent wreath may have these themes or characters engraved on it.
Although there isn’t a single, unified tradition (except that all traditions seem to place “joy” on the third week), I am going to follow the official “Breedlove Advent wreath” for the newsletter devotions over the next four weeks. We begin in week one, which on our wreath is labeled the “Prophet’s Candle, Symbolizing Hope.”
In the latter half of Isaiah, God frequently ridicules the false gods of the nations for not knowing the future while simultaneously reminding his own people that he does. As Is. 42:9 says (of future events), “before they spring forth I tell you of them.” It wasn’t that pagan deities didn’t have prophets. Prophecy and fortune-telling exist in many religions. But God’s point is clear—those gods and their prophets and fortune-tellers don’t know the future. They are blind, ignorant, and foolish.
For anyone who reads the Old Testament prophets or who listens to Jesus’ prophecies, it might seem strange that prophecy is associated in Advent with hope. After all, many of the prophecies focus on the judgment to come. The entire human race has been guilty of rejecting God and not worshiping him for millennia; we have been guilty of sinning against one another through violence and deceit since Cain and Abel; we have sinned sexually and through theft. We are guilty and deserve the judgment of God, and the prophets regularly remind us of this. Yet God’s descriptions of the future never end in judgment. Hope—restoration, redemption, healing—is always promised to those who will simply receive his word. God’s judgment has a limit, a boundary, an end; yet his mercy is infinite towards those who receive him.
We come face-to-face with the deepest hope of the prophets on Christmas morning—God in the flesh amongst his people. He did not come in judgment, but instead as “the sun of righteousness…with healing in its wings,” rising upon all those who fear the name of the Lord (Mal. 4:2). To fear the name of the Lord is the only prerequisite. We don’t need to be perfect, nor do we need to be guiltless. We don’t need to have our lives perfectly put together. Instead, everyone who approaches the Lord in reverence and humility will receive this healing. The message of the prophets is “darkness” and “calamity” (Is. 45:7) to those who reject it, but it is hope to those who receive it, a genuine and trustworthy hope that God will come near to us.
As you pray during this first week of Advent, remember the hope offered; remember God coming in the flesh with healing for you. Receive his word, and in humility worship him!
Steven+
Advent
Perhaps no season of the Christian Year is as difficult to keep as Advent! Christmas parties start early in December, and it would be unsocial to decline invitations because we are observing Advent. Yet the cost of filling the season of waiting with celebrations is that we are tired of the season of Christmas by its second day, December 26th! We wear ourselves out with food and parties when the church calendar would have us fasting, and then feel the need to rest and fast soon after Christmas Day, when the church calendar would have us feasting. The Christian Year begins with four weeks of fasting, which prepares us for the twelve days of Christmas, and then simply returns to normal life, or Ordinary Time, afterwards.
The fast of Advent is not a deep or severe fast, though. It is not driven by penitence, but instead by patience, hope, and expectation. It is like waiting for a wedding banquet, which we would hardly prepare for by eating too much cheap food. Instead, we wait in modest fasting, with joy and expectation, because a feast is coming. The certainty of Christmas offers us the ability to wait in patience and hope.
But it is the return of Christ, not Christmas, that we are ultimately waiting for in Advent! The first coming is proof that the second will also arrive, and our joyful waiting for Christmas should prepare us for Christ’s return. More than anything, this is the season of the year when we should cultivate longing and hope for the second coming of Christ.
Prayer in Advent should be marked by this expectation. Every prayer should be grounded in the fact that Christ will come again and restore all things. Every reading should be considered from the standpoint, “What will this mean when Christ returns?” The season offers us a particular form of discipleship—discipleship in waiting. It should be the season where, even as we learn hopeful patience, our hearts fill with the prayer, “Lord, I long for your return! Please prepare me to celebrate your arrival!”
Steven+
The Christian Year
It doesn’t require great insight to see that our world has no framework for how to think well about time. We all experience time, but we lack an overarching way of understanding how its seasons fit together and what it means. That God gave time to us on purpose and teaches us something through time might sound strange to modern ears!
We do have a progression of school years, and within them, the progression of material learned. We also have a series of purchasing days tied to certain festivals—Halloween, Black Friday, Christmas. But we have lost the sense that each season is connected both to the preceding one and the one that follows, and that together, the collection of seasons mean something.
Perhaps this loss results from the movement away from an agricultural world, where land was left fallow for a season before it was sown, and sowing necessarily preceded growing, which resulted in harvest. It is impossible on a farm to divorce one season from another, and each season on the farm contributes its own gift and preparation to the next. But our inability to see the connection between seasons is also the result of trading the church calendar for the economic calendar, where every season is supposed to be “harvest,” and none is “planting.” Try telling your boss you need a “fallow” season because you can start “planting” your work again (to be harvested after it has grown for a season), and you will discover how far removed the economic calendar is from the agricultural or church calendars!
The church calendar is not a series of discrete seasons, yet our discipleship under the tyranny of the economic calendar makes it initially difficult to see this. As the 2019 Book of Common Prayer says, “the Christian Year consists of two cycles” (687). In other words, we don’t have Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany. Instead, we have the Incarnation Cycle, which consists of Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany. And we don’t have Lent, Easter, and Pentecost. Instead, we have the Paschal Cycle, which consists of Lent, Easter, and Pentecost. In each of these cycles, the seasons are intricately connected to and dependent on one another, and in each, the pattern is the same—preparation, celebration, and growth.
The relationships between the seasons demonstrate something important, namely that mortification and repentance (preparation) must precede rejoicing (celebration), because they sow the seeds for it, and rejoicing is the foundation for discipleship and mission (growth), because we reap our harvest from the object of our rejoicing. We cannot divorce Lent from Easter, and we cannot divorce Easter from Pentecost. Each season prepares for the next, and trying to live the spiritual life in only one season is like trying to have only harvest without sowing. We need to be planted anew each year, and the Christian Year offers us the framework.
Steven+