Advent Column

Advent starts on Dec. 3 this year. I am unaware of a time when the church calendar runs into so much cultural opposition as this time of year. No, I do not mean the foolish mania of a supposed war on Christmas of the culture warriors who seek a safe sense of persecution. I mean a clash of time periods. Christmas music started to penetrate the airwaves before thanksgiving this year and the saccharine Christmas movies started around the same time. For the church, Christmas is to start at Christmas. We just had a visiting group here who expressed surprise that we do not decorate for Christmas in the sanctuary until Christmas. Even in our liturgically correct church here at 4^th and Alby we bow to the culture and have a Christmas hymn to close the 3^rd Sunday in Advent. For that matter, I am a faux Santa myself at a local park again in early December. I don’t practice this, but does the elf on the shelf serve as a secular counterpart to Advent? Is Festivus far behind?

Advent was originally a penitential season to help one prepare spiritually for the First Advent of the Incarnation and the Second Advent of a future divine consummation of God’s vision for our planet. Even some Catholic churches, along with Protestant ones have changed it to blue, to avoid that sense of requiring repentance. St Paul Episcopal in Ivy, VA puts it this way: Deep blue is the color of the clear, predawn sky, the color that covers the earth in the hours before the sun rises in the east. Most of us are not looking at the sky at that hour – perhaps we’re still asleep, or too weary to notice it as we get into our car for our commute. Nonetheless, a deep, dark blue is the color that covers us in the dark, cold hours before the dawn. Thus we use deep blue for Advent to shade the season with a hint of expectation and anticipation of the dawn of Christ. (I usually think of Elvis and blue Christmas, however).

The candles for the season have become a random assortment of symbols. If it has los tits penitential aspect, it no longer makes sense o to have the pink candle for rejoicing as the third Sunday moves toward messianic hopes. I do appreciate that we make at least some effort to connect them to Scriptural themes or virtues, or even figures in the Christmas narrative.

The Jesse tree has caught on in churches and homes... A Jesse Tree, named for the father of David, is a tree that is decorated gradually throughout Advent with symbols or pictures of biblical persons associated with the gradual coming of the Messiah, Christ. The Jesse Tree tradition provides a walk through salvation history; it serves to teach and remind us about Biblical figures in Scripture as they relate to the Advent of Jesus Christ. We just had a marvelous demonstration of it in our Wednesday morning Bible class where a woman used it as a devotional exercise and showed her artistic creativity with the symbols she created for each day.

Everybody says Advent is a period of waiting. No wonder it’s unpopular. Who likes to wait? I don’t know if calling it preparation is much better. It does have the sense of active waiting, instead of a vision of the purgatory of being in an unending line at the Driver’s bureau or doctor’s office in that time tunnel of looking at 2 year old magazines. More than passive waiting, the season is designed to try to create or re-discover a sense of expectancy as deep as that of a child who have grasped Christmas.