Episcopal Church Foundation Vestry Papers - for leading congregations

It’s Advent, we know. Some people found this out when they walked into a church bedecked in purple or blue on Sunday morning. The church, at least a lot of communities in the Episcopal Church, does a pretty good job of keeping the focus on Advent during most of December. This isn’t a minor thing as the themes of Advent are decidedly unsettling: end-times and stirring up and expectancy and waiting.

That’s what I think we’re saying, or trying to say.

That’s not necessarily what people hear. The day after Thanksgiving, I went with my family to our local downtown tree-lighting ceremony, where the line for pictures with Mrs. Claus was a whole lot shorter than that for her husband. We snapped a photo, I posted it on Facebook, and one of my parishioners said, in good humor, “What’s this, Fr. Greg?! Christmas so soon! What heresy!” (She has, in the past, accused me of being “Scrooge,” and I’ve heard “Fr. Grinch” from time to time – such is my reputation for how much I apparently 'love' Christmas in the early days of December!)

Believe me, I’ve told people how much I love Christmas. (I really do, by the way.) And I’ve talked about how much more special a gift becomes when we wait, really wait to open it, such as waiting for the days of Advent to truly savor Christmas. I’ve preached about the twelve days of Christmas as one long feast, and how much joy it is to relish in that short season; in other words, don’t exhaust the celebration by launching it too early. I’ve said all of this, over and over again.

But we, the church, are speaking in paragraphs (see above!) whereas the world is listening in nano-seconds. A friend reminded me that we used to talk about “sound bytes": turning complicated ideas into quick quips the evening news can pick up. Now, even that’s changed. Now, we’re talking in hashtags. And that’s all you’ve got to communicate your message.

We’ve come up with lots of hashtags, or the equivalent of a hashtag to communicate what we’re trying to say in this whole “Wait for Christmas” / “Enjoy Advent” campaign. But I’m afraid that most of them, sound awfully anti-Christmas. We used ‘The Advent Conspiracy’ series a few years ago, but that wasn’t so much about Advent, especially, but, instead, how to do Christmas a different way. Every year at St. George’s, we’ve had some kind of Advent formation gathering – and we did that again this year – but even those have had a “show the world you don’t believe in their version of Christmas” twist. And those messages, frankly, don’t hashtag very well. They’re negative, judgmental, and they offer very little in the way of helping people prepare meaningfully and get their spiritual house in order.

This year, however, as we were preparing for Advent worship and worship music, our music director found a wonderful resource through GIA Publications called “The Advent Sequence.”  Basically a service of Lessons and Carols for Advent, this rich and beautiful liturgy uses the progression of the “O Antiphons” as a unifying theme. (Thus, it can be used much later in Advent, for the “O Antiphons” begin on Dec. 17.) Our music director added instrumentation and connected with congregational and local musicians to pull together an amazing ‘pick-up’ choir. We added this service – which we named after one of the pieces in the collection, “Longing for Light” – to our Advent gathering this past Sunday afternoon, and it was such a beautiful and holy gathering. 

And, as you can tell from this post, it reminded me of what I’ve needed to say all along. Instead of saying “wait” to the Christmas crowd, I can just say “come” to those who want beautiful music and deep prayers of longing and expectancy. Instead of saying “no” to those who want to gather and celebrate, I can say “yes” to that primal need to give thanks to God and sing God’s praises.

As our music director said to me at the potluck and formation gathering, which followed: “At least now people can say they’ve truly had an amazing Advent experience.” And for the first time in my own ministry, I now realize, they can.

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