Tis The Season...But What Season?

The Thanksgiving leftovers have been consumed, Black Friday has passed and Cyber Monday too.  There’s a sense that some big event has been coming since October; greenery and wrapping paper have been lining shelves in the stores, Santa and his reindeer have been popping up everywhere alongside elves and fake cottony snow, radio stations started playing non-stop Christmas music midway through November, and people are decorating their houses, putting up Christmas trees, and setting out manger scenes.  All of the evidence in front of us might lead us to conclude that the Christmas season is in full swing.  The only problem with that conclusion is we’d be wrong.

If you just did a double take and had to read that last sentence again I’ll repeat myself just to be clear.  The Christmas season hasn’t begun, and it won’t for a few more weeks.  That’s right, weeks.  Christmas doesn’t start the day after Thanksgiving (much less back in October like the stores would have you believe), and it doesn’t start at the beginning of December either.  The Christmas season doesn’t begin until Christmas Day or maybe Christmas Eve depending on how you look at it.  The Christmas season begins on Christmas and lasts until Epiphany in January.  This is the “twelve days of Christmas” we love to sing about.  Our modern notion of the Christmas season being the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas is just that, modern – a development coming out of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries and our consumerist culture.  More on that later.  So if isn’t Christmas yet, what season is it?

 

Advent

Not This

The season we are about to enter, the season that begins this Sunday is Advent.  Advent begins four Sundays before Christmas and kicks off the first great cycle of the Christian year, Advent – Christmas – Epiphany.  It is a cycle in which our posture moves “from hope to joy.”[1]  We don’t begin with celebration and “Joy to the world, the Lord is come!”  No, we begin with “O come, O come, Emmanuel.”  Advent is a season of remembrance and waiting, a season of hope and longing.  But what do we remember; for what do we wait upon; for what do we hope and long?

But This

Well, most people would probably say Advent is about remembering the time leading up to the birth of Christ; that it is about the prophets foretelling our savior’s birth, about the longing of the Jewish people for a Messiah.  And we remember a Jewish couple, a teenage mother-to-be, arriving in a small backwater town in a small backwater province of the Roman Empire where there wasn’t enough space in the inn for them to get a room.  There they bedded down for the night as the first of the birth pangs began to set in.  All that is right and true, but it isn’t the whole of Advent.

Advent doesn’t just look to the past and remember – it also looks to the future in anticipation.  During Advent we begin at the conclusion, by gazing forward to the end of days.  The Gospel readings for the first Sunday in Advent don’t begin with Mary and Joseph in Bethlehem, or even with the angel Gabriel’s astonishing news to an un-wed girl; they begin with an adult Christ warning us to “keep awake” for the coming of the Son of Man.  In this season we look backward and remember the period leading up to our savior’s birth, and we also look forward to our savior’s return.

But that still isn’t the entirety of Advent.  It isn’t just about Christ’s first arrival among us, or his future one; it is also about his coming into our lives today.  This last aspect of Advent is one that may be the most neglected in our worship and witness.  Just as the descendants of Israel longed for a savior 2000 years ago, many of us long for a savior today.  Even many of us in church are waiting and longing for Christ to come into our lives and save us from sin and death, to begin that work of re-creation within us that will be completed when he returns in glory.  In the midst of that longing and hope, we are called to repent and return to the Lord for the kingdom of God has come near.

 

Entering Into Advent

As we move through the seasons of the Christian year we take part in the story of the life and ministry of Christ.  We start the year however with this strange interplay between the end and the beginning of that story.  As we move forward in Advent we travel back in time.  We shift from the second coming to just prior to the first.  Why is this?  It is because we can’t fully understand the meaning of Christ’s birth without first knowing how the story ends. 

Every aspect of our worship orientation during the Christian year is centered on Christ’s crucifixion, death, and resurrection; on him breaking the bonds of sin and death and beginning a new work of creation and redemption.  Without a proper understanding of what Christ did on the cross and his resurrection, his birth would just be a story about another great religious figure among many other great religious figures.  In order to fully remember the anticipation of his birth, we need to know what he was born to do.  And our God is not the god of the Deists, a god far off, a god who creates, sets things in motion and then disappears into the ether of the cosmos letting things unwind like a clock. Our God did not ascend into heaven never to come back.  Our God is one who is near, one who enters into history with us, one who won’t leave us alone in despair.  Our God is one who will return to finish the work of re-creation, and will dwell among us once more.  It is in this promise of what Christ has done and will do that we have our hope.  Without a proper understanding of the cross and the resurrection our hope would be foolishness.  In order to make sense of Christ’s return we need to know why he died and rose in the first place.

So while we remember the past and anticipate the future, we do so in light of the cross.  That event lies at the center of every season of the year.  In Advent we sit and wait at the foot of the cross and outside the empty tomb gazing ahead and looking back; we reflect on the past, and hope for things to come, and it is there that we begin our story.  Advent is not about busyness, or gifts and consumerism – it isn’t even about Christmas cheer.  It’s about reflecting on what has gone before, it’s about repentance now, and it’s about what will be.  It’s about the coming of Christ into our lives past, present, and future.

The season of Advent is only days away.  In the meantime hold off on saying “Merry Christmas,” – not because of a fight over whether “he’s the reason for the season,” but because that season isn’t here yet.  As I like to say, “Don’t put Jesus in the manger till he’s born.”  For now let’s wait together upon the coming of the Lord.  Don’t rush it.  For the celebration when he arrives will be the greater for the wait.

 

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[1] “From hope to joy” is a term I picked up from Hoyt L. Hickman, Don E. Saliers, Laurence Hull Stookey, and James F. White, The New Handbook of the Christian Year, (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1992).

Mark Your Calendar

The season of Advent is almost upon us and that means a new year is about to begin.  Now I’m not talking about New Year’s on January 1. No I’m talking about New Year’s on December 2.  I’m a month early you say?  Am I?  Really?

Well, I suppose the answer to that depends on which calendar you are following.  The secular calendar in the U.S. begins on January 1 with New Year’s Day and Ends on December 31 with New Year’s Eve.  In between those two dates lies a whole slew of other “holidays”, some more holy than others.  Beyond the individual holidays there are seasons of the calendar - seasons like Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter.  There is also what we have come to call the “holiday season,” beginning these days in October before Halloween and ending on New Year’s.  This is the calendar we all know, the calendar we grew up with, the calendar which unfortunately narrates our story and governs our lives.

Why that last comment?  I offer it because I want to suggest an alternative calendar to govern our lives; a calendar that narrates a different story.  Some of you already know it, and some of you don’t.  But even those who know it, including myself, have too often allowed the secular calendar to shape the narrative of our life and the way in which we approach everything we do, from our interactions at work, the way we spend our free time on the weekends, how we spend time with family, even to the way we worship. 

What is this new calendar you ask?  Well it isn’t something new.  In fact it has been around a long time.  It is the Christian Calendar, and I’m praying we’ll re-introduce it into our daily lives.  It is a calendar that stands at odds with the status quo, the principalities and powers.  It is a calendar that continually looks to Christ as the center upon which the seasons turn. It is a calendar which re-orients us from being of the world and servants to false gods and idols (insert whichever one you want), to being in the world serving our Lord God and King.  I’m not saying we totally ignore the secular calendar; that would be impossible and foolish.  I’m saying we engage the secular calendar while committing to live by the cycles of the Christian one.

What is the Christian Calendar?

So just what is the Christian Calendar?  The answer to that will depend on your tradition/denomination.  Eastern Orthodox churches have a slightly different calendar from churches in the West, just as Catholics have a slightly different calendar from Protestants.  Even Protestants will vary on what they recognize as a part of the yearly cycle.  For instance, many Protestant traditions will only celebrate Christmas and Easter - those two holidays and seasons comprising the entirety of the calendar they recognize outside of a secular one.  But in the West, the basic traditional calendar begins with Advent and includes the following seasons:

Advent Season
Christmas Season
Epiphany Season (or season after Epiphany)
Lenten Season
Easter Season
Season After Pentecost (Kingdomtide, Ordinary Time)

Within those seasons we find numerous Holy Days including:

Christmas Eve/Day
Epiphany
Baptism of the Lord
Transfiguration Sunday
Ash Wednesday
Palm Sunday
Maundy Thursday
Good Friday
Easter Sunday
Ascension
Pentecost
Trinity Sunday
Christ the King
All Saints Day

But the calendar is more than just seasons and Holy Days.  As I mentioned earlier it is an orientation - or rather it is a way for us to orient our lives, not on secular, national, commercial, or worldly pursuits, but on Christ and his mission to redeem all of creation.

I want to spend time over the next year exploring the calendar and I hope you’ll join me.  We’ll look at each of the seasons and Holy Days in turn as they approach.  We’ll delve into their origins, meanings, and the ways in which we continue to celebrate them today.  We’ll discuss the meanings of the various symbols and colors associated with each season, and ways in which we can incorporate the celebration of the calendar into the worship of God, whether in church or at home, or wherever we happened to be.

Before we go too much further I want to explore a little more about why we might follow the Christian calendar, whether the calendar is even biblical, and some of the aspects of the calendar all Christians share.  I’ll also mention a little bit about the lectionary and how it fits into the calendar.  So look for those in upcoming posts (even if they don't all come before Advent begins).

In the meantime I hope you’ll consider going on this journey with me.  You may just choose to follow the posts here, or you may decide to go a little deeper.  Whatever you choose I pray the Spirit would encourage and guide you.  I’m going to attempt to use a devotional guide related to the calendar this year entitled Living The Christian Year: Time to Inhabit the Story of God, by Bobby Gross.*  I have no idea if it is any good (I haven’t read it so I can’t recommend it yet) and I don’t know if I will finish it (I’ve never been much of the devotional type), but I’m going to give it a shot.

 

*Bobby Gross, Living The Christian Year: Time to Inhabit the Story of God, (Downers Grove: IVP, 2009).

Engaging The Story

I’ve been debating the whole blogging thing for a while now.  I’ve had to wrestle with a few questions and get past my tendency to overthink things and never get around to acting on them.  The first question I kept asking myself is “Does anyone really want to read another religious blog?”  Well, I really don’t know the answer to that.  The next question was actually two-fold; what should I write about, and what should I call it?  Since I’m obviously writing and posting I suppose I’ve gotten past the first question and finally decided to put fingers to keyboard.  And the answer to the second question…well that’s the topic of this post.

 

The Story

When I was in seminary I was introduced to the idea of the story of God.  Now this wasn’t a totally new concept, people have understood the Bible to contain stories ever since they were first written down, and the Bible is often touted as The Story.  What was new for me was the idea of THE story.  The story as I refer to it is found in the Bible yes, but it is more than that, it also encompasses our individual and corporate engagement with it, past, present, and future.

 

Engaging The Story

My first name for this blog was going to be Entering the Story.  I liked it.  It was short, and simple, and seemed to convey what I wanted to get across, that as Christians we engage with the story by entering into it, by becoming part of it and accepting it as our own.  It was a phrase I’d used in seminary to describe the life of faith, discipleship, and worship.  But the more I thought about it, the more I felt something wasn’t quite right with it.  At one level I didn’t want to limit this blog to a Christian audience. The audience wasn’t the big issue though; something else was still nagging at me.  What I finally realized was the phrase “entering the story” implied that at some point you are or were outside of it.  Immediately I knew that was wrong.

Not long after my realization that I had a name I couldn’t use I was driving down the road and out of the blue I was thinking about The Matrix.  Now this isn’t odd, random things pop into my head all the time and leave just as quick, but this one lingered for a while.  And then it hit me, The Matrix was the metaphor I was looking for to describe how we engage the story.

It’s funny how often I see The Matrix used to relate a philosophical or theological theme.  It’s a movie filled with great metaphorical imagery and language.  As I drove down the road that day I was pulled into “the pill scene” where Neo meets Morpheus.  Neo is brought into an abandoned apartment building and told that everything he’s ever known, or thought he knew about the real world was wrong, a lie, a story created to deceive him.  He was born a slave, born in bondage, born into a prison for his mind that he cannot sense, born into the Matrix.  Morpheus tells Neo that he must feel like Alice “tumbling down the rabbit hole.”   He offers Neo two pills and gives him a choice, “take the blue pill and the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe.”  Take the red pill, “you stay in wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”*

The Matrix had always been there whether Neo (or anyone else) knew it or not.  So had the real world, the world that had been kept hidden form him by the powers behind the Matrix.  He was a part of the story even if he didn’t realize it.  But in the pill scene Neo was finally given the opportunity to engage in the story in the way that he chose and The Matrix was never the same again.  The same metaphor applies to the story of God and creation.

Whether we enter into the story isn’t the issue.  Everyone is a part of the story whether they realize it or not, whether they believe it or not.  What matters is how we engage the story and the part we play within it.  That is what I hope to explore in this blog, the many and various ways we engage the story of God and his creation, the story of sin and death, the story of redemptive history, the story of incarnation, re-creation, salvation and everlasting life.

 

What to Expect

What can you expect from this blog?  Who knows?  The possibilities are endless.  I really don’t want to limit it too much.  I’ve got some ideas in mind for early on if I can just get them all down.  Thankfully the title allows for a wide range of topics.  So we’ll see where it leads.  In the meantime take some time to consider just how you’ve engaged the story and the part you play within it.

 

*The Matrix. Dir. Andy & Larry Wachowski.  Perf. Keanu Reeves, Lawrence Fishburn. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1999. Film.