Abby's birthday
Advent and Idolatry
A good post here about Advent—have we become idolatrous in our celebration of Christmas? Are we bowing down in worship and expectation of Christ, or before the throne of commercialism and empire?
I expect this is not an either-or for most Christians. It is not a matter of outright rejecting the giving of gifts or enjoying our American traditions associated with Christmas. But how can we recapture them as worship of Christ?Advent songs
It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas. Silent nights, chestnuts roasting on open fires, bleak midwinter and silver bells.
Trick is, it's not Christmas. It's Advent. Our culture has rushed us into a premature Christmas fixation, mostly because it sells things.
Real conversation between myself and Caleb Porter, Aaron's son, well before Thankgiving:
Caleb: Why does that store already have Christmas decorations? It's not even Thanksgiving!
Ben: Because they want your money, Caleb.
Caleb: Oh...
Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not against Christmas music, so long as it's played between the Friday after Thanksgiving and January 6 (Epiphany). But what does frustrate me is how we've forgotten Advent songs.
Why does this concern me? Well, mainly because Advent songs give voice to the longing and need for Christ that I've been discussing over the past few posts. Christmas songs rejoice in fulfillment; Advent songs look toward what is still unfulfilled. We need both.
So, in an effort to promote Advent celebration everywhere, here is a list of some of my favorite Advent hymns, and links to newer recordings of them. Enjoy!
- O Come, O Come Emmanuel
- Bebo Norman
- Night Heron Consort [instrumental]
- Sufjan Stevens
- Come, Thou Long Expected Jesus
- Comfort, Comfort Ye My People
- Christ Whose Glory Fills The Skies
- Of the Father's Love Begotten
- Ordinary Time
- Night Heron Consort [instrumental, Divinum Mysterium]
- Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence
- Thou Who Wast Rich Beyond All Splendor
- Veiled in Darkness
Advent and the end of all things
For someone who grew up with Advent as simply 4 more weeks of Christmas, the readings in the Common Lectionary can be somewhat surprising. The Lectionary provides an order of readings for Sundays, used by many denominations—Lutheran, Episcopal, Methodist, Presbyterian, Catholic, etc. It reflects the church seasons, and the choice of texts for each week is one of the primary ways that many Christians interact with the church calendar.
So when Advent comes along and the readings are about the end of the world, that can be a bit odd.
Advent is not simply a longer span of time to enjoy eggnog lattes, Silent Night and Christmas trees. (Though I do enjoy those, a lot.) It's also a time for us to fix our hope and longing on Christ's return.
As I said yesterday, Advent lets us speak our longing openly and plainly, by helping us fix it on Christ. One way this season does that is by reminding us that all the things around us are going to fade away.
We know very little about what it will be like when Christ returns—but we do know that it will be very different. So different that the things which obsess and worry us now will not even be on the radar.
Advent is a time to breathe deeply, and remember that the Gospel frees us not only from our sins but from our fears and fixations as well.
We take to heart the words of the apostle John:
15 Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. 16 For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride in possessions—is not from the Father but is from the world. 17 And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever.
1 John 2:15-17
Advent Longings
It seems that there is a constant pull in the Church away from dealing authentically with the depths of human experience. We regularly shift into a mode of believing that only our positive emotions are legitimate. Hope, peace, joy—these are acceptable. But longing, disappointment, loneliness and sorrow are masked, ignored, or are at least awkward to share.
Part of the wisdom of Advent is it's open acknowlegement of human longing—and its magnetic pull back toward Christ, the Expected One. Advent gives a clear answer to our disappointment and unfulfillment. Of course all is not well, now: you are waiting. It is a gift to speak plainly and admit that nothing has really ever fulfilled us, without needing to fall into despair. Advent keeps us honest and hopeful. That's a hard balance to live. When we light a candle on the wreath, or read the prophecies of the coming kingdom and it's peace, or sing "O Come, O Come Emmanuel," we are given words and song by which to express our deepest desires for a never ending, complete wholeness, intimacy and joy which nothing around us can provide. That is a gift. First because honest expression is good. But also because we've often forgotten what we were longing for. Advent takes all our unnamed longing and names it: Maranatha! Come, Lord!Advent—does it matter?
I've had a lot of discussions over the past week about Advent. Mostly because I'm brimming with delight and bubbly joy at the sheer thought of the season. This tends to bewilder people.
"What is Advent, anyway?" most people ask. A few have related stories of how terrible Christmas was for them in childhood—December was a month of stress and family discord. Others had churches where candles were lit, for reasons mostly unclear. For very few people does Advent, as a season, register as even mildly important.
Of course this goes for the entire Church calendar, which was somehow ejected from the Protestant church along with the papal bathwater. Many evangelicals turn up their nose slightly at the mention of Lent (abstaining? sounds like legalism to us!), and know Christmas and Easter only as single-day holidays, marked more by their secular dressings (Black Friday, Easter eggs) than their liturgical settings (Advent wreaths, Lenten fasting).
Does this forgetfulness matter? I think it does, for a few reasons:
- I'm hesitant to reject traditions too quickly. By all means let us hold to what is good and reject what is false. And, yes, let's breath life into tradition instead of letting it get stale. All the same it seems unwise—if not arrogant—to assume that what fed the church for 1500+ years doesn't concern us.
- We desperately need every tool available to us for remembering and living inside the Gospel. As a professor of mine said, "Any stick to beat the Devil." The church calendar is a mighty useful stick.
- We are going to live in some sort of calendar, regardless. Do we really want our primary understanding of time to be an academic, financial, or civil calendar? Are the seasons going to be marked by our patriotic holidays and our big sales, but not by the life of Christ?
- It takes time to absorb weighty, life-altering truths. It seems unfair to expect anyone to ramp up to the mysteries of Christmas and Easter in a day or two. Churches do their people a disservice by sneaking up to these celebrations without word of preparation.
- Why on earth would we not want more time to celebrate? Am I missing something? If Christmas is good for a day, why not eight? If we're really excited about Jesus' return, why not take four Sundays of the year and remember to long for it? If we are truly sorrowful over our sin and longing for healing, why not focus on the Cross for 40 days?
The Gospel and Formation
I've been following the work of Dallas Willard, Richard Foster, and others in the spiritual formation world. ("Spiritual formation"—the pursuit of being formed in the image of Christ, the progressive renewing of our minds/hearts through practices and community, by the Holy Spirit.)
I deeply appreciate their practical insistence that the new life described in the Gospels and New Testament is not theoretical or merely "positional"; it's actual. It is a new kind of life. And then they set about showing us how to find that life.
All this is helpful, but it is very hard to teach without stumbling into legalism. (Not their fault. It's hard to do anything without it becoming legalism.)
What I want to add to their program: all spiritual disciplines and practices are about living inside the Gospel. They allow us to remember the Gospel, daily.
Prayer, Bible study, fasting, service, solitude—none of these make us good. They help a Christian to experience the truth—they are already new in Christ.
I find this kills legalism right off the ground. If my actions aren't about changing me, but accepting God's inevitable decision to change me, then I won't be proud. I'll be thankful, and trusting.
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Painfully Pleasant: The Paradox of Following Christ
I bought The Complete English Works of George Herbert recently, hoping to add a little more poetry and devotion to my reading list. Not 10 minutes after laying my hands on it I read "Bitter-sweet" and knew I would not be disappointed. I'm tempted to say these are the best 8 lines of English poetry I know of.
Bitter-sweet
Ah, my dear angry Lord,
Since thou dost love, yet strike;
Cast down, yet help afford;
Sure I will do the like.I will complain, yet praise;
I will bewail, approve;
And all my sour-sweet days
I will lament and love.(I've also discovered that John Piper quotes this poem in When the Darkness Will Not Lift (PDF), pg. 78.)
On Not Being the Center of the Universe
By Charles H. Green
I remember an old, old Peanuts cartoon. Charlie Brown is watching Lucy and another girl from afar. He approaches them: “You girls were talking about me, weren’t you!” he says accusingly. “No we weren’t,” the girls say with a smug expression. Charlie Brown reverts to his earlier distant position, and waits a bit, only to return once again and ask: “How come you girls never talk about me?”
A basic human presumption seems to be that we are, each of us, the Center of the Universe…. The Chinese call their land The Middle Kingdom. World maps in the U.S. have, guess which country, at the center? Not the same country as maps sold in, say, France.
Years ago I read a study of students and professors. The study asked students how much time they spent thinking about the professors (not much), and how much time they thought the professors spent thinking about them (a lot, the students figured). The professors, asked the same questions, said they didn’t in fact spend much time thinking about the students, but they were sure that the students, of course, spent lots of time thinking about them. Wrong again. Center of the Universe all over the place.
On a more cosmic scale, it was only recently in history that we could as a species countenance the idea that the universe might not revolve around planet Earth…. Some of us—some a bit more than others—escape from the tyranny of self, but only just a little bit. We get angry, resentful and afraid—basically because people don’t behave the way we would like them to. After all, aren’t we the center of the universe?
Of course, we most assuredly are not. All those would-be subjects of ours aren’t paying us homage—basically they’re just not that into us…. But there are two great causes for optimism in this observation. First, since most of humanity doesn’t really concern itself with us, we are quite free of the bondage of others’ opinions. Our slavery is of our own creation. We hold our own keys to freedom.
Second, once we see that others have the same uni-centric disease that we do, we can lighten up a bit and reach out over the 50-50 line for a touch of human contact. Yul Bryner once said, “We come into this world alone, and we leave it alone; and if someone offers you kindness along the way, you don’t spit on it.” Bryner’s is the minimalist version. The maximalist version is that if you touch someone, you help to free them from their own self-obsessed bondage. By reaching outside yourself, you initially delight them; but quickly that turns to teaching by example. You show that it can be done, and you role-model the benefits of doing so.
If you live in the space that says you’re the center of the universe, people’s orbits tend to fly away from you. But if you reject that belief, then people are attracted to you; oddly, you become (directionally) the center of much more. They trust you….
You are not the center of the universe. What a blessing. Go pay attention to someone else.
Charles H. Green is founder and CEO of Trusted Advisor Associates. This piece is excerpted from the Trust Matters blog found here.
Seems to be a theme today. Or, recently. Or, for the last few years.
Ben Barczi
Pastor of Spiritual Formation at First Baptist Church, SLO (www.fbcslo.org). Working on figuring out how a local church community can move toward a healthy, Gospel-centered rhythm of spiritual disciplines, community and missional presence. Sure that, whatever it looks like practically, the mechanism is "beholding the glory of the Lord."
