First Sunday of Advent

Tomorrow we mark the beginning of another liturgical year in the life of the Church---The First Sunday in Advent.  Advent has been marked for many years among Christians, as the season provides four Sundays of preparation for the coming of the Messiah, Jesus.  It is meant to be a time of reflection, meditation, spiritual preparation, and remembering one’s baptism.  Of course the world “celebrates” Advent for a totally different reason:  preparing for the “Big Day” by turning up the volume dial about materialism.

But the coming of Jesus is meant to be the relief that God had promised through the prophets:  relief from pain, suffering, dysfunction, prejudice, hopelessness, and all those things that drag us down.  I’ve preached several times over the years on one verse from It Came upon a Midnight Clear:

And you, beneath life’s crushing load, Whose forms are bending low,

Who toil along the climbing way With painful steps and slow:

Look now, for glad and golden hours Come swiftly on the wing;

Oh, rest beside the weary road, And hear the angels sing!

The theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whom we Lutherans love to quote, had this to say:

The celebration of Advent is possible only to those who are troubled in soul, who know themselves to be poor and imperfect, and who look forward to something greater to come.

In the 1930’s, the very gifted Bonhoeffer taught in New York City at Union Theological Seminary.  He was touched to the core of his being by the spirituality demonstrated by Black churches in Harlem, and was encouraged to stay in the United States due to the political climate in Germany at the time.  He refused to take the “easy way out,” because he said he could not participate in the reconstruction of a new Germany if he did not suffer with his people.  He paid for it with his life, being hanged on a meat hook in a concentration camp just before the American army arrived in April, 1945.

So Bonhoeffer speaks with authority about how we need Advent, for Advent gives us hope.  As Advent is the start of a new year, we will be using a different liturgy, lighting the Advent wreath and singing Advent hymns; the liturgical color for Advent is blue, which, again, symbolically represents hope.

From Pastor Richard