Refresh 12 // Prompt #3 Advent Edition
During winter break of 2012, when I was in between semesters at Asbury Seminary, I posted about how I knew Christmas was going to forever change when I was appointed in the summer of 2013. I was right in many ways.
Growing up I assumed that the national start to the Christmas season was when the radio started playing Christmas music and snow started to fall. When I started seeing commercials for the toys I wanted and church put up some Christmas trees. I was not a very good listener. I have no doubt the season of advent was taught and preached in the Catholic church I grew up in.
Today, I am appointed to a traditional UMC as an associate pastor. I've learned a lot of things about facilitating worship through Advent, not the least of which is that protestant churches don't have services on Christmas Day, which was my family’s normal time to go to church on Christmas.
Now that my life’s official work is to bring people into the giant narrative of redemption through Jesus Christ, it seems like Christmas is one of those times during the year when the anticipation, excitement and fondness for Christmas in our secular culture almost parallels the gravity of the season in the liturgical calendar and the life of the christian church. Sure there are plenty of ways that the secular understanding of Christmas have departed from the “real reason for the season” but it also seems just a little bit easier to explain to friends and neighbors that the birth of the son of God is a reason to express thankfulness when everyone is already thinking about giving gifts, gathering as families, drinking peppermint mochas and other fun things.
The real trick is to make the movement from celebrating Christmas as a holiday into a way of life. The celebration of a birth is no longer a moment but it leads into a reorientation of our entire year. Because Christmas happened and we are different people, we spend every single day of the rest of the year celebrating the other 33 years of Jesus’ life. That means the day after Christmas we begin figuring out what it means for our life to have a savior, a king, a redeemer.
