I didn’t know about Advent as a kid, but I understood the aching desire for Christmas to arrive. Whether I was looking forward to eggnog, winter break, Christmas pageants, presents, or just the time to celebrate the birth of Jesus with my church family, I was intimately familiar with the anticipation that is being-a-kid-in-the-month-of-December.

The calendar of the church year was, oddly enough, one of the things that eventually drew me to the Episcopal Church. The way that the church takes the seasons of the year and connects them to the seasons of Christ’s life and ministry is powerful. It meets a primordial need in us to connect the profane and the sacred because, as a people of the Incarnation, we know that God hates nothing God has made. It is all somehow sacred.

Even the waiting.

“Christ Will Come Again”

As I grew up and began to realize how long it has been since our Lord’s Ascension, I began to feel the other anticipation inherent in the season of Advent. The one you hear every time the congregation responds in Eucharistic Prayer A of The Book of Common Prayer (363):

“Christ has died.
Christ is risen.
Christ will come again.”

We can’t help but emphasize that “will,” can we? We say it defiantly: “We don’t care how long it’s been. Christ WILL come again.” But we also say it expectantly. Hopefully.

We have been baptized into Christ’s death and resurrection, the road that began with his birth 2000 years ago. We are, as scripture and tradition tell us, the body of Christ. We know Christ will come again because we have had and continue to have experiences of God’s love and mercy and grace, over and over again.

Embracing the Waiting

Which is why my family and I have been all-in on Advent. Years ago my wife and I began decorating our tree with purple (or blue) ribbon and ornaments. It has become our Advent tree. On the night before Christmas, it transforms into the Christmas tree with all its colorful, chaotic, kid-made ornaments—the ones you pull out of the box and say, “Oh, remember this one?”

As we became parents, we also found meaning in the Advent wreath, which marks time for us in surprising ways. For our kids, it helps them visualize that seemingly endless wait of the weeks leading up to Christmas. For my wife and me, it calls us to slow down and cherish the march of time, which nowadays seems faster than ever, and lean into the waiting.

As we take branches, berries, and pinecones and decorate the wreath in a way that is never quite how I pictured it in my head but always beautiful, we feel the importance of the fact that God took on flesh. The God who made creation and declared, “It is good,” heard the labor pains of creation and joined it in order to redeem it. As my hands get sticky with sap, I am reminded that the Incarnation itself is God’s willingness to go down to the dirt and get messy with us. As I water the wreath to help the greenery make it all the way to Christmas, I am reminded of the thousand little ways God has sustained us, giving us a taste of the water of life. When we light the candles as a family each week, I am reminded of the Easter Vigil and the words that get to me every year: “The Light of Christ” (The Book of Common Prayer, 285).

Thanks be to God.

A Liturgy for Lighting the Advent Wreath

Here is a brief liturgy that I wrote that can be used while lighting the candles on the Advent wreath:

A Liturgy for Lighting the Advent Wreath
A Liturgy for Lighting the Advent Wreath – Large Print Edition

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Featured image is by Gabriele Lässer on Pixabay