A Simple, Winsome Intro to Advent

Discovering Advent: How to Experience the Power of Waiting on God at Christmastime, by Mark D. Roberts

✓ Ebook available from Amazon or Barnes & Noble

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Mark D. Roberts blogs on Patheos at his site, “Reflections on Christ, Church, and Culture.” Over the years, he has become an admitted “Adventophile,” and his site has many articles introducing Advent and the Christian Year. His wife, Linda, is doing an illustrated online Advent Calendar on the site this year called, “Linda’s Advent Doodles.” Mark has been blogging on Advent since 2004.

I find his material refreshingly simple, down-to-earth, and winsome. If you or someone you know would like a primer on the Advent season and how we might celebrate it as individuals and congregations, check out Mark’s contributions.

Tonight, I downloaded his ebook, Discovering Advent, for my Kindle. For only $2.99, I received an excellent resource to help me think through the basics of Advent again, and one which I will use in teaching about Advent to others.

He tells his story: the story of a dyed in the wool Presbyterian “Christmasophile,” who loved “the Christmas season,” which for him extended from Thanksgiving to Christmas Day. He attended First Presbyterian Church in Hollywood, CA, where Rev. Lloyd John Ogilvie was pastor. Ogilvie introduced the practice of using an Advent wreath in worship services, while still emphasizing Christmas carols and themes in his messages in the season leading up to Christmas.

As Mark Roberts went to Fuller Seminary, he was introduced to the concept of the Church Year and Advent. Later when he became Senior Pastor at Irvine Presbyterian Church, his worship director introduced him to Advent music and other practices that led him to start “getting it” and becoming an “Adventophile” himself.

In subsequent chapters, Roberts tells us how Advent began enriching his celebration of Christmas, how it helped him resolve the dilemma of dealing with the “secularization of Christmas, and gave him practices that helped him in his own devotional life.

As I entered my early thirties, I tried to emphasize the Christian aspects of Christmas in the days leading up to the holiday. Yet I seemed to be fighting a losing battle, not just with my family and my culture, but also with myself. I needed some new way to focus my mind and heart on God. I needed some new traditions that would help me. And I needed social support for these traditions, the sort of thing that comes from a community of shared belief and practice. Then I discovered Advent.

Mark Roberts has an excellent section on how the colors of Advent (and the other liturgical seasons) helped remind him to prepare for Christ’s coming. He also gives several other practical suggestions for practices that can help us grow closer to God in this season. I like that he balances the community aspects of the season — like paying attention to the advent emphases in corporate worship — with family practices — such as using an advent wreath, calendar, or one’s nativity set to mark the passing of the days. He also suggests the simple practice of dressing for Advent, finding ways to incorporate the colors into the very clothes we wear.

And he does not forget to emphasize “doing acts of kindness and justice that inflame [our] hope for God’s future” as a way of anticipating the coming of the King of Righteousness.

The book concludes with an Advent Devotional Guide, using the Advent Wreath with prayers, readings, and songs.

I highly recommend this inexpensive, simple, winsome guide to Advent.

Before We Can Become Gods We Must Be Men

Monday Merton Musings, December 5, 2011
Before We Can Become Gods We Must Be Men

Thomas Merton contended that human beings have lost a great deal in modern, technological society. What we have gained in efficiency and productivity has, in many ways, sucked the humanity and spirituality from our inner beings. In this meditation from Seasons of Celebration, the monk laments that we have separated ourselves from intimacy with the cycle of seasons. No longer do these annual patterns exert much influence over the course of our lives. Instead, we simply “keep moving.”

He suggests that the first step for many of us is not to seek spiritual formation through religious practice, but rather to get reacquainted with our humanity by restoring our connection to the natural world. Perhaps then, we can begin to appreciate the “cycle of salvation” reenacted in the liturgical year.

 

The modern pagan, the child of technology or the “mass man,” does not even enjoy the anguish of dualism or the comfort of myth. His anxieties are no longer born of eternal aspiration, though they are certainly rooted in a consciousness of death. “Mass man” is something more than fallen. He lives not only below the level of grace, but below the level of nature—below his own humanity. No longer in contact with the created world or with himself, out of touch with the reality of nature, he lives in the world of collective obsessions, the world of systems and fictions with which modern man has surrounded himself. In such a world, man’s life is no longer even a seasonal cycle. It’s a linear flight into nothingness, a flight from reality and from God, without purpose and without objective, except to keep moving, to keep from having to face reality….

To live in Christ we must first break away from this linear flight into nothingness and recover the rhythm and order of man’s real nature. Before we can become gods we must first be men. For man in Christ, the cycle of the seasons is something entirely new. It has become a cycle of salvation. The year is not just another year, it is the year of the Lord—a year in which the passage of time itself brings us not only the natural renewal of spring and the fruitfulness of an earthly summer, but also the spiritual and interior fruitfulness of grace. The life of the flesh which ebbs and flows like the seasons and tends always to its last decline is elevated and supplanted by a life of the spirit which knows no decrease, which always grows in those who live with Christ in the liturgical year. “For though the outward man is corrupted, yet the inward man is renewed day by day. . . . For we know if our earthly house of this habitation be dissolved that we have a building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in heaven.” (II Cor. 4:16; 5:1)

Update: Tod Bolsinger thinks now is not the time for “chaplain” pastors

Tod Bolsinger disagrees with Mark Galli.

In a post on his blog, Bolsinger writes, “We Need Chaplains…Just not More Of Them…Not Now.”

He says he is right there with Galli when it comes to critiquing the megachurch model and the corporate-style leadership such congregations have. “If leader means “someone who makes the organization grow in numbers, dollars and reputation,” it is a deficient definition indeed,” Bolsinger writes. He also strongly agrees that we need pastors who are spiritually sensitive.

But he is not with Galli in endorsing the “chaplain” model.

Why? Tod Bolsinger thinks the traditional “cure of souls” pastor is not adequate to meet “the complexity of the pastoral task in our day.” We live now in a “post-Christendom” world that makes everything different.

Yes, “for centuries, the pastorate was thought to be about the ‘cure of souls’.”  I agree.  That’s the way it USED to be.  During the centuries of Christendom, this was an appropriate and helpful metaphor.  In a culture where Christianity was in the cultural center, “chaplain” or even “pastor” was a crucial component for keeping powers-that-be attuned to the word of God and the way of Jesus when other cultural forces were present to lead us into temptation and conformity with “the world”.

But increasingly, this is not the mission of the church today. In a post-Christendom context, the metaphor of pastor as healer, chaplain, or curer of souls is inadequate to the task and literally killing the church.  Churches that continue to cling to a Christendom context and expectation for pastors (as seen mostly in mainline churches like my own) are dramatically in decline and becoming increasingly irrelevant to the changing cultural contexts that are far more like a mission field in the first century than the cultural contexts of the most recent past centuries for which Galli (and most of us, frankly—even me) pine nostalgically.

Continue reading “Update: Tod Bolsinger thinks now is not the time for “chaplain” pastors”

In Praise of the “Chaplain” Pastor

Jesus washing the feet of his disciples, Michael Šplho

Mark Galli is speaking my language (again). Every pastor and church leader needs to read his article, “Why We Need More ‘Chaplains’ and Fewer Leaders.”

Much to my personal dismay, “chaplain” is apparently a dirty word — at least to those who claim to know what makes a good leader in a healthy church.

Mark recently received one of those ubiquitous church growth communiqués listing qualities of healthy/unhealthy churches and suggesting kinds of pastoral leadership that can solve the problems. One mark of an unhealthy church was, “the pastor has become a chaplain.”

“Chaplain” was fourth on a list of five types of pastors — Catalytic, Cultivator, Conflict-Quelling, Chaplain, Catatonic. Fourth is not good.

It’s nice to know “experts” think people like me are just one step away from being catatonic. Gee, thanks.

Mark Galli rightly opposes this analysis. But let me be even more blunt than he is in his fine article — this kind of analysis, this motivational corporate business-speak dressed up with a few spiritual words to make it appear applicable to church settings, is a pure abomination. Not that we can’t learn anything from the corporate world, but for heaven’s sake, the American church has bought into this “wisdom” to such a degree that most church “leaders” wouldn’t know genuine pastoral theology if it bit them on the nose. Of course pastors must provide a certain level of institutional leadership — any group of people that comes together will have to deal with institutional matters — but when corporate leadership paradigms come to define who we are, what we do, and how we do what we do, we are in deep doo-doo.

To his credit, Galli is willing to speak out, as the evangelical circus parade passes by, that the ringmaster has no clothes, and that the entire circus apparatus and even the audience is supporting the lies that the ringmaster is believing.

What is so bad about being a “chaplain” pastor? Chaplain pastors, according to the piece Galli received, “want to bring healing to hurting souls.” Heaven forbid!

We find ourselves in an odd period of church history when many people have become so used to large, impersonal institutions that they want that in their church as well. Thus the attraction of megachurches, where people can blend in and not be seen if they want. Many thought leaders who ponder church life naturally end up championing massive institutions and denigrating (inadvertently, to be sure) the healing of hurting souls. And this in a community whose theology is supposedly grounded in the universal and cosmic love of God who gives attention to each of us as individuals.

Mark also notes that a chaplain is essentially a servant, not an entrepreneurial leader who functions in the style our culture honors with the most attention and accolades. I understand the longing for respect that many pastors have. They (rightly) feel that they are doing some of the most important work in the world, but get little recognition for it. The temptation is strong to make use of resources that are readily available and to pattern ministry after corporate models that influential parishioners will appreciate and support. When it “works,” as it often does, the result is a religion that sparkles, a faith for winners.

There’s only one problem — that isn’t Jesus’ way. I mean, isn’t that obvious? If you’re a minister and it’s not obvious to you, I question whether you should be in ministry. As Mark Galli paraphrases:

And Jesus called them to him and said to them, ‘You know that those who are considered rulers of the Gentiles like to be seen as “leaders,” “entrepreneurs,” “catalysts for growth,” and their great ones exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many’ ” (Mark 10:42-45).

Jesus could not have been clearer, whether by word or example. And so it was with the apostles, who spread the Gospel to the ends of the earth as suffering servants, not superstars; who built humble communities of loving service, not “great” churches.

It is time to reclaim good words like “pastor” and “chaplain” from the foolish counselors who are leading us astray and undermining the foundations of the church.

The American church is in deep trouble, and Mark Galli has put his finger on a primary reason — her leaders have no idea what they’re supposed to be doing or how they’re supposed to be doing it.

Is it possible we’ve lost touch with the One who can show us?

Advent II: The Grass Withers

Second Sunday of Advent
December 4, 2012

Isaiah 40:1-11
Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13
2 Peter 3:8-15a
Mark 1:1-8

Prayer of the Day
Stir up our hearts, Lord God, to prepare the way of your only Son. By his coming strengthen us to serve you with purified lives; through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

The grass withers, the flower fades,
when the breath of the Lord blows upon it… (Isa. 40:7)

• • •

sonnet for advent II

“the grass withers,” and in these shrinking days
my yard will take its rest ‘neath wintry skies
i’ve yet to clear the last few fallen fronds
i hesitate to cut all autumn ties
though we have had hard frost, even some snow
yet still i find i’m loathe to rise and act
unhook the hose and pack the porch away
submit to cussed cold and stubborn fact
but god’s cruel breath sweeps in from northern climes
and pummels all my futile protests down
resigned, i pull on gloves and don my hood
i grab the rake and scrape the brittle brown
across the yard a squirrel unearths, retrieves
a morsel buried ‘neath the withering leaves

iMonk Classic: Skip the Carping this Advent

Classic iMonk Post
by Michael Spencer
From December, 2006

NOTE: Michael Spencer had many friends with whom he regularly conversed at The Boar’s Head Tavern. Each year they run an Advent blog called, “Go to Bethlehem and See.” I encourage our IM readers to check it out. Today’s classic iMonk post is from the 2006 edition of that Advent blog.

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I never heard about Advent growing up. Our church recognized Christmas, but anything else would have been too “catholic,” and we were fundamentalistic Southern Baptists. What I heard about Christmas was dependable preaching from the texts surrounding the birth of Jesus, the Lottie Moon Christmas offering for foreign missions, and a lot of negativity.

Negativity? Yes, there was plenty of negativity in the season of Joy. We heard a lot about how Christ had been “X-ed” out of Christmas. We heard of the evils of Christmas celebrations involving alcohol. We heard warnings about leaving Christ out of Christmas. We heard that most people had no idea what Christmas was about anymore. (Apparently things used to be better.) Eventually, we heard that if you stayed home from church for any kind of Christmas or New Year’s celebration, your salvation was probably questionable.

This eventually extended to Super Bowl Sunday night, but that’s another story.

The season of Advent- with all its traditions and customs- would have been a good idea in our church. We were intense about the meaning of Christmas, but not very interested in the kind of spiritual formation that would allow us to “keep” Christmas with our families and our children. It would have given us something to do besides complain.

Part of the Lottie Moon offering was a prayer guide for foreign missionaries. It’s still a deep part of my own spirituality too think about missions when I think about Christmas, and I owe that to those Lottie Moon prayer guides. Of course, along with the missions stories were daily scripture readings. Maybe someone suggested lighting a candle in there somewhere. It was close to Advent, but not quite there. It wouldn’t have been to hard to make the leap.

Evangelicals and their more conservative cousins have a tendency to go negative at Christmas. It’s understandable. The pagans took their holiday back and made it more pagan than ever, this time with our St. Nicholas, our wise men and our music. That probably deserves some “Bah! Humbugs” from the church, but if all we can come up with for the next 5 weeks is carping, we’re pretty pitiful.

Yes, the world has gotten into our treasure closet. But let’s not kick them out and yell at them to stay out of our decorations and music. Let’s ask them what they found. Let’s explain what it all means. Let’s connect the dots from Santa Claus to St. Nicholas to the Incarnation. Let’s invite them to sing along and, at the proper time, let’s pour some egg nog, tune up a “Gloria” and shine the light right in their eyes.

Our church had a “live” Nativity scene for several years. We had a big parking lot next to a busy street and that was a good place for such an event. Cars drove by, Eugene Ormandy played the big arrangements of the carols and we shivered in bathrobes. Hard to top it for a Christmas memory.

It was one of the few positive things we did that acknowledged the existence of the outside community. It was a way of saying, “You’re borrowing our incarnation and putting it right in the middle of this big nasty fallen world….which is what God did on Christmas. Did you know that?”

I remember the feeling of being exposed to the headlights of the world, standing there with the baby Jesus, outed as a Christian willing to shiver for 30 minutes in exchange for hot chocolate. (Well….Mary was pretty cute.)

Stay positive this Advent. Even the pagans like the calendars, the music and the candles. Let’s like it all so much that the joy of it overflows into the streets in the middle of the coldest nights. Put away the negativity and include yourself in all those regular folks that God loves enough to come up with this entire Christmas business.

Knowing what Christmas is all about doesn’t add ten points to your score. It just makes it all the more amazing.

(Reprinted from “Go to Bethlehem and See.“)

Saturday Ramblings 12.3.11

Wow! It’s December already? Just last week it was November. Next you’ll be telling me it’s 2012. Time is racing by. What say we sit back, relax, take it easy, and enjoy a batching of ramblings we swept up this week? Are you ready to ramble?

By the way, Mr. Bones lost his way home after his Thanksgiving break. We think we spotted him somewhere in Missouri, beat and bedraggled, but heading back home. In the meantime, Texas volunteered to lend us one of their longhorn steers. I suppose there is an editorial comment in his look, but I’m not going to be the one to say what it is …

Let’s go ahead and get this one over with. Joel Osteen. Reality TV. What more do I need to say? You can take it from here, iMonks.

In breaking news … this just in: Most churches are planning to have services on Christmas this year. If you haven’t noticed, Christmas is on a Sunday this year, the same as in 2005 (and the same as in 2017—go figure!). In ’05 a few churches, mostly large congregations where it takes a lot of volunteers to make things happen and a lot of money to heat and light the joint, decided to not hold services on Christmas day in order for their people “to spend more time with their families.” Uh-huh. This year, however, it seems that those same people don’t need as much time with their families, as most churches are saying they will be open on Christmas. Is this as confusing to you as it is to me?

Continue reading “Saturday Ramblings 12.3.11”

Repent It Forward

Advent season was designed to be a season for repentance, which begs questions like, “What is repentance?” or “How do I repent?” and “How does repentance prepare me for Jesus’ coming?”

Sometimes when I hear about repentance, I don’t hear much grace and I don’t see much Jesus. It’s more about examining myself, focusing on and correctly identifying my sins, learning to mourn over them and despise them, and submitting to disciplines that help me mortify them.

On a congregational level, calls for repentance often include exhortations to come back to the fold and submit oneself to the “boundary markers” that set that particular faith community apart. Repentance means stop trying to make it on your own and get back in the system.

Repentance was a primary provoking issue that led to the Protestant Reformation. Before his career as a reformer, nobody repented better than Martin Luther! He was a pro at it. He was so scrupulous about trying to scrub his inner life clean that his mentor had to tell him to go away and come back when he had some real sins to confess.

The freedom of the Gospel may never have been appreciated by anyone more than Luther, the meticulous monk whose religion was repentance. And that is why he became concerned about the abuses that the medieval church had accumulated around matters of repentance and absolution. That’s why when he took his hammer to the door of Wittenberg Castle Church in 1517, the subject of Luther’s 95 Theses was repentance. His first statement set the theme: “Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ, when He said “Repent”, willed that the whole life of believers should be repentance.”

Martin Luther was not saying that believers should never participate in special acts of penance such as the practice of confession and absolution with a minister, or the keeping of fasts or vigils (such as Advent or Lent). He was, however, saying that, at its root, repentance is a daily matter that is about the direction of our lives. It happens every day when we reenact our baptism: “[Baptism] signifies that the old Adam in us should, by daily contrition and repentance, be drowned and die with all sins and evil lusts, and, again, a new man daily come forth and arise; who shall live before God in righteousness and purity forever” (Small Catechism).

Daily we die to sin, daily we rise to walk in newness of life (Romans 6:4, 11).

By linking repentance with the sacrament of Baptism, Luther was saying something profound about the nature of repentance under the New Covenant in Jesus — repentance is the way forward, not the way back. Repentance leads us to the newness of the Gospel, not to the bondage of legalism, moralism, or self-preoccupied religion.

Continue reading “Repent It Forward”

Marshmallows

So this morning I wrote about why I need Advent, the real Advent, a real season of preparing my heart for the coming of the Savior. But I don’t mean I want to go about solemn-faced and somber for four weeks. I would have trouble doing that for four minutes. No, I want to enter this time leading up to the great Feast of the Incarnation with repentance, yes, but also with joy.

And there is almost nothing that brings me joy more than …

Marshmallows.

You know, those fluffy, white concoctions made of sugar, corn syrup, and other healthy things. Marshmallows—those things you plop in your hot chocolate or roast at the end of a stick over a fire. Hot chocolate and fires are wasted if they don’t involve marshmallows.

Continue reading “Marshmallows”

Why I Need Advent

So I set out Tuesday for a quick errand to find a book on the importance of Advent. How hard could that be? Four bookstores and two library branches later, I came home with one book of dubious value and one booklet with some good stuff.  (I also came home with a large diet chocolate Coke from Sonic bought during happy hour, but that really doesn’t come into play in this story.) I was quickly coming to the conclusion that I was the only one in my city who really cares about Advent.

Oh, there are plenty of books and such that have the word “Advent” on them. Books like How To Have A Stress-Free Advent and A Very Amish Advent were found next to the Star Wars Lego Advent calendar without looking too hard.

Ok, I know one person looking at a handful of stores does not indict an entire nation. Yet I find it hard to believe Advent is very important, leading me to wonder: Do we even know what Advent is any longer? Or is it that we know, but we are afraid to face the question it forces on each of us?

Continue reading “Why I Need Advent”