Advent IV: Lighting The Last Candle
Almost Christmas - But Not Quite!
Dear Friends,
If you had asked me as a child what my favorite part of the Advent story was, I wouldn’t have known quite what you meant. What, after all, is the distinction between the story of Christmas and the story of Advent? They are inextricable, and yet, as different seasons in our Christian lives, it is worth considering how they can or cannot be broken apart.
If I had come up with an answer, of course, they would have been the answers of a child - the Advent wreath, the chocolate-filled Advent calendar usually gifted to me by my godmother each year. One of the few forms of church participation that I came to love as a child was having the opportunity to light the Advent wreath with my mother during our congregation’s early service. Along with being a lector, this action felt uniquely vital.
I wonder, what is your favorite part of the Advent story - the way we tell it in Godly Play, or any other way you have come to know it?
This past Sunday I had the wonderful opportunity to share the Advent story with my new congregation, and I think that for many people this was the closest they’d ever come to the story. We rarely approach Advent fully as the journey that it is – though I do recall the year I had a pastor who positioned our church’s creche figures on a board places across some pews, allowing them to journey through our nave as we approached Christmas. Traveling to Bethlehem, with the prophets, the Holy Family, the Shepherds, and the Magi and emphasizing that travel, sheds new light on why we spend time in Advent, rather than skipping straight from the Green Growing Days of Ordinary Time and on to Christmas.
On this coming Sunday, the lectionary allows us to spend yet more time with the mother Mary via the Magnificat, but in many Sunday School classrooms, it is also the Sunday where we come closer to the journey of the Magi or Wise Men. Though they don’t arrive until Epiphany, the season following Christmas, they are too important to leave out of this part of the story. So, who were the Magi?
When we talk to children about the Three Wise Men, we are in some ways doing them a disservice, overlaying a popular narrative onto the actual story conveyed to us. We are never told there are three travelers, and the common rendering of these figures as wise men or kings skims over the reality that, more than anything, they were like modern scientists or geographers. As we say about these figures, “The Magi knew about many things, but of all the things they knew about, they knew the most about the stars.”
In thinking about the Magi, this is a good opportunity to look more closely at the actual Gospel texts with older children, to see what they really tell us about the mysterious visitors, while with younger children, one of the most popular questions is simple: what gifts would you bring? The gifts are, after all, where we derive the number of kings from - they brought three gifts, gifts with great meaning, but which aren’t exactly the most useful to an infant. Instead, they are gifts that symbolize the sacred life and death of the Christ Child, the whole story that is to come.
With Christmas around the corner, this will likely be my last note until the New Year, but I wish you all a Blessed and Joyful Christmas. May it be peaceful, or at least not too hectic, and may you be present with the stillness of night, able to find space in which to welcome the Christ Child into your own heart.
With festive fatigue!
A. Bird