I found Eric Metaxas' short introduction helpful:
Text:
It’s been a rough few weeks. It seems virtually all of the news is bad. Whether it’s ISIS, Boko Haram, the refugee crisis, or, here at home, the troubling trends in American culture, depression, if not outright despair, seems like a reasonable response.
Thankfully, God has provided a remedy for this temptation, and it’s as close as your nearest Church calendar. I’m speaking of Advent, which begins this Sunday.
Relatively few Americans, including many Christians, understand what Advent is really about. Here’s a hint, it’s more than just a countdown to Christmas.
For nearly two millennia, Advent has been the season in which Christians reflect on the bookends of God’s redemptive acts in Christ: His Incarnation and His coming again in glory to judge the living and the dead.
These bookends are arguably best described in the hymns associated with Advent. They express the human longing for God to set everything aright, to wipe every tear from our eyes.
Take the hymn “Creator of the Stars of Night.” It was written, probably in England, sometime between 600 and 800 A.D., in the midst of what is commonly known as the “Dark Ages.” Life was unimaginably hard for those living back then: war was endemic, as was destitution, disease, and hunger.
This reality is reflected in the hymn’s opening stanza: “Creator of the stars of night, Thy people's everlasting light, Jesu, Redeemer, save us all, and hear Thy servants when they call.”
But it doesn’t stop there. The hymn then recalls the first bookend of God’s great redemptive act: “Thou, grieving that the ancient curse should doom to death a universe, hast found the medicine, full of grace, to save and heal a ruined race.”
It then looks forward to the second bookend: “O Thou whose coming is with dread, to judge and doom the quick and dead, preserve us, while we dwell below, from every insult of the foe.”
Now, talk of a dread coming and judging the quick and the dead no doubt sounds jarring to modern ears, but it’s a reminder that in Advent, we not only recall Jesus’ first coming, we look forward to Jesus’ second coming. And part of that looking forward is examining our lives.
That’s why Gospel passages like the parable of the wise and foolish virgins are associated with Advent. We’re called to be about our Lord’s business as we await His return.
But the word that best expresses the spirit of Advent is the refrain from the best-known Advent hymn, “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel”: Rejoice!
We are to rejoice even when all the news is bad because all the news that really matters is the “Good News.” God, in Christ, has decisively dealt with sin and evil. At his first coming, as Paul told the Philippians, he took on “human form, [and] humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even on a cross.”
This resulted in his being given the “dread name” to whom “all knees must bend,” and “hearts must bow.”
To paraphrase Linus van Pelt, this is what Advent is all about, Charlie Brown. . .
Inside:
This season, may your home be filled with family, friends, and the joy of the holidays.
Me: No surprise.
Elizabeth Kendal of the Religious Liberty Prayer Bulletin offers a summary of a longer survey:
Whilst public schools in Sweden are by law non-confessional, Advent services are part of the compulsory curriculum. This year, however, the government has ruled that, though the Advent services are still compulsory, in public schools they must be Christ-less and prayer-less, to try to balance Sweden's Christian cultural tradition with the 'new secularism'. Last year the Scottish government promoted all Scotland's winter festivals except Christmas. This year the European Union Commission published three million secondary school diaries that detailed the feasts, festivals and holidays of all faiths except Christianity, even omitting Christmas and Easter. The West has forgotten the Lord. Revival and returning to him are urgent or else anti-Christian repression, intolerance and hostility will only escalate. Please pray for a Christmas awakening in the West.
Me: Will we heed Kendal's admonition to pray? We must make prayer a daily discipline that the true meaning of Christmas will be recovered in the West. We must guard against succumbing to apathy and/or defeatism. And that goes for our own government's hostility to Christian expression as well. From the FRC:
For our troops in the Middle East, it's not away in a manger -- it's away goes
the manger! After years of celebrating Christmas with a live nativity,
the U.S. Navy is ordering military families to tear down its display on a
Bahrain base. Service members were stunned. The news was most upsetting
for the kids, who look forward to playing their parts all year long.
"It was devastating," one officer told Fox News.
"Here we are serving in the Middle East, defending our country and
other people's religions... and we can't even enjoy our own."
The order came down just days after a secular group, the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers, complained that the nativity somehow endangered U.S. lives. "It's unconstitutional," the group argued, "it's bad for the military, and in a Muslim country, it's dangerous."
Funny , that didn't seem to matter when our troops flew rainbow flags over camps in Afghanistan -- or hosted gay pride parties at our Baghdad embassy. Where was the concern for Muslim sensitivities then? These sailors are thousands of miles from home sacrificing their Christmases to defend the freedoms and the rights of people as misguided at MAAF. The least we can do is respect the Constitution they're defending, and give these troops the same freedom that's been afforded every American since the Supreme Court ruled on nativities in 1984.
Some people, like Newsweek's David Sessions, think the war on Christmas is over. "Christmas won," he says. That may be true in the retail world, where American Family Association points out that an overwhelming number of stores are chucking their holiday-neutrality in favor of Christmas greetings. "We've gone from 80% politically correct ads four years ago to 80% pro-Christmas messaging [today]," said AFA's Randy Sharp. Bill Donahue also senses the shift at the Catholic League, where the usual flurry of discrimination cases is at a minimum.
And while the commercial world may be catching on, the government is more hostile than ever -- not just to Christmas, but to Christians. In the last few weeks, the Left has gotten away with plenty of seasonal censorship-from Illinois water towers to a senior center's Christmas tree. Even President Obama couldn't throw a bone to Christmas on his official White House card -- and instead threw one to Bo, whose picture is featured. Inside, the dog's paw print appears, along with the message "May your home be filled with family, friends, and the joy of the holidays." Move over, Jesus -- the Portuguese water pooch is here!
Meanwhile , the war on Christmas isn't over -- it just expanded into a broader, 12-month battle over religious expression. And Christians will continue having success in it the more comfortable they are standing up -- and speaking out -- for truth.
Light, clean, wholesome entertainment is getting hard to come by. Hallmark Channel's "Farewell Mr. Kringle" fits the bill. I saw it last weekend, and it will be shown again on the Hallmark Channel at various times during the holiday season including Friday, December 10th, 8:00 PM
(EST) and Saturday Dec. 11th, at 2:00 PM. A feature article on the screenwriter, Robert Tate Miller, can be found here.
Every
year since 1947, the people of Oslo, Norway have given a Christmas tree
to the city of Westminster, England. The gift is an expression of good
will and gratitude for Britain's help to Norway during World War II.
From the University of Illinois Extension:
Dr. James C. Dobson notes, "How different was the world when President Harry Truman addressed the American people from the lawn of the White House on the occasion of the lighting of the National Community Christmas Tree":
Joseph Morrison Skelly pens a fine article focusing especially on Dietrich Bonhoeffer's experience of Christmas in prison at the hands of the German Gestapo:
For two millennia, tyrants have suppressed word of the birth of Christ
or religious
commemorations of it. Herod feared for his throne. In the
modern era, dictators have
realized that the potential for human
freedom inherent in this divine event threatens to undermine their
authoritarian rule. Liberty, not servitude, is the logical outcome of a
process whereby men and women channel their allegiance not simply to a
secular leader but ultimately to a heavenly being, and, at the same
time, governments accept the principle that temporal power must take
account of a higher moral law. In the recent past, and today, despots
in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Nazi Germany, China, Cuba, North
Korea, and elsewhere have sought to suppress man’s relationship with
God. . .
But the light will not be extinguished. Christians in unfree lands — including places where religious extremists restrict their rights, such as Saudi Arabia — have enacted the second part of this historical pattern: they have resisted oppression by celebrating Christmas, often in secret, sometimes in open defiance, frequently without fear. This year will be no different, as they commemorate Christ’s birth and so defend religious freedom . . .
| Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | |||
| 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 |
| 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 |
| 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 |
| 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 |