St. Thomas’ Parish at Dupont Circle
advent
Selling Advent
Dec 3rd
There are almost as few things for sale with an Advent-theme as there are Lenten-collectibles. Lent, of course, is focused on the events leading up to the end of Jesus’ life at the age of thirty-three. Lent is a hard sell, and few people try to make a living off of Lenten trinkets.
But it comes as a surprise to many of us that one of the central themes of Advent is the final judgment. Advent, we are jolted to learn, isn’t just about waiting for the baby Jesus in the manger, but also our anticipation of the end of all things at the last judgment when Christ comes back on ‘the last day’ as the Lord of all of creation for all time .
No wonder that both seasons – Lent and Advent – are ‘hard sells’. They are, after all, periods for introspection about “the time of this mortal life” (BCP, 211), and thus have a certain ‘penitential’ quality to them – a tone of giving-up or turning-loose of our attachment to ‘things’. So ‘selling Advent’ sounds like an oxymoron, if not just in bad taste.
As a result, we are left with Advent Wreaths and Advent Calendars for the most part, although personally I can never find where I put the four-candle-styrofoam-form last year for my wreath, and I always get to about December 15th before I realize that I’m ten days behind with my calendar already, and give in to sloth.
So it’s been interesting to think about whether there are actually any ‘consumer goods’ out there with Advent themes that are worth considering even in an age of recession. The trick, of course, is how not to fast-forward to Christmas, even when trying to celebrate Advent — like this Nativity Advent Wreath I found for sale online this week.
In protest you could wear an “It’s Only Advent” button while you’re out doing your Christmas 
shopping. Or you you could be less self-righteous than I tend to be and look at a wonderful website and blog by the artist Jan Richardson to see some of her fabulous Advent art and to buy one of her Advent books – Nancy and I own Night Visions and have just ordered The Advent Door.
Here’s someone who’s been captivated by Advent, and her art can unleash a whole new set of associations about this special season.
Spend some time looking at her Advent Hours Series of Greeting Cards, or one of her fantastic prints, like “Wise Women Also Came.”
Advent is such a curious season for so many Christians because it invites us to entertain the possibility that God chose to be in our midst precisely because creation is one of God’s favorite places to be. God took flesh, became incarnate, because our flesh was worthy of bearing God … then … and still is now.
It’s hard to sell Advent because we’ve been so thoroughly taught that our bodies are bad that we can no longer even imagine they are good enough to be God’s place to dwell. So we wait in Advent for this miracle to become ours again … althought it is already, if we were only awake enough to see it.
“Ike” Eisenhower and the Advent Calendar
Dec 2nd
Leave it to the BBC for trivia you can count on:
“The first advent calendars appeared in 19th-Century Germany, when various methods of counting the days between the start of Advent and Christmas Day were used. Starting on the fourth Sunday before Christmas, or simply on 1 December, the Protestant Christians would keep track of the days by making marks on their doors with a piece of chalk, which would then be rubbed off one by one as Christmas approached. Other practices then developed, including burning a candle or putting up a small religious picture to mark each day.
There is some disagreement as to when the first printed advent calendars appeared, although it is clear that they were first produced at some time in the 1900s. There are claims that a Christian bookshop in Hamburg produced a ‘Christmas Clock’ in 1902, and a newspaper in Stuttgart is known to have included an advent caldendar in its pages in 1904. However, the first mass producer of advent calendars is thought to have been Gerhard Lang, who worked at the Reichhold & Lang printing office in Munich. He released his first advent calendar in 1908 and had a steady business going which produced over thirty patterns of calendar until some time in the 1930s. The calendars would usually have 24 doors, but tended to be better-decorated than modern versions.
Soon enough, calendars were being designed with little doors or pouches which contained small religious pictures or bible extracts. Better still, some of the calendars also contained sweeties in order to keep the attention of young children. The practice escalated up until the Second World War, when paper and cardboard were rationed and advent-calendar production ground to a halt. Once the war ended, though, the production began again, pioneered by Richard Sellmer in 1946.
The introduction of the advent calendar to the USA was aided by ‘Ike’ Eisenhower, whose grandchildren took a shine to the idea. The calendar was soon adopted in other countries too, and in the UK chocolates began to appear behind the little doors as soon as rationing would allow. By the end of the 1950s, chocolate advent calendars had appeared, and by the following decade they had become widespread. They still exist today, with hundreds of different varieties appearing across the globe.”
Three of the best online are the Full Homely Divinity Advent Calendar — the Episcopal Diocese of Washington’s fifth annual 2008 Advent Calendar — and the BBC’s wonderful, musical Bach Christmas Calendar. Bookmark each of them (or just your favorite) and check each day for a new surprise.
Advent anticipation
Nov 30th
There are two seasons in the church year that ask us to wait.
During Lent we wait for the pivotal stories of Holy Week, and Good Friday, Holy Saturday …. and Easter. Forty days we wait, with a growing sense of the immensity of what lies ahead, and our own insufficiency in the face of God’s time of need.
During Advent, the season beginning the fourth Sunday before Christmas, we are also asked to wait. But now the waiting has an entirely different flavor. It is the waiting, to use Shakespeare’s phrase from the Merchant of Venice, “With bated breath and whisp’ring humbleness.” It is the waiting for God’s entrance into our home, this place earth.
It is long enough for us to be admonished to “keep awake” — for it will come as a surprise, “in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn.” We are admonished, too, to “Prepare the way of the Lord.” Yet there is no doubt that the point is for us to be ready “to greet with joy the coming of Jesus Christ our Redeemer” (BCP, Collect for the Second Sunday of Advent).
Our waiting for the child in Bethlehem is “Advent anticipation” – the expectation of the unexpected. We cannot imagine what form God is already waiting for us to experience, as we, too, discover our own flesh as capable of bearing Christ into the world. We wait in anticipation that this year again, God will make our flesh God’s own “proper habitation” (Richard Hooker).
