The First Sunday of Advent

Today we begin our observance of a season of Extended Advent.  “Advent” is a term that comes from the Latin “to come.”  It refers to a portion of the year that the church devotes to considering the coming of Christ into the world.  It has the dual emphases of looking toward the celebration of the entry of Jesus Christ into human history as well as the anticipation of Christ’s return for the final redemption of the world.

The traditional celebration is more than “getting ready for Christmas.”  It is a “kettle that sits on its own bottom.”  It has its own music, its own traditional liturgical material and its own theological emphasis.  The traditional season gets underway on the Sunday closest to St. Andrew’s Day (November 30) and continues through Christmas Eve. 

But, for reasons that we discussed yesterday, we are embracing an alternate model this year.  We call it Extended Advent.  It begins on the Sunday following All Saints Sunday (the first Sunday in November).  The first part of Extended Advent incorporates the traditional elements of the season.  But as the time moves on, we will include music and other accoutrements that we associate with the celebration of Christmas. 

The observance of this season dates back with certainty to the mid-fifth century.  Given its stage of development by this date the practice of keeping Advent almost certainly reaches back even further.  According to materials found in the website of The Advent Project,

In its origin, the season of Advent was nearly seven weeks. The Gregorian Sacramentary introduced a four-week Advent in Rome in the seventh century, but this truncated version of the season was not widely adopted in other western churches until the twelfth or thirteenth century. The Orthodox still observe a longer Advent, though in the eastern tradition Advent has not been viewed as the beginning of the Church’s liturgical year. By the time of the 16th -century western reformations, however, though few remembered that Advent had once been longer, the season was clearly fixed as the initiation of a new liturgical year and, in the face of no competition from the Christmas culture until the 20th century, its focus was clearly eschatological

This lengthened observance seeks to make a full, rich time that meets the worship needs of our people.  We will talk about many of the things that go into a meaningful celebration of this time in the days to come.