Advent 2020: November 30, 2020

“Ready or not, here I come!” As children, do you remember yelling this line if you were the “seeker” in a game of Hide and Seek?  After you counted to 30 so your friends could have a head start in hiding, you’d yell, “ready or not, here I come!”

But we’re not always ready, are we?  Advent is a season of wrestling with readiness.  Scripture tells us to prepare.  Yes, it’s good news:  light is coming to shine in our darkness. But it’s challenging news too:  we don’t want to miss out because we’re too distracted, sluggish, or unorganized.  We need to get ready, yes, ready to welcome the Lord who comes afresh as a babe born in Bethlehem.  But if you listen to the Advent texts, you hear that we’re also called to prime our pumps for the Savior’s coming again when the living and the dead are judged and God’s final and full reign of justice is established.  For both a promised baby and an apocalyptic guest alike, we want to be ready.

So Advent is a time of spiritual and physical preparation.   Hearts are adjusted as well as mantles. COS is blessed with so many rich traditions as we prepare: mid-week Advent services, the Moravian Love Feast, resourcing others through the Angel and Star Trees, children leading worship and more.

But there is another opportunity for faith focus and since Lutherans created it, we want to pay attention: the Advent Calendar.  Legend holds that in the spirit of a marvelous “count-down,” German Protestants began in the early 1800s marking the days of Advent either by burning a candle for the day or, more simply, marking walls or doors with a line of chalk each day. A new practice of hanging a devotional image or a verse to memorize every day ultimately led to the creation of the first known handmade, wooden, Advent calendar in 1851. The creator of the modern Advent calendar is Gerhard Lang, who added small doors to paper calendars in the 1920s. Although the Nazis forbade their printing, after the war ended, Richard Sellmar of Stuttgart almost miraculously (considering the paper shortages) obtained a permit from the US officials to begin printing and selling them again. President Eisenhower is sometimes credited with their American popularization after being photographed opening them with his grandchildren. (Thanks Wikipedia.)

I have fond childhood memories appreciating Advent with calendars, whether they featured Scripture verses to memorize, images to discuss, or sweets to eat. You probably do too!  Today, of course, you can find calendars whose windows open to reveal a beer, jewelry item, or a toy of the day.  But what we need these days, what most of us really appreciate are messages of hope.

So good news!  Since this is the Advent of our pandemic, when so many of us feel less connected to each other, we thought it would be fun to create our own COS Advent Calendar. With each day will come a fresh email, created by one of your COS friends, each bearing a word of hope from Jesus’ family.  Who knows? The virtual window might reveal a piece of music, a written devotional, or a recorded memory.

Thanks to Barbara Anderson, our new Director of Connecting Ministries, for organizing this for us. May each “daily window” of this Advent calendar be blessed by the Holy Spirit to bring you warming and beautiful rays of the Light coming to shine in our darkness! Enjoy.