I recently saw this picture on Facebook, from a pastor I love and respect. But my feelings are exactly the opposite. Here are my thoughts on the subject.
Advent is a part of the Christian year leading up to
Christmas. It starts four Sundays before Christmas, and goes through Christmas
Eve. It’s a time of preparation for God’s arrival on Christmas. It's a time of waiting and longing for God to come again, and again, and again, transforming the world.
In the worldwide calendar of Christianity, the season of Christmas doesn't begin until Christmas Day (or Christmas Eve). Christmas continues for twelve days (the origin of
“The Twelve Days of Christmas” song), and ends with a holiday called Epiphany,
which celebrates the magi coming from the east to worship Jesus.
There is great value to that calendar. It says "no" to the over-commercialization and over-busy and over-the-top Christmas all the time culture. (It is the height of irony that the very day after we celebrate gratitude, we run to the stores to buy more stuff. And sometimes not even the day after.) Our culture often misses the point of Christmas, and that's at least in part because we've missed Advent. We don't know what it is to wait for God, to long with all our hearts for a different world. There is great value in Advent.
However, in our
current culture, using that calendar misses some important things about Advent
and Christmas. For one thing, it means singing Christmas Carols only from
December 25 until January 6 – a period where there’s only one or two Sundays,
and many people are out of town seeing family. That would mean that some folks
don’t get to sing Christmas carols at all – even though many Christmas carols
are deeply beloved and meaningful. And it's not just Christmas carols - we barely get to celebrate Christmas at all! Twelve days of Christmas, beginning on Christmas Day or Christmas Eve, makes sense in a culture where you have a worship service on each of those days (or at least three or four of them), where you're actually celebrating Christmas for twelve days. But that's not what many of our churches do - and they can't, because as it turns out in our culture, those are the days that kids have off from school, so they're the days when families go out of town to see each other, and (let's be honest) when pastors (including me) are on vacation, and when, frankly, we're more than a little tired of Christmas, having seen it everywhere for a couple of months already.
That's the key thing for me when we focus too much on Advent:
We are missing Christmas.
Advent is important. But it is not as important as Christmas.
Here's my solution:
As a culture we are actually preparing for
Christmas much earlier than Advent. That doesn’t always have a spiritual
aspect, but it certainly can. The church calendar was never written into stone. It's not Biblically mandated. It ties us together around the world, which is good and worthy, but let me say again:
We are missing Christmas.
What if we shift the Christian calendar a bit?
I use the
last two or three Sundays before Advent to emphasize the waiting and longing for a
better world that are usually emphasized early in Advent. Then in Advent,
the first couple of weeks are about preparing
our hearts for Christmas – which includes singing Christmas carols. We’ll start
really getting into the celebrating
on December 21 with our Spontaneous Christmas Pageant. My hope is that this
matches more readily with our current experiences of Advent and Christmas,
while still holding the deeply meaningful parts of both.
Here's another article with more reasons for singing Christmas carols during Advent.
Happy Thanksgiving! Blessed Advent! And, soon, Merry Christmas!
