With Thanksgiving just around the corner, so’s the advent season (November 29 to December 24). These days our family is doing a wreath and even (when we can find all the bits & pieces) a Jesse tree. No more advent calendars with chocolate behind the doors, though (my wife’s mother used to send these): the kids just drag it into a dark corner and extract all the goodies at once!
I just find it interesting that evangelicals are starting to do this “liturgical” stuff at all! This year even the increasingly Calvinist Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary has created a set of faculty-written Advent devotionals. I posted on this phenomenon for Christian History & Biography:
Advent: Close Encounters of a Liturgical Kind
‘Tis the season when even the free-ranging revivalist pulls up a chair to the table of historic liturgy.
Chris Armstrong
I confess: as an adolescent, when my parents tried to impress on my two brothers and me the importance and the intricacies of Advent observance, I could hardly keep from rolling my eyes. In a country that spends its cold Decembers in hot pursuit of food, presents, and parties, the historical niceties of an ancient liturgical season seemed … well … irrelevant. Continue reading
Medieval Wisdom for Modern Christians
Grateful to the dead 