Advent Devotional — Introduction

December 1, 2007, 3:00 am; posted by
Filed under Advent, Articles, Featured, Mike J  | 1 Comment

Each day from Sunday, December 2 until Tuesday, December 25, Pastor Mike will share with Bweinh! a special Advent devotional!

One of the things I have come to realize as a young man is the power of rituals. The process of repeating the same behavior again and again — sometimes “meaning it,” sometimes not — often has the effect of putting new layers of meaning into those actions. So a school fight song ceases to be simply a collection of syllables and notes but causes memories and friendships long dead to flood back. Or seeing a baseball game makes one nostalgic for youth, and time spent at the ballpark. Or even finding a rerun of a beloved TV show brings back the family and friends with whom you used to watch it.

Most American churches are long on inventiveness and short on ritual. “Ritual” has a bad connotation, meaning something empty and not heartfelt. We relentlessly invent new ways of doing church, new songs to sing, new prayers to pray, new approaches to preaching. We design contemporary, clean churches that self-consciously resemble office parks. But in so doing, we forget the simple power of repetition in rituals. Change in a human being is rarely like dynamite blasting away rock; more often it is like the slow erosion of water on that rock, gradually shaping and smoothing the rock into something different. It is that type of change–gradual but no less real–that ritual is designed to work in us.

All this is to say that as a kid, I grew up loving Christmas. It was the one time of year when a good evangelical Protestant boy could experience all the ritual he could handle! At Christmas, everything was a ritual — the Christmas Eve service, the kinds of cookies my mother baked, the reading of ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas, the food on the table Christmas Eve and Christmas Day; all these were rituals. Even new Christmas behaviors were evaluated on whether or not they’d make for good rituals. A new TV Christmas special, for instance, was judged on whether or not it was worthy of being part of the tradition, like Rudolph and Frosty, or whether it was fly-by-night and would be ditched next year. Having grown up in a culture that did not ritualize easily, Christmas was a breath of fresh air.

It is with this in mind that I present to you this daily Advent devotional. It is my sixth (!) such effort since becoming the pastor at Exton in 2002; I suppose that just writing these is becoming another Christmas ritual for me! Regardless, I hope that it builds in you a desire to make this a ritual: a time spent with the Lord each day during Advent. I know there will be some days you feel like it, and some you don’t. There will be some days you reach the end of the devotion and feel that the text or my reflection has spoken directly to your soul, and there will be some days you wonder why on earth I’ve chosen what I’ve chosen or written what I’ve written. I hope you enjoy and appreciate the days that touch you, and I hope you keep with it after a day which does not seem particularly meaningful, so that God can shape you with the power of ritual.

This devotional can be used in one of two ways:

1. Use it on its own. Just read the text printed for the day, and the reflection.

2. As part of a larger daily process of prayer. Those of you who know me well know that I find prayer books very useful. They help to keep my prayer life structured. One book that I have used is The Divine Hours by Phyllis Tickle. This book has four short times of prayer, written out, for you to repeat out loud or silently each day: in the morning, midday, evening, and before retiring. It is actually a three-volume set that covers the whole year. However, the author has also released just the Advent and Christmas season in a little paperback called Christmastide.

Each of my daily reflections will be taken from a piece of the prayers printed there. So if you want to join me in a deeply prayerful Advent, pick up the book and use it for your personal devotions and use this set of reflections to amplify the process of prayer there. (If you prefer, The Divine Hours are printed online each day here.

I hope this little book of reflections helps you in reflecting on the greatest gift of God — his Son!


Comments

1 Comment to “Advent Devotional — Introduction”

  1. Marcus on December 2nd, 2007 4:13 pm

    The website link that I posted directs you to one of my older posts about ritual. Should you read this post I link to, bear in mind that I was not reacting to the type of Protestantism you guys seem to embody, but rather the Protestant skeletons of my own past and my former church(es).

    I am a big fan of ritual… and this is not just because I am Catholic. In fact, the Roman and high church Protestant liturgies captivated my imagination even when I was at my most low-church, anti-Catholic simply because it felt so ancient… so primal… so reverent.

    Anyway, I have been trying to incorporate more and more of the Liturgy of the Hours into my life. It is rare to find a lay Catholic who loves the LoH and I was pretty shocked to see a similar office being promoted here. I heartily applaud!

    I find the LoH to be very refreshing and if you’re lucky enough to be near like-minded people, I highly encourage reading the hours together. I was blessed enough to be introduced to this practice by some wonderful people who not only recite the hours but chant them with lovely tones. I am not sure how “chantable” your version would be, but I find chanting the Psalms is especially useful in channeling my spirit into a proper frame of worship.

    As a tangent, it is noteworthy that many post-Vatican 2 Catholics became increasingly suspicious and hostile toward a lot of our rituals and it is only recently that the Catholics of my generation (in their 20’s-30’s) are calling for a return of the rituals. We see them as beautiful, whereas the older generations are trapped in the Modernist malaise that nearly threw the liturgical baby out with the Vat 2 bathwater.

    I also have noticed a parallel love of the high church practices and a return to ritual in some of the Reformed and Episcopalian churches that I’ve visited over the past several years. I wonder if it something systemic in our culture that makes us crave what our parents once spurned?

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