Year B: November 29, 2020 | Advent 1
Advent 1, Year B
Episcopal Church of the Holy Cross
November 29, 2020
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
To watch a video of the sermon, please visit this page (about 27:15 in).
In a year that’s been full of surprises—nearly all of which have been unpleasant at best—today we get a good one. That’s right, while the rest of the world keeps bracing itself to endure one last month of 2020, as part of a Lectionary-focused tradition, you get to breathe easy. The long season following Pentecost is finally over. At midnight, we launched into Advent, and with it, a brand new Church Year.
So, happy New Year!
The Church Year isn’t too familiar to much of American society, even those of us within the Church. We all know the names of a few holidays and seasons, but the overall flow of events doesn’t tend to affect our broader view of life or our long term actions. However, if we’re willing to pay attention to it, the Church Calendar can offer us some direction in the midst of difficult days.
For the basics of the Church Calendar, we need to start out with the two primary Christian holidays: Christmas and Easter. While there are certainly other important dates like Epiphany, Ash Wednesday, and Pentecost, Christmas and Easter are the twin poles of the Church Year. Each of them holds sway over three of the six annual Church Seasons.
The Church Seasons are similar to natural seasons in that they carry a particular flow and logic to them. Unfortunately, due to some underlying issues of differing calendars and ways of looking at time, unlike natural seasons, Church Seasons aren’t remotely equal in duration.
Of the six Church Seasons, only two have a perfectly consistent length, the ones most directly associated with their primary holiday. Christmas lasts 12 days, and Easter lasts for 49. The other four all have to be a little flexible, length-wise, because of the way Easter likes to move around.[1]
The reason Easter jumps around and messes with everybody else’s number of weeks is because unlike Christmas, which is based on a date in the solar calendar, Easter is more closely connected to the lunar-solar calendar.
The lunar-solar calendar can be tricky to get a handle on, especially for Western cultures. That’s because it’s essentially a different way of understanding time. Western society looks at time as a (or even the) constant of reality, something people are able to divide into consistent, measurable chunks. We’re focused on ensuring dates remain consistent from year to year. Other cultures view time more flexibly, with the overlapping patterns of natural cycles being the measurable constant. Those patterns are what determine when things occur. From that angle, remembering is more about returning to the natural setting of the original event rather than its specific date. Essentially, you mark time by how the sky looks within a particular season. When a similar sky reappears at roughly the same time of year, you celebrate again.
A familiar example of the contrast would be the celebration of New Year’s day. Using the solar calendar, we say that January 1 is always the start of a new year. The year consistently begins on that date largely because of broad agreement on how to organize official records. However, a lunar-solar culture would be more likely to choose something like the second or third new moon after the winter solstice as the start of their year. For the West, the irregularities of nature have to make way for the proposed regularity of time. For a lunar-solar society, the repeating realities of nature mean that time and dates shift around instead.
Regarding the date of Christmas, we don’t really know when Jesus was born. But over the ages and owing to various circumstances, the Church eventually settled on the somewhat arbitrary choice of December 25th as the day to celebrate Christ’s incarnation. However, the New Testament marks Jesus’ death by its relation to Passover, and Passover’s timing is based on the ancient Hebrew lunar-solar calendar system. Therefore, Easter more or less aligns with that primary Jewish holiday.[2]
Anyway, moving our attention back to the Church Seasons themselves, we traditionally distinguish between them by using three different colors. Those colors indicate the seasons that reflect one another yet “belong” to a different holiday. Advent and Lent are purple. Christmas and Easter use white. And green indicates either the Epiphany or Pentecost season, which, together, are also known as Ordinary Time. Each season and its reflection also share a specific quality relevant to those portions of the Church Year: preparation (purple), celebration (white), and implementation (green).
You’re probably looking at me and our backdrop thinking, wait a second—Advent isn’t purple—it’s blue! That’s true, although the change is relatively recent. Go back 150 years, and you wouldn’t find blue associated with any liturgical season. In fact, some churches still refuse to use it. The reason for the change is important, but we’ll get to that later.
Returning to our overview of the Church Year, as I said, the three seasons of Christmas reflect the three seasons of Easter. Advent and Lent are for preparation, where you ready for the coming holiday. Christmas and Easter are then a celebration of deliverance. And Epiphany and Pentecost become times for implementation—the spreading of the Gospel and building of God’s Kingdom by living out the truths you learned through the cycles of preparation and celebration.
You might have noticed that I said Christmas and Easter are a celebration of deliverance. Within the regular patterns of the Church Calendar, that’s one of the greatest surprises. It’s easy to recognize Lent as a time of internalized preparation to ready ourselves for death and burial with Christ. We spend that season in self-examination, recognizing and turning from our faults and failures, and repenting of sin not only “in our hearts” but through action. In Lent, we’re essentially making peace with God and others as we prepare to join Jesus under judgment and execution. Easter then upends that cycle with the unexpected gift of resurrection and renewal.
In Advent, something similar is happening, but we tend to read ahead of our place in the story, missing a good chunk of the season’s point in the process.
Advent is like Lent in that it’s a time of preparation, hence the traditional purple color. But Advent is Lent’s reflection. Because of its subtle but significant differences, churches have decided it’s important to distinguish it with blue. So while we focus on our internal, personal relationship with God in preparation for Good Friday and Holy Saturday, Advent is directed at external preparation, but not just for a baby’s arrival (that’s the reading ahead part). Just like Lent—surprise!—Advent is also preparation for judgment. But this time it’s not just to ready ourselves as individuals—it’s for the whole world!
Looked at in the light of the entire Church Year, Advent is the outward preparation for the coming of the Great King, one who will exercise swift retribution on all rebellion within his realm. That’s why our Gospel readings today and for the next few weeks are so intense and apocalyptic: we’re essentially announcing not only to ourselves but to the world at large that everyone needs to clean up their act before it’s too late.
In some ways you could think of the grand scope of the Church Year similarly to how the earth orbits the sun. The sun remains in a constant position[3] while earth swings around it. From earth, we can’t help but mark the differences between the summer and winter solstices. If we could make out the details without blinding ourselves, even the sun would have a different face on each of those days. But a different appearance doesn’t make it a different sun. It’s the same with Christmas and Easter. Both are a single celebration at their core. Because of the overall flow of the year, we’re simply looking at that memorial from different perspectives.
Basically, while we all recognize that Easter is the celebration of unexpected release from coming judgment, we’ve forgotten that Christmas is the exact same thing—just from another angle!
In Lent, we prepare ourselves to enter the night of suffering and death only to be surprised by the abrupt dawn of life and resurrection. In Advent, we ready the world around us for the arrival of the Almighty King who will set everything in order, but instead of any fearful expectations of violent upheaval or the quelling of a cosmic rebellion, the whole world is startled into submission with a newborn baby, a powerless infant who overcomes all rage and insurrection not by force but through innocence and frailty.
Each season hinges on the consistent reminder of two things: first, God is a God of life and renewal; and secondly, God is the one who chooses how God will act, even though those acts don’t necessarily align with what we want, expect, or probably deserve. People preparing for shame and humiliation find themselves met with the surprise of mercy, aid, and kindness, while those readying their strength for battle suddenly discover themselves bowing before the simplicity and fragility of what they so greatly and unnecessarily feared.
And that, really, is what the Church Year is all about: surprise hidden within the regularity of life and upended expectations within carefully drawn plans.
2020 has been a year full of abrupt disappointments and unusually dark twists and turns. Hope has worn thin, and it’s easy to question the point of faithfulness to a God who seems bent on judgment. But as the Church, today we’ve entered a new time of preparation, one intended to call the world back into order before everything comes to an end. As we prepare, we know that God is readying something for us, even though we have no idea what it might be. Jesus has been warning us about this in his parables over the past few weeks. So now isn’t the time to lose hope. Now is the time to ready ourselves for the coming of the King. Or as Jesus commands us in today’s Gospel reading, now, perhaps more than ever, is the time all of us must “Keep awake!”[4]
[1] I misspoke. Lent is technically forty days. However, those days don’t include Sundays or Holy Week.
[2] Due to the Church’s combination of measurements between the solar and lunar-solar calendar, the connection is not exact.
[3] relative to the earth
[4] Mark 13:37b (NRSV)