As I write this we are approaching the second Sunday of Advent according to the church calendar. I have not always thought of the yearly cycle in these terms. I grew up in a secular household that relegated religion to holidays characterized mostly by Santa and the Easter Bunny. Even after responding consciously to God’s call on my life as an adult, I continued for some time to order my life around the secular calendar. Only gradually did I begin to appreciate the wisdom of the early church as made manifest in the church calendar. Our God is a God of order, and there is something wonderful and a bit mystical about ordering our lives around the daily, weekly and annual worship cycle of the church.

So what is Advent all about?  Traditionally it is a season of penance as we remember the first coming of Christ and prepare ourselves for the second. But as Douglas Wilson points out here, “If the season is penitential, you are doing it wrong”.   There should certainly be an acute awareness of our sinfulness and of our need for God’s grace, but it seems that the real focus should be on our need and longing for Christ’s second coming and on celebrating that future event by faith in advance.

I think one of my favorite Advent hymns, Comfort, Comfort These My People, says it well.  Taken from Isaiah 40, there are many variations on the hymn text, but I like the version printed at the right.  Note particularly the end of verse two:

We who languished many a day under guilt now washed away,

We exchange our pining sadness for His comfort, peace and gladness!

As we enter into this Advent season, my prayer for all of us is that we enter into God’s comfort, God’s peace and God’s joyful gladness.  Our need for His grace sets the context, but the reality of His grace should cause us to “Rejoice in the Lord always, again I will say, rejoice!” 

One of the unifying principles of education here at Wilson Hill Academy is the entering into The Great Conversation.  Among other things, this gives us an appreciation for history and the working out of God’s Providence across many generations.  Seen from this perspective, it is easy to connect the old testament cycle of annual feast days and days of remembrance to the “modern” church calendar as it was developed by the early church.  Our contemporary culture is focused only on the present, but by ordering our lives around the historical church calendar, we can avoid that temporal self-centeredness; remembering God’s past faithfulness and reminding ourselves of His future promises.

Submitted by Bob Donaldson, co-founder of WHA.