Dear Christ Our Hope Family,

I can hardly believe that Advent is upon us! And yet it is. Sunday, November 27, is the first Sunday of Advent and will mark the start of a new liturgical season as well as a new year in the Church calendar.

Simcha Fisher, writer for the National Catholic Register, wrote recently about her anticipation of Advent. For Simcha and her family, this particular season also marks the anticipation of their ninth child. She says that it hit her just this week in a moment of panic – “where are we going to put a new baby?” She says that the facts are the facts, with everything necessary to run a household of ten people – there is no room. She panicked and she cried. And then she began to think more:

Eventually, through my tears, I figured out that maybe the sock-and-underwear bin could go over the heating vent… The hall chest, which holds broken picture frames, an oddly large collection of grout sealant, and (sigh) the previous baby’s baby clothes, could be emptied and moved into the laundry room…So, there was room. There was room after all. It’s not wonderful, but it works, and it gets the job done.

Fisher concludes that just as a complete remodel of their home to create new space for a new person is not going to happen this season, so too, in Advent a complete overhaul of our spiritual life is neither possible nor necessary.

We will not suddenly become the people we wish we were; we will not give the way we wish we gave and worship the way we wish we worshiped, becoming magically flawless, sinless, and sacrificial. But we can make room.

That is what Advent is truly all about. Just making a little bit of room. Many of you are feeling overloaded, over-programmed, overworked, and sleep-deprived. Life is not going to miraculously change for you overnight just because it’s Advent. But in the midst of the ebb and flow of daily life, we can make room. We are called to. So that is what our season at Christ Our Hope is going to focus on: making room where it seems there really is not room for the coming Christ.

This will be reflected in our corporate worship, of course. First, you can be ready for some changes to our liturgy; how we organize our corporate labor of prayer. Sunday, November 27, we will begin the New Year and the new season by singing/praying together the Great Litany. This is a very old and distinctly Anglican form of corporate confession and intercession. We are using it to mark time and to signal strongly that this is the beginning of something new. The Litany is sometimes called the Anglican Introit or entrance rite. For us it will be a way to mark this time, this season, and this new year as holy, distinct, and set apart for the worship of God.

Continuing throughout the Sundays of Advent, we will use some alternate forms for other prayers: the Confession, the Great Thanksgiving, and the Prayer of Humble Access, for example. I love the liturgy because, through the regular and repeated recitation of these biblically formed prayers and declarations, they work their way downward from our heads into our hearts until they become part of the very fabric of our being. Yet, I also recognize that the danger in repetition is that things can become rote and sadly sometimes even stale, and their deeper meaning gets lost on our hard hearts, our blind eyes, and our deaf ears. So, that is why for this season we will switch things up a bit to draw attention to those all-important words to interpret their deep meaning in a fresh way and to connect with the liturgy on that deeper heart level.

Throughout the season we will also focus on making room for the Christ as He comes to us daily in many ways. We will do this both through the preaching of the Word and through several events that we have designed to facilitate our response to the Word.

We will have the opportunity to make room for Christ as he comes and reveals Himself to us in the form of His persecuted Body, as He shows Himself in the face of the hungry and thirsty, and as He is revealed in His image imprinted upon the unborn, the aged, and the infirm.

Additionally, while we will not formally participate in the Advent Conspiracy campaign this year, we will still have an opportunity to collect money to provide clean water for some brothers and sisters who need it. We will keep this as a focus throughout Advent, but the actual collection will take place on Epiphany Sunday, January 8.

Finally we will make room corporately by making room for more silence. Once again, as you enter the worship space this Advent season you will be invited to enter into prayerful silence. We love our times of fellowship and a lot of Body life happens before, during, and after worship. But in this special season, as we focus on the call to make even just a little room, let’s confine our visiting and our catching up to the spacious lobby that we are blessed with. Let’s make room in our sanctuary for silence, reflection, and prayer.

When Mary and Joseph arrived in Bethlehem, they were told there was no room in the house. There was no malevolence in this statement; it was a simple fact. Yet their hosts made room where there was no room. They found space for them among the animals in the stable. And it was there, in the midst of that humble scene – that room made where there had been no room – that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

My prayer for all of us this Advent is that as we seek to make even just a little room in the midst of our crowded lives where it appears there is no room we will see Christ come once again to us and make His dwelling in us.

With prayers and blessings as we prepare to celebrate the Season,

Fr. Steve+