Advent 1, Year C
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
November 28, 2021
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
To watch the full service, please visit this page.
Good morning, and happy Advent! At midnight last night, the Lectionary moved from Year B’s focus on the Gospel of Mark to Year C, which means we’ll spend most our coming Sundays hearing Luke’s Gospel instead. Similarly to Matthew, the Gospel of Luke was likely written down or compiled in the northeastern Mediterranean’s Antioch area sometime in the late First Century. Where Mark was full of action and humor, Luke tends to focus far more on Jesus’ teaching and parables. He also gives us the most familiar of the Christmas stories and a significantly expanded Passion and Resurrection account. Church tradition says that Luke was one of Paul’s companions, that he was a trained medical doctor, and that he even painted[1] the first icon of Jesus.
If our Gospel today sounds familiar, that’s because we’ve picked up in the midst of Luke’s take on Jesus’ “little apocalypse” that we read a portion of in Mark two weeks ago. Having discussed that so recently—and in light of the dawning world of the new Church Year—rather than focusing on one of our Scripture readings this morning, I’d like to turn our attention to something that silently yet dramatically affects our services and worship throughout the year: the Church Calendar itself.
The Church Calendar isn’t particularly familiar to much of modern American society, even many of us within the Church. We all know the names of a few holidays and seasons, but we don’t think of its overall flow as having any real effect on our broader view of life or our long-term actions. Yet it underlies and structures nearly everything we as a parish do, quietly guiding us throughout the seasons. Becoming familiar with it can both expand our perspective on why we’re doing what we’re doing and enhance our perception of ways God continues to work in the world around us.
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 which 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 three have a perfectly consistent length. Christmas lasts 12 days, Lent for 40 (not including weekends), and Easter for 49. The other three all have to be a little flexible because of the way Easter likes to move around.
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, repeating chunks. Other cultures view time more flexibly, with the overlapping patterns of natural cycles being the observable, measurable constant. In that mindset, it’s those patterns that determine when events occur. So holidays and memorializations end up being more about reflecting the natural setting of the original event rather than maintaining its specific date. Essentially, a lunar-solar culture marks 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.
The most familiar example of the contrast is probably the celebration of New Year’s day. Using the solar calendar, January 1 is always the start of a new year. Because of a broad unspoken agreement on how to organize official records, the year consistently begins on that date. 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 intellectualized regularity of time. For a lunar-solar society, the repeating realities of nature mean that the abstract concepts of time and dates are the ones to shift around instead.
Regarding the date of Christmas, no one really knows when Jesus was born. But over the ages and owing to various circumstances, the Western Church eventually settled on December 25th as the day to celebrate Christ’s incarnation. However, the New Testament marks Jesus’ death and resurrection by its relation to Passover. Because Passover’s timing is based on the ancient Hebrew lunar-solar calendar system, Easter more or less aligns with that primary Jewish holiday[2], which means that from our perspective, it moves around each spring.
Moving our attention back to the Church Seasons themselves, we traditionally distinguish between them by using three different colors which 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 post-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 or growth (green).
You might be looking at me and our decorations thinking, wait a second—if Advent is purple, why is he wearing blue? That 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 shift is important, but we’ll come back to it in a few minutes.
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 we ready ourselves 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 discovered in 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 understand Lent as a time of internalized preparation where we 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 miss a good chunk of the “reason for the season” by reading ahead of ourselves in the story.
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, many churches have chosen to distinguish it with blue—something close to purple but free of Lent’s penitential associations. While we prepare for Good Friday and Holy Saturday by focusing on our internal, personal relationship with God, Advent is directed at external preparation. With Christmas only a few weeks away, many of us logically assume we’re preparing for a baby’s arrival, but that’s the part where we’re reading ahead. In reality, just like Lent, Advent is also preparation for judgment. But this time the idea isn’t simply to ready ourselves. This time we’re trying to put the whole world back in order!
Looked at in the light of the entire Church Year, Advent demands outward preparation for the coming of the Great King, one we expect to exercise swift retribution on all rebellion and disloyalty within his realm. That’s why most Advent Gospel readings tend to be intense and apocalyptic: we’re 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 because of changes in the weather and the amount of daylight. If we could make out the details without blinding ourselves, the sun itself 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 festival at their core. Because of the overall flow of the year, we’re simply viewing that celebration from different perspectives.
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, the one who will set everything in order if we don’t do it first. But instead of meeting 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 rage and insurrection not by force but through innocence, frailty, and hopeful possibility.
Each season hinges on the reminder and realization that God is a God of life and renewal. People awaiting 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: an annual reminder that the confounding realities of mercy and love will eventually overthrow all threats of judgment and retribution.
It all goes back to our “little apocalypse,” where the world is always ending and the world is always beginning. In Advent and Lent we prepare ourselves for the end. Christmas and Easter then shock us with the realization that what we thought was the end was an unexpected and entirely new beginning. After celebrating, we spread this Good News of deliverance and love, rebuilding God’s Kingdom until we once again find ourselves preparing for the end of the world and setting ourselves up for renewed surprise as we participate in this beautiful and divine cycle again and again.
[1] Technically “wrote”
[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