Advent

One day before Thanksgiving.  Where is the fancy table cloth, where are we going to seat the tean-agers, do we have enough food?  All sorts of questions as we prepare for the great day of thankfulness.

This Sunday will start the Christian year with Advent.  In the Episcopal tradition this means that we will not be singing Christmas hymns but rather Advent hymns.  We are in a state of getting ready.  Not only for the joyous day of Christmas where we celebrate the birth of Jesus as God's gift of His son to us on earth, but also that day when Jesus shall return to earth in a second coming.

We will dress our clergy and altar with blue vestment; we will light the candles in the Advent wreath; and we will prepare  for the coming of Christ.  In our secular lives we will be doing more preparation such as do we have enough ornaments, do we have a gift for Aunt Sally, where will everyone sleep.etc?  We will be in a frenzy as everyone else is.  But in our hearts we are preparing for the celebration of Jesus birth and his awaited second coming.

Our services at 8 am and 10 am will be full of hymns of "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel," "Rejoice, Rejoice, Believers and let your lights appear," or perhaps "Hark the glad sounds, the Savior comes."  Hymns of anticipation and calm as we try to prepare ourselves for such a momentous occasion in our busy, frantic lives.  (Actually there is no singing at the 8 am service.)  Prayers will be said as in the collect for the first Sunday where we acknowledge that we have been given the chance to "cast away the works of darkness" and move on to "rise to life immortal."

We would love you to join us in this period of preparedness before our glorious celebration of the birth of our savior, Jesus that we celebrate on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.  We would love you to join us whenever you can.