The "Advent Word" practice is a daily meditation on a given word and an opportunity to share that reflection on social media with others who are keeping this practice. It's akin to an Advent calendar, but with many boxes to open on a given day. Sometimes the reflections are sincere, and sometimes they're a little silly, but at the end of the day, it's a practice set aside to help us observe the season of Advent in the midst of the world's busyness. With all of that in mind, this is going to be my attempt to observe the Advent Word practice. I wish I could promise a reflection every day, and we'll see where this goes together.
A few weeks ago a few of us around here cooked up an idea for an evangelism project to represent a different voice of the the Church for our monthly arts festival downtown. We'd heard that some of the voices representing Christianity down there were more aggressive and fear-inducing, and we wanted locals to know that we, the Episcopal Church, were indeed present and available and open on the holidays.
As usual, it was just an idea from me that a dear friend took off and ran with. She enlisted the help of other churches, recruited helpers to staff the tent, and gathered over 30 dozen homemade cookies and had plans to brew over 200 cups of hot chocolate. We had flyers that listed all of the Episcopal churches in town along with our Christmas service times and website, and our hope was to invitational to the patrons of the arts festival.
Alas, it was not meant to be, at least in the form we initially planned.
The weather has been dreary all day, and around mid-afternoon the temperatures dropped, and the skies opened up with the rain that had been held back all day. The well-planned and well-intended "Cookies and Cocoa with the Episcopalians" was called for rain, and now the task becomes what to do with all of those cookies. My friend and colleague is already planning ways to use them (caroling through downtown; visits with local businesses; or even a hospitality station at the courthouse), and I’m thankful for her energy and creativity.
The grace here is that there was energy around the project and the idea. This is something that we in this convocation can build on, and it's something we can look forward to doing again sometime. I'm thankful for the ministry of all of those who worked so hard on the front end to make this a reality, and I'm bummed out that we got washed out by bad weather. All that said, it makes me look forward to the next time we're able to get together, and it's a reminder that there are people in our community and our church who want to share the Good New of Jesus Christ and who want to go out into the community to invite people into our churches.
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