Advent Word - December 20 - #go - “Go Dawgs.”

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.

I went to visit someone today for what was probably the last time. He's one of the first people I met when we moved to town, and we were introduced by a mutual friend who knew that both of us had a deep love for both the Episcopal Church and the University of Georgia Bulldogs. This gentleman wasn't a member of our parish, and he didn't live in town, per se, but we saw each other off and on around the community and at funerals here and there over the past number of years.

In the last month or so he came by to visit, and we talked for a while. He left me with an envelope that had a lapel pin in it with the University of Georgia "G" logo. His note said, "Once a dawg, always a dawg. Wear pin with pride." And then, he drew a smiley face on it, much like the same smiley face on the styrofoam cup that sits next to it, given to me by the friend who introduced us in the first place many years ago.

I can't say that I know B well, but I know he is well-loved and well-thought of by his friends and his community, a fact made clear in the long list of names who signed the sheet to get into the building where he is. And I don't know how much time he's got left in this life, either. But he said to me at some point today in our talk, "No matter where you go, always be kind." It's a maxim that's served him well. As he laid there hurting, there was no panic or fear. He was hurting, yes, but he also had a peacefulness to him in knowing that he's run his race faithfully; he's lived into his faith fully; and his mark has been left on those he's known and loved.

Well done, good and faithful servant.

And Go Dawgs.

Advent Word - December 17 - #pray - “I'll have a blue Christmas without you; I'll be so blue just thinking about you.”

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.

I'll freely admit I wasn't looking forward to this portion of the Advent Word with the "Way of Love" words. I've been helping lead a class on those steps, and while they've been on my mind, I just couldn't get an image for "turn" or "learn" that I liked enough for an instagram post. Today, though, was different. I kind of knew ahead of time what we'd use today.

As some of you know, tonight was our first "Blue Christmas" at our church. I've thought about it for years, but this year was a chance with the right energy and the right atmosphere for us to try it. I had lots of uncertainty and nervousness before it and during it, but the service itself was beautiful and rich, and I think everyone who attended felt like they got something from it.

What was striking to me was the cross-section of our membership who made time to be with us, who made themselves available and vulnerable to show everyone else there that they were hurting or sad during this holiday season, a time when we're all supposed to put on a brave face and sing the Christmas songs with gusto. I'm thankful for those who came, and I'm thankful for those who helped make sure that we did the service and who trusted us enough to encourage us to do it.

Most especially, though, I'm thankful that I got to be a part of something that hopefully gave someone some peace and solace in a time when it's hard to find that. I look forward to the chance to refine the service and make the necessary changes, and I look forward to sharing this service with people for years to come.

Advent Word - December 14 - #gather

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.

For the first time we invited our confirmation mentors and their spouses or significant others over for a thank you dinner, of sorts. My wife has wanted to do this for them for a while, but I haven't been able to get my act together to extend the invitation and find date for it. It's one of those times of year that it's impossible to get everyone together, and I was glad we were able to gather as many people as we could. My wife worked most of the day to get a good, hearty meal for us, and she made some incredible sweet treats for dessert. We all got to eat, the kids made lots of noise, and it was a good night.

I take a lot of pride in my confirmation mentors (see how I claim them as my own?), but it's not because of anything I do with them. I ask them to give up their Sunday afternoons for three months in the fall, and they come and hang out with sixth graders for up to an hour and a half. They help them navigate through Bible study and church history, and they build relationships with the kids that I hope will continue to grow as they all continue at our church.

What I'm especially grateful for, though, is watching them grow in relationship with each other. Some of them have a passing familiarity with each other through other things at church and around town, but nothing brings people together like the shared experience of an overnight lock-in with middle schoolers. And because we get to work so closely together, I learn a lot from them, too. They see some things I don't see, and they help to make the class better over time. It's not a small effort for them to undertake, and I hope they understand and appreciate how important their work is. And as a priest, I hope I can remember the importance and necessity of showing gratitude to our lay people for their ministries as I continue in my time in the Church, too.

Advent Word - December 12 - #water

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.

Advent Word - December 11 - #confess

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.

My wife and I started our annual rewatch of Lord of the Rings tonight. It's one of our traditions to put it on and watch the extended editions over the course of a week or 10 days (half of each movie a night, leading to needing six nights to watch it). We do this because we saw them initially around the holidays when we were in college. And the holidays, of course, are often about marking time and traditions.

I'll confess that I am sometimes a Grinch about following this particular tradition. It's about 90 minutes of movie a night, sometimes closer to two hours. I'm already tired, and since I'm so familiar with them all by now, it's so easy to doze off and fall asleep, which in turn makes me grumpy. However, there is something about being so familiar with these movies that allows us to make time to watch them and still have a our regular conversations. These movies are part of our tradition around here, and we make space for them so that we can also have our time with each other.

We've all got traditions and rituals that we keep. Some of them we keep begrudgingly, and some of them we keep because they connect us to something bigger (as we move through Advent and draw closer to Christmas, this will likely come up again for me here). Our opportunity, I think to see what those traditions might be and see how the continue to shape us as individuals and as people who are a part of a something larger. And as I wrote about the trees earlier this week, the keeping of traditions, be they at home or with family or in church, also help us to welcome others into the fold, giving them a place and opportunity to claim their spot as a member of the group.

Advent Word - December 10 - #grace

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.

For at least the last eight or nine years, we've had one of those Christmas elves in our house. It was given to us by a friend before our daughter was old enough to know what it was, and I guess in the next year or so after that our elf Jonathan began to visit our home each Advent. Our elf has never been an agent of the state reporting back to the North Pole about the behavior of our kids. Instead, he started out as "agent of Advent," and the kids would get a felt ornament to add to a tree when they completed their Advent mission, but as they've gotten older he's gotten more into different kinds of mischief and hijinx. I can't wait to put together an album of sorts of all of his doings because it'll be fun to look back on and remember, especially as the kids get older and get more knowledgeable about the "Christmas secret."

Last year and this year, though, the elf has gotten kind of tired. He's not into as much mess-making, and he's kind of run out of places to hide. So instead, he just moves from spot to spot. And while there isn't the excitement of finding him every morning and seeing what he did the night before, it is still something that they do when they think about it. Something like, "Did you find find Jonathan?" Or "I haven't found Jonathan yet." As slow a the elf has gotten in his age, though, there does still seem to be at least a little bit of magic and mystery involved there, and for that, I'm still grateful.

Ultimately, I wonder, though, if the grace that was shown in those early years of the elf and all of his tricks bringing them joy and happiness in the morning and excitement throughout Advent is still being shown through them to us, to me, as they seek him out and try to hold on to some of that magic and imagination of the season. They may not know it or realize it, but them continuing to play along makes me so happy. And if I'm honest, it's going to be a little bit bittersweet to me when they want to start participating in the elf's tricks, too. But you know what? There's grace in that, too, because hopefully they'll have learned, in some small measure, the purpose of this season is pouring out onto others the grace we have received ourselves.

Advent Word - December 9 - #root - “I’ve got no roots, but my home was never on the ground.”

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.

I struggled with “worthy” yesterday, but I saw a lot of great ones coming from the #adventword tag on Instagram. One that really stood out to me was the picture of a friend from seminary with the caption, “I am worthy just as I am.” For many of us, it’s hard to come to place and that realization, even when we’ve attained what society would call success. It’s a bummer, but sometimes that just how we are.

Tonight, though, when I was out with the dog, I looked up, and I saw a tree that had (finally) dropped all of its leaves. I love seeing the barren trees this time of year, and I especially like seeing a barren oak in the middle of a field. I can’t pinpoint why, but I think it’s because when we see a barren tree, with all of the branches exposed, it’s as close as we’re going to get to seeing what that tree’s root structure looks like. I know that sounds silly, and it’s not terribly profound, but it works for me.

And I think about it because, as we all know, the roots of a tree grow towards nutrients: good soil, water, anything else that tree will need. When we see the branches of the tree, we see that tree reaching up for all that it can get to. More sun, more air, more rain as it falls. As the seasons change, the tree changes, too. The branches may reach in different directions (like the ones about to grow into our house), and the roots certainly grow as the tree tries to reach it’s greatest height.

Again, nothing profound here. Just a brief mediation on the beauty of a tree. Take a look at one of the barren trees around town. It’s simply really cool to see. And then, notice it as it changes over the next few months, too. And then, think of you may have been changed in that same time.