Depending on your upbringing and your capacity for celebration, your Christmas season may start anywhere from early October to mid-December. But once Thanksgiving rolls around, it's hard to avoid the carols, the trees, the lights, and the sense that you should be doing something with every free moment--shopping, wrapping gifts, preparing for holiday travel. And those are all really good things to be doing, but the four weeks of Advent are, in the church calendar, a time of waiting and longing. A time of being still, living in the desert of the already/not-yet of the Christian faith before entering into the lush gardens of Christmas.
December 25th will mark the fulfillment of all the waiting of Advent: the 12 days of Christmas will be upon us, and we will celebrate that God came to earth; that, in the words of John, God "became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth." We will begin our celebration at our Christmas Eve services, gathering as a church family to express our collective waiting and worship of the God who came to be with us. Our Christmas Eve services will include carols, Scripture reading, prayer, and a congregational candle lighting to remind us of the light that could not be overcome by darkness. Join us at 5:00pm at 23rd Street or 5:30pm at Sutter.
Last weekend saw the return of our annual Lessons & Carols service, a fun and popular combination of classic Advent hymns and Bible stories. Choirs of City Church's children gathered to sing songs about the season, and we heard passages from Scripture that reminded us of the prophecy of Jesus, Jesus' birth and ministry, and the mystery of the incarnation. That same Sunday night, City Church partnered with other San Francisco churches as dozens of people gathered in the Tenderloin to sing carols (see photos here) all around the neighborhood. Our City Hope Tree has provided over 350 gifts for many families in the Bay Area who likely wouldn't have been able to give gifts otherwise.
Our seasonal prayer services earlier in Advent were a time to begin the season in communal waiting, prayer, and silence. We did this to set the pace for the season of Advent and the month of December, so that when we felt pulled toward busy-ness, we could remember that picture of what Advent could look like. At that service (at the 23rd Street campus), we sang these words:
But for you who fear my name,
the sun of righteousness will rise
with healing in his wings.
And you shall go forth again,
skip about like calves
coming from their stalls at last.
That song takes its inspiration from the last words of Malachi, one of the last books of the Old Testament: "But for you who revere my name the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings. You shall go out leaping like calves from the stall." After the season of waiting comes the season of celebration and frolicking; after the desert come the verdant gardens.