By Rev. Ethan Brown

Pastor and Minister of Service & Community

While Christmas music may have been playing in stores since Halloween ended, it finally looks like Christmas around our house. The tree is up and surrounded in lights—Basil even helped put the star on top! We introduced him to Christmas movies and hot chocolate, of which he is now a big fan, and Caitlin is plotting more elaborate and wonderful decorations. Highland Hills, too, is getting ready for the season. Wreaths have been hung and poinsettias are appearing. Nativity sets are establishing camp throughout the building. It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas!

Yet this Sunday as the church calendar rolls over and begins anew, we are starting the season of Advent, not Christmas. Despite the Christmas parties and family gatherings and all of the many, many commercials, these four weeks leading up to Christmas are weeks of preparation and anticipation, not the event itself. Historically, especially in some Christian traditions, Advent was a season of reflection and repentance similar to the season of Lent rather than the early feasting of Christmas. Like a newly expectant parent, hope and fear and discomfort and pain and love and joy and confusion and wonder are all intermixed together because the baby, in all its concrete reality, has not arrived. This is the story of our faith. Though we are a people who know and experience the goodness of Christ, we live in a time between the Advents, between Jesus being born on Christmas day and Jesus coming once again to set all things right. During the season of Advent, we join with those who long ago searched a dark world for the light of the Messiah, hoping and longing for Emmanuel to come, for God to be with us.

There are many ways to participate in this season of preparation at Highland Hills. Spend some time looking at the new artwork decorating our hallway to help you reimagine these faith stories. Pick up an Advent devotional for reflection and an Advent calendar to find ways to embody your faith during this season. And come worship with us each Sunday morning where new liturgies and songs will help us internalize weary, yet hopeful, anticipation. One such change in worship for these four weeks will be the exchanging of our normal singing of the doxology for a verse of “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.” Rather than bringing our offerings forward in the triumphant praise of Christ’s reign, we will do so with faithful persistence acknowledging that these offerings only matter in the light of Christ’s coming. Each week we will surrender what we have to a God we cannot yet see and we will sing of our fervent desire for Emmanuel to come, for God to be with us. Perhaps it will feel strange—perhaps you will be uncomfortable for these four weeks. In truth, I hope we all are at least a little uncomfortable for then Christmas will be all the sweeter.