Advent morphs into Christmas. The #AdventWord calendar is now the swaddled babe. The Advent tree becomes a Christmas tree. Equipped with the skills of Advent we become Christmas people, followers of Jesus—laying the groundwork and working for the emerging kingdom of God.
.Advent seems so short this year. This is the sixteenth day of Advent and already three Sundays of Advent are gone. Here are my two daily disciplines for this Advent:
1) I have been reading Walter Brueggemann’s Celebrating Abundance: Devotions for Advent. The daily readings are challenging and loaded with fresh and surprising Advent words. Each day I choose a word that jumps out at me, write it on a small envelope, and doodle while I think about the word. I pin the envelope on the Advent tree (i.e. our future Christmas tree). Some of the words on the tree are: Relinquish, Solidarity,Protest, Welcome, Outrageous…. This collection of words and Brueggemann’s meditations remind me that Jesus’s coming into the world is meant to turn my comfy, tame life on its head, that “God’s rule of starchy justice and generous mercy will arise on the earth…” Coins and dollars we collect in the envelopes will go to some organization that witnesses to that starchy justice and generous mercy.
2) AdventWord is a worldwide experience of prayer using social media and images. A new Advent word is posted each day.Recipients reflect on the word and share images or photos on a worldwide Advent calendar.The Society of St. John the Evangelist started this four years ago. This year Virginia Theological Seminary is contributing short meditations with the word. I’m using the word they provide in connection with one of the Advent calendar templates I created. The words from the Brueggemann book have captured my spiritual imagination more than the AdventWords, but I love the idea of a worldwide daily discipline of prayer and collective visual response.
One of my favorite intergenerational Christian Formation tools is the echo pantomime. Echo pantomimes tell a story with words and movement. They are a playful, full-bodied way to learn a Bible story and to build community. Here’s how the form works:
1.Choose a leader–an adult or a child who can read.
2. The leader reads a line of the script and performs the indicated action at the same time.
3. The group echoes the leader’s words and gestures.
4. The leader says the next line with the action; the group copies the words and actions again.
5. The back and forth between leader and group continues until the story is complete.
Echo pantomimes can be used with a large group of people or even with a small family. Adults seem to enjoy the movement and playfulness as much as children. The Zechariah story below can be repeated over and over during Advent. With lots of repetition a group can eventually do it together without a leader, almost as a dance.
Below is the Luke 1 Echo Pantomime of Zechariah’s encounter with the angel Gabriel. It was first published in The Season of the Nativity: Confessions and Practices of an Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany Extremist (2014) You can download a .pdf or .jpg version of this Zechariah Voice and Body piece.
