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Advent Calendar & Chain Pairings

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I know there are wine pairings for just about every food on the planet. But here are some resources for word pairings to go along with the Advent Calendar Templates or the Advent Chains from my November 9 and November 25 blog posts

1) #AdventWord is is a global, online Advent calendar. Each day from the first Sunday of Advent through Christmas Day, #AdventWord offers meditations and images to inspire and connect individuals and a worldwide community of believers to the themes of Advent. AdventWord is a ministry of Virginia Theological Seminary.” 

I love using the words from #AdventWord because I know that people all around the word are praying and pondering them too. You can post your reflections, images, poems, prayers…every day and see how others are responding. Below are the 2019 words. You can sign up to receive a daily reflection at adventword.org

#AdventWord 2019

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2) This year along with #AdventWord,  I’m using a reader called Low: An Honest Advent Devotional by John Pavlovitz. I have not read the whole book yet, but I like what I have sampled, especially this paragraph in the introduction about Advent: “the invitation is not to escape this place to an elevated heavenly sanctuary somewhere; it it to bring heaven down. Immanuel means ‘God with us.’ In other words, it is Jesus getting low. This is really good news for us here on the ground.”

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3) There are many wonderful daily readers for Advent. Here are five of my all time favorites–and there are many others. I would use these over and over again. I will include just the title and author. You can click on the title for further information. They are linked to the Kindle editions if they exist but hard copies are also available.



  • Light Upon Light compiled by Sarah Arthur–wise and literary excerpts from stories, poems, essays, and books.

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4) Here is a review I wrote in 2017 of four other books for Advent.

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5) If you are looking for playful and prayerful ways to celebrate Advent you can also get my book The Season of the Nativity: Confessions and Practices of an Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany Extremist by Sybil MacBeth. I have tried just about everything I suggest.

I am an Advent freak/geek and proud of it. I think Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany are the underrated, most important seasons of the Church Year. They prepare and equip us to live the rest of the year as embodied disciples of Jesus.

 

Advent Paper Chains

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Advent paper chains are like 3-D Advent calendars. They are a physical and visual way to mark the daily journey to Christmas.

Paper chains are an easy and playful way for kids to learn Advent words. Pick simple words like “wait, prepare, watch, baby, dark….” For children who are too young to read, write the word on one strip of paper and talk with them about its meaning. Let them doodle or draw around the word and along the strip. When the artwork is finished, take the strip of paper, make a loop, and staple the ends together. Give children two other strips of paper on which to draw and color. Remind them of the word without necessarily writing it again. Add the finished strips to each side of the original loop to create a three-loop chain. If you decorate a Christmas tree right after Thanksgiving, you can hang the trio on the tree. (Or maybe forget the Christmas decorations completely until closer to the 25th.)  Repeat the process every day of Advent with a new word. Reviewing the previous words each day immerses children in the rich vocabulary of the season.

Adults can also create Advent chains. Try any of the ideas I suggest for Advent calendars in my November 9th blog post. I like to pick an Advent word for each day and pray it/meditate on it as I doodle. The word seems to stay with me for the rest of the day. Adults might enjoy the meaty and fresh daily Advent vocabulary offered by #AdventWord.

Keep the 3-loop chains separate as individual “ornaments” or connect them together in one long, swoopy chain. It’s amazing to me how the simple practice can end up being both beautiful and spiritually satisfying.

Since I often travel at Christmas time, I buy a little Norfolk Island pine and designate it as an Advent tree. Purple or blue lights on it remind me that it is still Advent and not yet Christmas.

Sing, Sign, Expect–Advent Words

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Below are a few verbal and visual reflections on words from#AdventWord 2018.

#SINGing is my primary learning style. It is probably not in the educators’ official handbook of learning styles with auditory, verbal, visual, kinesthetic…but it includes all of those ways of learning. With melody and emotion thrown in, singing is a full-bodied way to import information into my entire being. Almost everything I know and remember about God, Jesus, and Scripture, I learned in Song.    December 17

 

 

 

There are #SIGNS everywhere–portents of doom, promises of prosperity. We can read the signs in the news and on TV and claim that biblical prophecy is now being fulfilled in both the portents and the promises. This is not new news. People have been matching current events with biblical prophecy in a one-to-one correspondence for at least 2000 years. This exercise seems a little self-focused, a way to confirm smug beliefs and opinions about how the world works and what MY God will do. But God will do what God will do.  More important for me than sign interpretation is to ask “What kind of sign am I?” How do people read me? Am I a sign of God’s love, compassion, and hope or am I a billboard slathered with words of self-righteousness, judgmental certainty, and despair?  In John 4:48, Jesus says, ” Unless you people see signs and wonders, you will never believe.” Current events may be signs, but I believe Christians are called to be living signs and wonders.      December 21

I #EXPECT a good meal and service when I go to a fine restaurant. I expect teachers to pay attention to my children and grandchildren. I expect my husband to make me happy. I expect to receive good things from God if I am a good girl. But these EXPECTATIONS have an unpleasant ring of entitlement to them. My expectations are not necessarily reasonable and often doomed to end in disappointment and resentment.  I  like the word EXPECTANCY better than EXPECTATION.  Though the roots of the words are the same, the first feels like an attitude of wide-eyed openness and humility rather than a sense of entitlement and arrogance that the second implies. EXPECTANCY helps me to honor the possibilities beyond my limited wants and imagination. What I think I can EXPECT is a God who surprises, who may not give me what I want or expect but who makes all things new.   December 22

 

 

 

Wild and Cry–Advent Words

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For the first nine days of Advent I have really enjoyed combining praying in color with #AdventWord. Everyday #AdventWord (adventword.org)  sends  an email with a new word and a reflection on the word. The chosen words are based on the Advent lectionary from year C. Most of them are familiar, returning Advent companions. But Sunday’s word jarred me and my thoughts went wild. The word was WILD. Instead of just drawing, I started writing:

WILD
Jesus tames the wild, but Jesus also wilds the tame. For people like me who seek the safe, easy, and comfortable way, he discomforts. I choose the path of the good-girl Christian. She’s the one who follows the rules, wants to be perfect, memorizes the Beatitudes and Ten Commandments, respects authority, doesn’t make waves, tries to please, goes to church every Sunday, smiles…. I don’t think Jesus objects to any of those things; they are good things– except if they get in the way of following Him. For me, it’s easier to follow rules. It’s hard to follow the Jesus who calls for wild, sometimes risky discipleship.

“I am the Way,” says Jesus. Possibly, the wild way, the unpredictable way. Jesus steers me off the 8-lane highway of comfort and conformity, asks me to unbuckle my seat belt, and takes me onto the narrow path through a forest of thickets, roots, and brambles. The only navigation tool is Jesus Himself. My mother warned me about men who said, “Follow me.” “You are my friends if you do what I command you.” (John 15:14 NRSV). (But this is Jesus, mom, okay?)

He is the Way. Follow Him through the Land of Unlikeness; You will see rare beasts and have unique adventures. These are the stunning words of the poet W.H. Auden. This wild Jesus who calls me beyond my familiar boundaries is the one I want to follow–but I am so afraid to do so.

 

Monday’s word was CRY.
CRY
I almost never cry. Not at funerals, not at weddings. Except recently, at the drop of a hat, at the movies, at pictures of my granddaughter, at funerals…. I have wondered: “Why all the crying? Did I have a stroke? Or is my heart actually softening?” In one of those strong, rare, inaudible voices I heard: “Doesn’t matter. Trust the tears.”

 

 

Leslie Lepage is also combining #AdventWord with a calendar template. Here are her visual prayers/meditations on the words.

#AdventWord and Advent Calendars

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“#AdventWord is a global, online Advent calendar. Each day from the first Sunday of Advent through Christmas Day, #AdventWord offers meditations and images to inspire and connect individuals and a worldwide community of believers to the themes of Advent. AdventWord is a ministry of Virginia Theological Seminary.” 

Last year I combined one of my Advent calendar templates with the daily word from #AdventWord. Besides having a daily word to think and pray about, I felt less alone than I usually do during Advent. I was part of a worldwide congregation of people making the daily journey to Christmas and anticipating the celebration of Christ coming into the world. A few times I posted my daily calendar entry on the #Advent word website and global calendar. I really enjoyed the words, the meditation, and the communal experience. I plan to do it again this year. 

Here is more information about #AdventWord from buildfaith.org:

“You can stay up-to-date by signing up to receive #AdventWord emails here, visiting AdventWord.org, and following the project on Facebook and Instagram.

The words for #AdventWord 2018 are inspired by the Lectionary readings for Advent Year C and selected through a process prayerful meditation on the Word. For the first time this year, one word, #Ancestor, was selected through the larger community via an online voting. The words are intended to follow the arc of the season, preparing us to #Celebrate the birth of Christ. This year’s meditations are offered in eight languages and American Sign Language.”

Here is the list of words for #AdventWord 2018.

If you want to combine #AdventWord 2018 with  a calendar template, here are six options. Click on the link below the images for the one you want. When the image appears as a  google doc, click on the download button at the top (the square with the downward facing arrow). Download first; then print.

All of the words in blue above are directly from the Building Faith website. To read the complete article about 2018 #AdventWord, Click Here.

Third Week Advent 2017

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.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.