Advent Letter
Saint John's Church

Late All Saints-tide 2003

Dear Members and Friends,

As we approach Advent I want to urge you to plan now to make it a genuine time of preparation for Christmas. Advent is characterised by reflection on a strange proposition, even a mystery: God is in the flesh. How is it so?

This idea is the very heart and soul of Christianity. The four weeks of Advent are a time to wrestle with this idea in our hearts, in our minds, and to look at how we spend the capital of our lives- our time -in light of it. Christmas will be a more moving, a more meaning-filled time and season if Advent is spent trying to understand it. For example, instead of sentimentalising for one day about a charming baby unfortunate enough to have rough straw in a feed box for a bed, we would do well to reflect upon what led that child to an adulthood that put him on a Roman cross for execution, and how the span of that child's life culminated in the preposterous notion that he had been raised from the dead by God, or that the child at every turn grew into a man consumed by soul-searing love. We would do well to ask if God was in him, and how we know it.

How can I prepare for Christmas? First, you must choose to do so. Then you must change your priorities. No 'ifs', 'ands', or 'buts'; you must change your priorities. Among them, these:

• I will slow down my life- every party does not need my presence, nor does every store, nor does every person, nor does every so-called 'crisis'.
• I will not 'shop 'til I drop'- gift giving will be reflective of my love and understanding of the recipient; it will be, therefore, very special. It need not be expensive.
• I will insist on making time to read and ponder the Christmas story in both Matthew and Luke.
• I will insist on making time to find out why there isn't one in either Mark or John.
• I will take at least one 'retreat day' at one of the many local facilities available to go for a time of reflection and meditation. This requires planning now, especially for those who work.
• I will reflect upon my past, my present, and my future-- in the light of understanding my own life to be one of God's gifts to the world.
• I will cultivate habitual wonder, expectation, and gratitude about the goodness of God in my life.
• I will attempt to savour each day, each friend, each party, each study, each moment, and, above all and in all, my loving God.

Your celebration of Christmas will be more informed, more honest, more profound, and decidedly more Christian. Enclosed is information about services and events here at the church which will bring into focus the priorities of the Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany seasons. Take time to note them, plan for them, and join in them; not as additions to a busy schedule, but as your true priorities. Before all else, in the words of an old hymn, "Take time to be holy...".

Yours in our present and coming Lord Jesus,

(The Rev'd) Jesse L. A. Parker
Rector of Saint John's Church, Huntingdon,
Waverly, Baltimore