Sermon Tone Analysis

We are starting our Christmas series this week!

The series is called, / / The Reason: What Christmas is All About! and we’re going to be looking at the traditional, the Christian Calendar of Advent.

If you don’t know what / / advent is, that’s ok.

I went for years as a Christian with absolutely no clue what Advent is.

How many know what Advent is?

Ok, well, there’s technically three aspects of the word advent.

First, the word itself has an actual definition, it’s not just a title for a season leading up to Christmas.

Advent comes from the latin word / / adventus, which simply translates as “coming” or “arrival” and the definition of the word itself means, the arrival of a notable person, thing or event.

That makes a whole lot of sense as that’s exactly what Christmas is about, isn’t it?

It’s the arrival of all of that, a / / Person, Jesus Christ, a Thing, our salvation, and an Event, his birth, his death & his resurrection are all because He came.

Second, / / Advent as a word is used specifically for both the coming of Jesus, his birth, what we celebrate over Christmas, AND the second coming of Christ.

So there is both a celebration of what has been, and an expectation of what is to come.

And then there is the third aspect of / / Advent, which we are coming into now as part of the liturgical or christian calendar, and that is the preparation of God’s people in the 4 weeks leading up to Christmas Day.

Advent always starts the Sunday nearest to November 30th, which means it always leads up to the Sunday right before we celebrate Christmas Day.

Like I said, I didn’t know any of that growing up!

In fact, it wasn’t until we were in Oslo, Norway for Christmas in 2014 that the leadership of our church there asked me the day before or a few days before the first Sunday of Advent, “So, do we have the candles for advent?”

And my response was literally, “What candles?”

I had no clue, and being the pastor, I felt a little sheepish admitting that, BUT, I grew up in a very non-liturgical church, that never observed this wonderful season.

Because at that point my full understanding of advent was a 24 day calendar that had little bits of chocolate behind little paper doors and everyday I got a little taste of awesome.

And trust me, I’m not opposed to a good advent calendar.

Last year I had a coffee calendar.

This year I have a cheese calendar.

Aldi was selling a wine advent calendar… But that’s not what Advent really is.

Man, we’re good at taking something really good and making it all about us, aren’t we?

Ok, so, I’ve been throwing around the word, liturgical, like we all know what that means.

And if you don’t, like I didn’t, / / liturgy simply means a format, or a program for public religious worship.

And if you’ve been in a traditional Catholic, or Anglican, Lutheran, or Episcopal or Orthodox, or Methodist church, you’ve probably experienced liturgy.

And so we call these liturgical churches, churches who follow a liturgy.

Ever been in a church service where someone says something from the front and everyone else responds, except in my case, I had no clue what was going on, so I didn’t respond...

Here’s where I have found that a lot of Christians have gone wrong.

Now, I don’t know if this was the intention, but this is how it came across, and this is how it got formed in my head.

The church I grew up in had almost a push back against liturgical worship, and it came across as a feeling that by following a set plan they were losing access to the flow of the spirit, or something like that, I’m not totally sure.

Maybe it was a sense of freedom, breaking away from what can feel like a stuffy tradition.

Liturgy for the sake of liturgy isn’t good, it doesn’t serve a purpose if we’re just doing it blindly.

But, I think as humans we tend to swing one way or the other, especially when we don’t understand something, or we feel abused by something, or manipulated by something, or for any other reasons, we swing hard the other way to try and correct what we think is misguided.

What I have learned as I have grown in my own faith and walk with God is that there is beauty in liturgy, as long as the liturgy is pointing to Christ.

And these fathers and mothers of the faith that put time and effort into these liturgical services had a heart to honor God in them.

The advent season is NO different.

But at first, I didn’t understand it, and my history was to kind of buck at that, so I pushed back a little, until God got a hold of me and humbled me a little and I learned what this was all about.

Advent is beautiful.

Now, we don’t know exactly when the church started celebrating advent as a season, it’s assumed it was sometime in the 4th century and there was a man, St Gregory of Tours who wrote that St Perpetuus had decreed a three week fast from the time of the feast of St Martin until Christmas.

But there’s no indication as to whether he was talking about a custom that already existed, or if it was something new.

There is a city in France called Tours, and the early church would have these meetings of church leaders to discuss the fundamentals of the Christian faith.

If you’ve ever heard of the Council of Nicea, or Constantinople, and many others.

These were where the Nicene Creed was developed and written.

And the Roman Catholic church had many such councils in the city of Tours, gatherings of leaders to discuss the fundamentals of the Christian faith.

One of these councils, in the year 567, it is recorded that the monks began to do a fast from December 1st to Christmas Day.

That was different from the Greek Orthodox & Eastern Catholics who were observing a 40 day fast that began on November 15th.

And so in time, the eastern church was fasting from November 15th, and the western church from the fourth Sunday before Christmas.

Over time these four weeks became essentially about preparing ourselves to celebrate the anniversary of the Lord’s coming into the world as the incarnate God of love, that is literally the birth of Jesus Christ, as the Son of God, the third person of the trinity, fully God and fully man.

It is a preparation of heart to celebrate Christmas.

And some would also focus on the preparation of His eventual second coming.

/ / The true beauty of Advent is an anticipation, a waiting, an expectation of the arrival of something, or someone great!

I think kids get this more than adults.

I remember sitting under the Christmas Tree, in the days leading up to Christmas, but especially on Christmas morning just waiting for everyone else to wake up so that we could dig into the presents under the tree.

There was a huge anticipation, an excitement that is unmatched in this world.

And when we take time to focus on the true meaning of Christmas, we are putting that anticipation into Jesus Christ.

Kids know how to anticipate.

Us adults need a little help, and my hope this December, this Advent season, is that we learn to truly anticipate again the joy and the true meaning of Christmas.

Each week of advent has a different focus.

As we prepare to celebrate the birth of Jesus on the 25th of December, we journey through these four themes.

/ / Hope, Peace, Joy & Love.

And some traditions include a fifth celebration on Christmas Eve or Christmas day that represents Christ the Messiah and His birth.

Traditionally there are Advent candles, remember that was the question that started all of this for me, “Do we have the advent candles?”

And a candle is lit each Sunday that represents each of these themes, and you light the specific candle on the week of it’s theme.

Now, we don’t have candles here, but like I’ve said, the true intent of Advent is to point us to Christ, regardless of whether you have candles or not.

And that moment of learning was good for both me and the leadership of the church we were pastoring because it made us really think about WHY we do WHAT we do.

Liturgy for the sake of liturgy can actually be dangerous because it can draw away from our focus on God.

But Liturgical worship that draws our attention to Him is beautiful and can enhance our journey with Christ.

I’ve experienced this in a small way through my journey of recovery this past year.

Pretty much every meeting you are in, you’re going to pray the serenity prayer, and you can simply recite that prayer, or you can truly pray it.

And this is true of anything we’ve done 10, 20, 100 times.

We can become numb to it, and simply follow along with the motions, or we can lean into it and truly give our heart and emotions to what we are doing.

When I pray the serenity prayer, I challenge myself to really focus on the words I am saying and not just recite something just because everyone else is.

So, this week, our theme is / / Jesus our Hope.

Now, if you know me you know one of my favorite words is hope.

It’s our daughters middle name.

Something that was confirmed for us by God through the mouths of prophets and a constant reminder of God’s goodness.

Hope unfortunately has been given a bit of a bad name.

We say things like, “I hope it happens..” which really means I’m not putting much stock in it.

Maybe there’s a 50/50 chance.

Or we will say, “I’m not really putting my hope in that...”

or, “Wow, I hope that works out for you...” Do we really?

“Ya, I hope so too...”

Like, it would be nice, but I’ll believe it when I see it...

“I’m not getting my hopes up...” How is that even a thing we say.

Hope is one of the most powerful things God has given us, and we have relegated it to a 50/50 chance.

But here’s the thing, / / hope by definition means, A confident expectation of a positive outcome.

A confident expectation.... expectation already means a strong belief that something will happen, so a confident expectation is like, a strong belief on steroids that something will happen.

And hope is having that confident expectation of a POSITIVE outcome.

What is that?

We’re saying this is going our way, it’s going to be in our favor, it’s good, wonderful, for our benefit.

And so hope is being very very sure of the FACT, that’s how much we believe it, that wholeheartedly we just absolutely believe that what will happen is going to be good!

So, these themes that we look at over Advent are really two-fold in their focus as we not only receive these things, hope, peace, joy & love, but that these are also the very characteristics of Jesus Christ that we are celebrating.

Hope is something we receive, but truly Jesus IS our Hope.

Paul wrote in his letter to Timothy, right away in the introduction, he says, / / This letter is from Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus, appointed by the command of God our Savior and Christ Jesus, who gives us hope.

or, as the ESV says it, / / Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by command of God our Savior and of Christ Jesus our hope.

And it is really both of those things.

/ / Jesus IS our hope, and THROUGH Jesus we receive and have hope.

1 Timothy is a letter that Paul is writing to Timothy, who he has been training and teaching in church leadership, on how to lead a church, and here he’s defining that Christ Jesus is our hope.