Lutheran Advent Calendar
**By keeping Advent we can pace ourselves, grow in faith, and build momentum to a spiritual and emotional apex by December 25.**
So true. The Christmas season is from Devember 25th through the Epiphany. Our Christmas tree never came down before the Wise Men arrived to adore the newborn King, Jesus Christ. (And that’s when the children could put the Wise Men figures into our Nativity scene!)
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I do my home decorating gradually, just like the increasing light on the Advent wreath.
This past Saturday I hung wreaths and an unlit deck garland. I have one wild cedar covered in blue lights and a large star lighted. That’s it.
This Saturday I will light a second wild cedar with blue lights and illuminate the deck garland with blue lights.
At Gaudete I will add blue icicle lights (haven’t found rose ones—yet) and light a third tree with rose lights.
At Advent 4 a fourth outdoor tree will receive blue lights. Plus by then I will have finished adding lights in varying colors to about two dozen more trees.
I do not treat Advent so much as time for penence, that is more for Lent, but rather as a time to get ready for the coming of the Lord Jesus as well as to remember his coming at the nativity, at the end of time, and in our lives daily. The purple of Advent I see is a reminder of his kingship with the pink candle for joy.
I was at St. Vincent’s Hospital yesterday to see my Cardiologist, and was pleased to see that all of the wreaths hanging in the hugh atrium were in ADVENT colors. They did have a large creche set up, but, of course, the Baby Jesus hadn’t arrived. ;o)
Yea, verily. However, that’s a heap more traditional Roman theology and practice than I could swallow comfortably.
Perhaps someone far more learned than I can tell us: Who does Roman tradition acknowledge as the first Christian saint? Were all those seemingly “saintly” figures in the first century or two of written earthly church history just “grandfathered in” after the Curia had established the criteria for sainthood? And who authorized them to do so? And why?
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