Many Christian traditions around the world take four weeks every year to remember and celebrate a season called Advent. The literal components of the word advent mean “come to”. We recognize our individual and collective need for the presence of God to come to us and set right what is wrong. Advent is about watching, waiting, and working for a better world. We trust that world will come.

The scriptures associated with Advent are broken into three four-week groups and rotated through every three years. Over 31 days, we meditate on the meaning of Advent using scriptures from all three groups as our prompt. After each reflection, we pray our Advent Prayer:

Dear God,

Fill us with the hope of the prophets, with a vision of the world filled the peace and a wellbeing that is grounded in our shared love of You, ourselves, and our neighbors as ourselves.

Give us the commitment to prepare our hearts and minds to do the work required of us to become the people we need to be to create such a world.

Fill us with the joy that leaves us with no room for resentment or bitterness, envy or jealousy. With a joy that enlivens us to enter each day with passion.

Fill us with a peace that spreads from the inside out and from the outside in, a peace centered in our compassion for ourselves and each other.

Finally, we pray for an awareness of your presence in our going out and coming in, in our labor and in our leisure, in our laughter and our tears.

We pray this in Your name, the one who creates, sustains, and redeems all things.

Amen.

Advent begins with the sense that something has got to change. When we look at the world, when we look at the individual nations, when we look at our communities, when we look at our families, when we look at ourselves, we recognize that we are a long, long way from where we ought to be.