First Sunday of Advent
Scripture Reading for Today:
Signs of the Season
by Amy Bratton
Welcome to the 2024 New Leaf Advent Reader, Advent Undone: When the Mysteries of Christmas Have Come Unravelled. In the coming weeks, reflections will be coming to your inbox and online from writers and artists across Canada. As we wait for the arrival of Jesus on Christmas day, the season of Advent makes space for our complicated emotions and complex situations. Advent makes space for the both/and nature of the Gospel. The lectionary readings that you will find paired with the reflections lean into the already and not yet as we read scripture passages that anticipate both the first and second coming of Christ, noticing the ways in which God’s presence is very much with us, and still not yet arrived.
If you are new to the Advent Reader this year, my name is Amy Bratton, and I am the editor of this collection. This is the seventh annual New Leaf Advent Reader and I find it such a joy to collect voices from across Canada to share some reflections on Advent and our theme with you. This network is a diverse place, we have met so many wonderful people through New Leaf events over the years, and I truly wish we could ask for an Advent reflection from each one of you. This is just a small sample of the richness of the Canadian church that the team at New Leaf has been blessed to encounter.
If you have followed the New Leaf Advent Reader in previous years, you will notice a few things that are different this year. First, we will be sending you fewer reflections. This reduction reflects the constraints of our staff team this year. Our time is increasingly finite in 2024 due to budget limitations, but we are still eager to offer reflections four times a week this year.
The second tweak you will see this year is the inclusion of artists among our contributors. It has been an immense blessing to have artists contribute to our conferences in the last few years, so we intentionally reached out to artists as we planned this year’s Advent Reader. As you engage with these reflections that don’t fit our typical format, we hope that they expand your heart and engage your imagination in new ways.
The Advent Reader theme this year, Advent Undone, is inspired by the newest release from New Leaf Network Press, Blessed are the Undone: Testimonies of the Quiet Deconstruction of Faith in Canada by Angela Reitsma Bick and Peter Schuurman. This book is full of stories of Canadians who are walking through faith coming undone. As the book makes its way out into the world we have been talking to people who have shared their own experiences of coming undone. This Advent we wanted to give some space to reflect on how Advent and Christmas are different after things have come undone.
In the best possible way, the good news of Jesus coming to the world upends what we expected, and we are no longer the same after any encounter with Jesus. Yet, there are also ways in which family traditions and cultural narratives can be stinging reminders of places of loss and differences in life after faith comes undone.
My own journey of coming undone was in my 20s when I had the opportunity to study theology at a depth that went far beyond what I had been exposed to growing up in church. The genuine but young faith began to enter contexts where questions and doubts were welcomed (maybe even fostered) as I came into communities that wrestled with our ideas of God and were willing to encounter God in the questions.
One of the reasons I feel like I came through the journey richer and deeper is that there were guides along the way assuring me that part of Christian maturity is questioning a more simplistic faith. Friends and professors told me that there are signs and signals in the life of faith reminding us that some things need to come undone and be redone closer to the centre of God’s love.
The fig tree Jesus speaks about in Luke 21 is an image of the dependability of the signs of God’s Kingdom, pointing us to the cycles of growth in spiritual life – seasons of questions and seasons of answers, seasons of doubt and seasons of faith – like fig leaves growing in spring and falling in autumn. If we don’t understand these signs, and if we can’t recognize the need for these different seasons of faith, then our journey of coming undone can be burdened by the unrealistic demands we place on ourselves and the church. What could be a moment of growth toward maturity instead becomes harmful.
For example, I have unravelled the Christmas card version of the birth of Christ, with Mary and Joseph alone with baby Jesus in a stable full of animals. It didn’t take long for this picture, maybe intended to signal the humble beginnings of the King of Kings, to be challenged as I read the gospel accounts more deeply, and began learning more about 1st-century hospitality and family practices. But because of many faithful guides, losing that picture didn’t mean losing faith, and I was able to rebuild a more hopeful narrative to replace the Christmas card tableau. What I envision now at Christmas is a community that gathered around Mary and Joseph to welcome Jesus into the world, whether they knew this baby was Messiah or not. They were not alone against the world, love would have surrounded the humble and ordinary start to God’s human life at Christmas, just like any other child in that community.
So as my faith continues to be undone and redone, laced with God’s love, I am comforted by the presence of God who is known for lovingkindness that is as old as time described in Psalm 25:6. Through the ages we have been on this journey longing for love and community as we ask hard questions along the way.
Thank you for joining us on the journey of Advent Undone. I’m eager to share these reflections with you.
Thank you for reading the New Leaf Advent Reader, a collection of reflections from writers across Canada. If you are enjoying the reader, sign up to receive the readings in your inbox each day here: SIGN UP
And please share this reflection with your friends and family who might also enjoy it.
