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After the Longest Night (album & songbook)

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Steve Thorngate Reviewed by Luke Hyder After the Longest Night (album & songbook) by Steve Thorngate Advent can be a season of awkward juxtapositions. We begin a new church year just as the calendar year is coming to a close. We celebrate the coming of the Light of the World just as the nights have become their darkest. We worship in longing and hopeful preparation for One who has already come, and yet who is still to come. Finding balance between the conflicting themes of Advent can be a difficult task, especially when planning worship services and choosing songs for our congregations to sing. Steve Thorngate, in his newly released project of songs for Advent, Christmas and Epiphany, “After the Longest Night,” has struck that balance beautifully, giving the church a collection of songs, hymns and canticles that can be sung throughout this season and across many types of churches. The album and accompanying digital songbook provide an attractive and accessible mix of original … [Read more...]

Tagged With: Advent

Advent devotions – Year C (2018)

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Are you looking for theologically sound, inspiring and affordable Advent devotions for the congregation? The Presbyterian Outlook is once again offering accessible and inspiring daily devotions for Advent. This year the focus is on deepening and practicing our faith vocabulary. How do Christians change the narrative from one of division to one of unity? How do disciples of Jesus Christ practice what our Lord preaches? Each week of Advent focuses on a characteristic of God that God’s followers are also called to exhibit: patience, kindness, goodness and faithfulness. As we prepare for our Savior's birth and Second Coming, we are called to do so with eagerness and while exhibiting the traits of the one for whom we wait. Download the PDF, print as many as you need and insert them into your weekly worship bulletin. Written by Outlook editor Jill Duffield, each week includes a reflection, daily Scripture readings, suggestions for living out the Bible and a short prayer for each day. … [Read more...]

Tagged With: Advent

Hymns for Advent and Christmas – Year C

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The Presbyterian Outlook commissioned Presbyterian hymn writer, Carolyn Winfrey Gillette to compose Advent hymns set to familiar Christmas tunes and other well-loved hymns. Your hymn purchase includes downloads of  a PDF of the lyrics scored with the music for a half-page regular sheet of paper, a second PDF of the lyrics scored with music for a half-page of legal-sized paper (large print) and a document with lyrics only. You have permission to print as many copies as needed for your use. Advent wreath hymn “The Candle of Hope”  is a new hymn that is not geared to the lectionary passages. This new hymn follows the themes of each of the Sundays in Advent: Hope, Peace, Joy and Love. If you light Advent candles as part of your worship during the season, then this hymn is ideal! The words are set to the familiar tune of “O Worship the King, All Glorious Above.” The Candle of Hope (preview of full hymn text) “The candle of hope we light in this hour, proclaims that the Lord is … [Read more...]

Tagged With: Advent • Christmas

Advent politics 

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They almost seem to come around together: Election Day and Advent. A secular moment and a sacred moment, moving in tandem, as always. In our congregations, pastors are reminded not to “bring politics into the pulpit.” No endorsing of candidates or parties, not even a discussion of the year’s critical issues. Leave that to the experts, some will say. Don’t make people uncomfortable, especially large donors. Then will come the four Sundays of Advent, and what will we hear? Politics, politics, politics. Issues of power and wealth, control and freedom, corruption and redemption. We will discover that Jesus devoted an estimated two-thirds of his teaching to wealth and power — the very topics that we want to avoid in Sunday worship. Advent 1: “Justice and righteousness,” said Jeremiah. “Distress among nations,” said Jesus, “fear and foreboding” among the people, “dissipation and drunkenness” springing a “trap.” Advent 2: Exile after defeat in battle, but now a glorious return to … [Read more...]

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Advent: The Once and Future Coming of Jesus Christ

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Fleming Rutledge Eerdmans, 426 pages Fleming Rutledge has gathered from her repertoire of (mostly) unpublished materials a number of sermons and writings to help others who preach to understand and grapple with the rich themes of Advent, often passed over lightly. Rutledge is not fussing about the way Christmas seems to have seized Advent and misshapen it so that it matches the secular holiday that begins before Halloween. She is concerned that the Advent themes are too central to the gospel to be easily surrendered in an annual rising tide of sentimentalism. Mainline Protestant churches, acutely uncomfortable with the apocalyptic, have tended to avert their eyes from it, leaving it to fundamentalists, who have seemed overly fond of literal interpretations that favor themes of punishment for a huge cast of characters that probably includes us. Only recently have some mainliners begun to appreciate that God’s project is not a matter of getting to heaven one at a time, but a far … [Read more...]

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Waiting as a spiritual practice

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I think it would be accurate to say that most of life is lived and experienced in the in-between. While it may be those non-in-between moments that keep us excited about life and motivated when we are not yet there yet, there is so often space between each high and low. When we were children, we were always waiting to be one year older, to have one more year of responsibility and one more year of freedom. Now we wait for tests results to come back. We wait to meet someone who gets us and wants to share life with us. We wait nine months (or eight, or a few more agonizing weeks) for babies. We wait for career changes, diagnoses, to see loved ones again, for family vacations, through illnesses, for new construction, for next stages in life and even to see those who have passed away again … someday in the future. In a fast-paced consumer-driven economy and society, it is no wonder that many of us are impatient and struggle with waiting. We have two-day shipping, fast food, email, social … [Read more...]

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