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Blue Ocean Advent 2020 Meditation | Introduction
2020 Blue Ocean Church Advent Meditation Podcast
Each podcast lasts approximately 8–10 minutes, and the format goes like this:
A brief word about Advent for those of you for whom it might be new:
The word advent means waiting—it’s a four-week season when we practice waiting on the presence of God to show up, symbolized in the celebration of the birth of Jesus on Christmas Day.
In the Julian calendar (which was a later version of the Roman calendar), Dec. 24 or 25 was winter solstice. In the northern hemisphere daylight diminishes between summer solstice and winter solstice and then increases again starting at the end of December. The Romans celebrated the day when sunlight started its renewed expansion, Dec. 25, as the birth of the Sun god.
And so it seems that Christians in the third century adopted the birthday of the Sun god as the birthday of the Son of God. The idea being that, after increasing darkness, there appeared a great light. When we celebrate Advent we practice waiting in the darkness for the Light of the World to appear.
I want to note that darkness has several meanings in Scripture. In the modern Western world, the metaphor of dark and light historically has racist tinges—as if dark implies nefariousness and light implies goodness. But in Scripture, which predates our modern associations, darkness far more often simply means “things which are hidden and unseen”; it can mean evil; and it can also mean something like “powerfully holy.” A few of the most profound moments in the Bible depict God surrounded by darkness or by dark clouds.
During this 2020 Advent we meditate on the stories of how animals wait and survive in the dark and learn from them what it means to wait on God—and on hope—when things seem hidden from us.
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By Blue Ocean Church Ann Arbor
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2020 Blue Ocean Church Advent Meditation Podcast
Each podcast lasts approximately 8–10 minutes, and the format goes like this:
A brief word about Advent for those of you for whom it might be new:
The word advent means waiting—it’s a four-week season when we practice waiting on the presence of God to show up, symbolized in the celebration of the birth of Jesus on Christmas Day.
In the Julian calendar (which was a later version of the Roman calendar), Dec. 24 or 25 was winter solstice. In the northern hemisphere daylight diminishes between summer solstice and winter solstice and then increases again starting at the end of December. The Romans celebrated the day when sunlight started its renewed expansion, Dec. 25, as the birth of the Sun god.
And so it seems that Christians in the third century adopted the birthday of the Sun god as the birthday of the Son of God. The idea being that, after increasing darkness, there appeared a great light. When we celebrate Advent we practice waiting in the darkness for the Light of the World to appear.
I want to note that darkness has several meanings in Scripture. In the modern Western world, the metaphor of dark and light historically has racist tinges—as if dark implies nefariousness and light implies goodness. But in Scripture, which predates our modern associations, darkness far more often simply means “things which are hidden and unseen”; it can mean evil; and it can also mean something like “powerfully holy.” A few of the most profound moments in the Bible depict God surrounded by darkness or by dark clouds.
During this 2020 Advent we meditate on the stories of how animals wait and survive in the dark and learn from them what it means to wait on God—and on hope—when things seem hidden from us.