Mark and Rex discuss the importance and beauty of the Advent season as well as the significance of the structure of the Church year. This episode is a wonderful way to thoughtfully begin the Holiday season and and excellent frame for the coming year.

TRANSCRIPT

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Hey everyone. Welcome to Jessup Think. I'm your host Mark Moore

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and your co-host Rex gurney.

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Rex today on the show, we're going to talk about the Advent seasons one of my favorite seasons of the year. And we really just want to help people understand what admin is, and what maybe the church the greater church calendar is, and how we can help our spiritual life.

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I think you'll enjoy this conversation.

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Well, Rex, we're actually into one of my favorite seasons of the year, or a couple days into Advent. And we'll just wanted to kind of take maybe the show to talk about what is Advent? For one because many people who grew up in the kind of Evangelical community maybe not have celebrated Advent or I think recently, I feel like more and more, there's been a change that's been happening, but when I was a kid we never heard about and not not Advent, not Lent, not anything, right. And so that I think it'll Yeah, it'll it'll flow the conversation from Advent into a greater kind of church year church calendar, because that's something that is kind of missing from least in a formal sense from the evangelical community. But I think something that in my own life has become really important and kind of creates a really important rhythm. For the year I know, yourself to the church year has kind of created a rhythm that maybe we didn't have growing up, right. It's been something good to kind of ground, our Christian life on our spiritual life on and something to shape the year. But yeah, just love to talk about Advent. What is Advent? And maybe we can just start there.

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Well, since the Christian year actually starts with advent. Yeah, we're actually like, this is sort of our New Year's podcast. That's right. Let's go our students sometimes. It's a trick question. But there's a point behind the trick questions, the teaching moment. I'm trying right now it looks like so windows, did you know that there's actually a church calendar, and then historically, churches have celebrated something called the Christian year? So when does that start? So students will say, January the first, right, yeah, no, actually, we're, you know, depending on when I asked the question, we're already deep into it. And so, you know, it's a teaching moment. And I found that many of our students even still, you think that in 2021, that, you know, the word would have gotten out, but many of the folks I talked to still have never heard of the Christian year, right. And are skittish about Advent. And so yes, yeah, yeah. It's

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really interesting. I can even joke a community, some of some of these more liturgical, more formal views of the church here of Advent are still kind of approached, we're talking about the more but they're approached with a little bit of skepticism. Now, Advent. So you're saying Advent starts the church here. It always begins on Advent. Advent is always four Sundays out from Christmas,

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right? So it's sort of movable, it's not the same. Same date, not same date, sudden, every time, not the same

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day. And so you just gotta go for Sunday's out. And that's the first Sunday of Advent. You have four Sundays. And then if Christmas Eve happens on a Sunday, then that that Sunday is the last Sunday of Advent. So it's kind of like a combo there.

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And then if Christmas itself happens on a Sunday, you cancel churches, and

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that is how God intended allocate one. Okay, even, you know, this year is kind of interesting, because Christmas is on a Saturday. So Sunday is the 26th. And it's like, okay, well, we just had service on Christmas Eve,

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from heaven forbid, we had to, like, co