Reading: Colossians 3:16-17 (NRSV)
Song: What Sweeter Music (lyrics here)
Reflection
I have a confession to make: when I was a pastor, I often caused great frustration for members of the church during Advent. Not because I wanted to. It wasn’t purposeful. Well…it was purposeful, but for a different reason than making people angry:
I refused to plan a lot of Christmas carols for worship services in Advent.
I didn’t want the congregation to “fast forward” to Christmas morn and miss the season of waiting and anticipation, so I would avoid the popular Christmas carols that speak directly to Christ’s birth in the Sundays leading up to Christmas Eve. In my mind, they were only appropriate for that evening service as we transitioned from Advent to Christmastide.
And it did not go over well. Looking back, I may have been a little over-the-top about it, like this offering from Episcopalian priest and cartoonist The Rev. Jay Sidebotham:
Don’t get me wrong—I still believe in marking Advent as a season of waiting, but these days I’m less obsessive about being the Advent Police.
What made the change? Simply this—an honest comment from a member of our church, who told me one Sunday after church, “Jack, these are some of the most beautiful, most theologically rich hymns ever written. And it’s a shame that we don’t get to enjoy them more as part of our preparation for Christmas.”
She was right. The hymnody of the incarnation is some of the most moving, most thoughtful, and most worshipful ever written. And here I was, holding all of it back for a single service, one that many people in our congregation missed because they were out of town celebrating with family. As a result, they never had the opportunity to sing these beloved carols with their church family.
From that day on I sought to make a compromise, and that compromise taught me something. It taught me that we should be careful about sacrificing meaningful opportunities to celebrate and encounter God on the altar of our own theological preference. We have so many wonderful songs and carols out there which speak to the meaning of this season, and if we hold back on all of them for the sake of “Advent purity,” we miss an opportunity to worship, both individually and corporately.
There are still some carols I don’t use in worship until Christmas Eve—”Joy to the World” and “Silent Night” being two of them. But in the years since my “carol conversion,” I have found there are many, many others that help me wait, because they remind me what the anticipation is all about.
What sweeter music can we bring
Than a carol, for to sing
The birth of this our heavenly King?
Are there carols or songs for you that are “off limits” until Christmas is at hand? How do you balance the spiritual posture of waiting and celebration in your own life? How might you make Advent an intentional time of anticipation while also engaging the glorious truths of which the carols speak?