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The Advent Conspiracy: An Interview with Josh Butler

In this interview, Josh Butler describes his work with the Advent Conspiracy, an organization that challenges popular consumerist responses to Christmas and seeks to recapture that sense that there is...

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Waiting with Mary: A Meditation on Luke 1:26–38, 47–55

Advent is a season of waiting, of being drawn into the spiritual discipline of anticipation. Our spiritual director is Mary, the mother of Jesus, the one in whom we see revealed the patience of God....

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A Peculiar Memory

For author Greg Moore, the season of Advent is rooted in a divine memory.

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Pardon the Interruption: A Meditation on Luke 1:26-36

In this Advent sermon, Dan Rhodes engages the deeply disturbing and yet hopeful interruption of the angel Gabriel to Mary, when he announces that she will bear the Christ-child.

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The Introduction: A Meditation on Matthew 3:1–12

In this Meditation on Matthew 3:1–12, Will Willimon reminds us that we are not right, that our worlds are out of kilter, and that Jesus presents us with the most difficult, demanding bad news that ever...

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Do Not be Afraid: A Meditation on Matthew 1:18–25

In this meditation on Joseph's discovery of Mary's pregnancy, Melissa Skelton urges us to embrace the voice of God speaking in the depths of our souls, and to not be afraid.

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Advent and Teddy

Chris Hoke learns something about receiving the Messiah from towering and tattooed Teddy, a former gang member in Skagit Valley, Washington.

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Removing the “Holy” from “the Holidays”

When we ground our spirituality in the church’s liturgical calendar, says Hunt Priest, we experience ancient patterns of preparation, encounter and celebration that can make us more fully aware of...

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What Are You Waiting For? A Meditation on Isaiah 61:1–4, 8-11, Luke 1:53, and...

God’s longings for us always seem connected to a bigger picture that includes others.

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On The (Gritty) Birth of Christ

This essay argues against sentimentalized images of the nativity for a more realistic rendering of the birth of Jesus.

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On the Possibility of Death in Advent

In death, we enter into the tomb on Friday with Jesus, and like the disciples on Saturday, all we can do is to wait in the darkness, hoping for the miracle we were promised on Sunday.

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Waiting with Mary: A Meditation on Luke 1:26–38, 47–55

This essay is adapted from one published in J. Alexander Sider and Isaac S. Villegas, Presence: Giving and Receiving God (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2011), 22–27. Used by permission of Wipf and Stock...

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A Peculiar Memory

Bertrand Russell, that great humanist of the past century, was fascinated with human memory. Our capacity to have events and feelings and notions seared in our minds in ways that we could recollect in...

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Pardon the Interruption: A Meditation on Luke 1:26-36

Inevitably, it always occurs at the most inconvenient time. You know what I mean. After a long, exhausting day at work, you sit down with a warm cup of tea to catch up on Gossip Girl, and that’s when...

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The Introduction: A Meditation on Matthew 3:1–12

If you are old enough to remember Johnny Carson, you’ll remember that the late-night host’s show opened with an invariable liturgy: it always began with the announcement, “Welcome to the Tonight Show...

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Do Not be Afraid: A Meditation on Matthew 1:18–25

“Tell me the story of when I was born.” This is a request that my adult son Evan invariably makes of me whenever we get together: “Tell me the story of when I was born,” he always says. And so I go...

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Advent and Teddy

After dinner I get a call from one of the homies: towering and tattooed Teddy. While working as a jail chaplain with Tierra Nueva in Washington State’s Skagit Valley, I found myself being adopted as...

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Removing the “Holy” from “the Holidays”

Christians have not always celebrated the Christmas holiday in this way—with canned music and decorations that begin long before the Thanksgiving turkey is stuffed and that end when the tree gets...

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What Are You Waiting For? A Meditation on Isaiah 61:1–4, 8-11, Luke 1:53, and...

All the time John the Baptist spent waiting and preparing in the wilderness was in order to steep his identity in God.1 Even before John’s conception, God had already claimed his life; John’s primary...

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On The (Gritty) Birth of Christ

The birth of my son was a frighteningly joyous affair—and a long time coming. Like most parents-to-be, the nine months prior to his birth were full of exhaustion and elation, hope and fear, and more...

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