Powerful read on the need for (and absence of) hope this Advent for immigrant Christians.

It is September 13th. I am already buying myself a tea advent calendar and hating myself for it. I am thinking about how much more offensive capitalist Christmas should be to Christians than secular Christmas.

One of the most famous photographs in the world is the Blue Marble, a picture of Earth taken from Apollo 17 as it made its way to the Moon.

I learned something interesting about the photo today, though: Apparently (see here, among other sources, though I wish I could find a NASA comment on this), the photo was originally taken with the South Pole facing the top of the photo—and with the Earth not exactly centered. Frequently, though, it’s displayed with a vertical flip and some cropping so that it matches our expectations of what the Earth looks like.

I… didn’t mean to wait until the day before the Inauguration to post the text of my sermon on hope in the face of despair. The weekend I gave the sermon was also the weekend of a funeral and near a very busy end of semester, so blogging was on the backburner. Even if I had had more time, my website-to-social media setup was a bit borked and I’m just vain enough to not post things if I think my audience is going to be diminished. I finally had some time yesterday to figure out what was going on and fix it, so now I’m trying to get back into regular posting.

I’m bookmarking this so I can sit with it and return to it. It is powerful, searing, and condemning.

I’ve been scheduled for a while to preach on hope during Advent. It was always going to be about hope in the face of bleakness, but I can see the tone changing a bit now anyway.

I am not great at observing the different seasons of the liturgical year. A good friend of mine once responded to this complaint with “Welcome to living a liturgical year life,” so I gather that to a certain extent, this is how everyone feels about it. It always feels a little frustrating to me, though, because I love the idea of the liturgical year.

I attended a spiritual retreat sponsored by my congregation last Saturday, and one of the activities we did was to string together some painted wooden beads representing the different liturgical seasons as we read about what each of those different seasons represents. I love the sense of “waiting for something great to happen” of Advent. I love the bursting forth of the spirit associated with Pentecost. I even appreciate the invitation of Ordinary Time to make the everyday sacred in its own way. I’m just bad at making those areas of focus when those seasons roll around (maybe the prayer beads I have up in my office now will help).

As I’ve written before, I’m skeptical when Christians see the Middle East uniquely through the particularities of our beliefs and tradition—there’s so many ways that can (and does) go wrong. Yet, if we’re going to sing and preach about Bethlehem this year, we ought to use modern Bethlehem to get us thinking about a better world for the West Bank, Israel, and Gaza.

Kiddo’s awesome “advent calendar of magic” is prominently advertised as a STEM toy, and that’s been bugging me. Not because it isn’t true, but because things don’t need to be STEM to be valuable.

Love this article. This year, I’ve been craving Advent since Halloween ended, and I’ve seen a justice and peace element to Advent since I first started celebrating it, so there’s a lot for me here.

I did not read this book as one is supposed to. It’s a collection of daily Advent and Christmas reflections, but I listened to the audiobook well before Advent started and with no pauses in between individual reflections. I’m sure that takes away from the experience, but I enjoyed what I heard and plan to read more Bonhoeffer.

I know it’s not Advent yet, but I’m feeling impatient for Advent, and if I start checking out Advent books from Libby/the library now, I won’t have to compete with people for them in a month when Advent really starts.

A member of my Community of Christ congregation recently asked if I would lead the Disciples’ Generous Response portion of tomorrow’s worship service (where donations and tithes are collected). I’ve done this for previous services, but more than any other way I’ve contributed to a Community of Christ service, this is the one that takes the most practice. In Latter-day Saint services, there’s never this kind of collection, and this was honestly one of the hardest things to get used to as I began regularly attending Community of Christ services. That said, much of this is due to the intense pressure for Latter-day Saints to tithe; even if Community of Christ services always include an invitation to donate, there’s none of the same pressure that there is in Latter-day Saint circles, so I’ve come to see this as an acceptable tradeoff.

Skipping my congregation’s candelight service today. Can’t go in person because of family sickness, and they’ve made it clear that they aren’t going to make huge efforts to make it Zoom accessible. Bummed to miss it, but playing Mario Party with kiddo instead is pretty fun.

I was really hoping to make something special of Advent this year, but the past three weeks have just kind of sucked, and I don’t know if the next one will be any better. I don’t know that I have a takeaway from this, except that maybe it’s okay to have a sucky Advent.

Bien content d’avoir découvert le Calendrier de l’Avent de noelenbd.fr (même si je suis deçu d’avoir raté les premiers jours). Encore plus content qu’Izneo ne défend pas aux non-Français de profiter de l’offre.

In recent years, my faith has become less literal, my marriage has become mixed-faith, and we’ve both committed to letting kiddo choose her own future as she gets older. This has meant revisiting family ritual and tradition for end of year holidays, but it’s kind of fun!

Over the past few days, I’ve been relistening to the One Shot podcast’s October 2018 Kids on Bikes episodes (which starts here). There’s so much to love about this six-episode series. I remembered enjoying the characters and the players, but it wasn’t until this morning that I remembered the perfect moment where one player describes the biblical Jacob as “history’s best angel fighter” and summons him to help a science teacher fight off a terrifying seraphim (which I promise makes sense in context).

I’ve never had qualms about listening to Christmas music outside of December, but it still surprises me that I’ve been listening to parts of Handel’s Messiah during my morning routines over the past couple of weeks. I’ve never been the biggest fan of the music of Messiah, and in recent years, I’ve let go of my attachment to King James language and learned that a lot of the passages quoted in Messiah represent Christian prooftexting of the Hebrew Bible (here’s a great post on the subject by Pete Enns—and here’s another). In theory, this ought to sour me on Messiah even more, but I’ve spent a big chunk of this morning listening to this performance of excerpts—and really enjoying it!