Monthly Minute with Pastor Andrew

Hello to all the Monthly Minute readers of West Hempfield Presbyterian Church!

This year the season of Advent (4 Sundays before Christmas) begins on December 1 — perfectly aligning with all of the commercial Advent Calendars that have 24 boxes to open!

“Advent” means “coming.” In Advent we count down the days and we prepare for the coming of the Messiah on Christmas Day. Advent is a season of waiting for the One who is to come.

But we are not very good at waiting, are we?

Waiting is something that we don’t do much anymore. We can get anything and everything right away. If we order something online and it takes more than two days to arrive at our door, someone is calling customer service to complain!

“Christmas” starts earlier and earlier each year. Halloween is barely over before candy canes and Christmas trees start appearing in stores that are playing Christmas music over their speakers.

I like to tease my family that we can only do one holiday at a time, so no Christmas stuff in our home until after Thanksgiving. But even that would seem too early to our Christian brothers and sisters from years ago.

The tradition used to be that you didn’t sing Christmas songs until Christmas day, and the “12 days of Christmas” were December 25 through January 5 (the day before Epiphany). Now, usually by the second day of Christmas (December 26), we’ve been doing Christmas stuff for so long, we are ready to pack it all away and be done with it.

Does it really matter if we sing the songs before Christmas day or after? Why should we wait anyway?

We will mention in a December sermon that an internal motto used by Facebook until 2014, as coined by Mark Zuckerberg, was “Move fast and break things.”

But God shows us a different way:

“Our Lord’s patience means salvation”

2 Peter 3:15

God’s way is patience and salvation. God teaches us to move slowly and fix things.

Learning to wait and to be patient is an important discipline.

Hopefully, singing the songs before Christmas is ok, since we will be singing Christmas songs all throughout the month of December, but we will also be learning to move slowly and fix things.

Happy Advent!    Merry Christmas!

Blessings,   Rev. Andrew Wirt