Advent Reflections

Prayers and Reflections for Advent

The Season of Advent

Throughout this period of Advent – contrary to what the media would have us believe! – we prepare not just for Christmas festivities, gifts and good food, but for the coming of our Lord. ‘Advent’ means coming, and in fact we prepare for three comings:

The coming of Jesus, Emmanuel; God made man, born weak and vulnerable in Bethlehem: the First Coming.
The coming in glory of Jesus at the End of Time: the Second Coming.
The coming of Jesus into our own hearts – where, with Mary, we welcome him and say YES to him.

We ourselves live in the period of history between the First and Second Coming. During Advent, we reflect on this. We watch and wait in hope, as we try to prepare a way for the Lord, and long for his coming to dispel our darkness. Advent is also a time when we try to prepare ourselves personally for the Lord’s coming, as we look at our own lives and repent of the times when we have not let his light shine through us.

With a great feeling of expectancy and joy we can cry out in Aramaic, the language Jesus himself used: ‘Maranatha: Come, our Lord!’

Prayers for Advent

The Advent story of hope and mystery, anticipation, preparation, a kingdom of this world and the next, and a king appearing when we least expect.

Heaven touching earth, the footsteps of the divine walking dusty roads as once they did in Eden, and a people, searching for a Saviour, and walking past the stable.

Open eyes and hearts, that this might be an Advent of hope to the world.

©John Birch

Strange how one word will so hollow you out.

But this word has been in the wilderness for months. Years.

This word is what remained after everything else was worn away by sand and stone.

It is what withstood the glaring of sun by day,

the weeping loneliness of the moon at night.

Now it comes to you racing out of the wild, eyes blazing and waving its arms,

its voice ragged with desert but piercing and loud as it speaks itself again and again:

Prepare, prepare.

It may feel like the word is levelling you,

emptying you as it asks you to give up what you have known.

It is impolite and hardly tame,

but when it falls upon your lips you will wonder at the sweetness,

like honey that finds its way into the hunger you had not known was there.