First Sunday of Advent. A new season of thoughtful waiting begins. We wait in the same way that concert goers, sports spectators, and travelers wait with joy! The longed for, highly anticipated, waited for, beginning has come. The conductor has waved the baton and the crowd has hushed, the ball has been tipped and the clock is running, and the train has pulled out of the depot. We waited for so long for the exciting trip, the big game, and the beautiful concert. Finally, the wait is over! It all has begun now, finally!

But now we wait to see how it will end. Who will win? What will the finale sound like? What will the destination really be like?

In the fulness of time God sent forth His Son to be born of a virgin. The wait was over! But the new wait had just begun! Each year many Christians formally hit refresh on our wait and remind ourselves that the game is in its final minutes, the concert is building toward a tremendous crescendo, and the destination is as certain as the departure because the long-awaited beginning actually came!

Jesus has come! The wait is over!

Jesus is coming! We wait!

We have suggested before that the chaos of our lives needs to be anchored by "the three r's" that reveal our true priorities: relationships, routines, and rituals. A recent article from the Wall Street Journal emphasized the point of ritual that Bob has been teaching at Redeemer.

Instead of struggling to be authentic, Confucius proposed another approach: “as if” rituals, that is, rituals meant to break us out of our own reality for a moment. These rituals are the very opposite of authenticity—and that’s what makes them work. We break from who we are when we note the unproductive patterns we’ve fallen into and actively work to shift them—“as if” we were different people in that moment.

When you hear your girlfriend at the door and make yourself go to greet her instead of sitting there absorbed in your iPhone, you are creating a break. When you make a point of ignoring your mother’s harping and solicit her guidance, you are recognizing that both of you are constantly shifting and changing and capable of bringing out other parts of each other. Instead of being stuck in the roles of nagging mother and put-upon child, you have behaved “as if” you were someone else. It turns out that being insincere, being untrue to ourselves, helps us to grow. (Source: http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-college-of-chinese-wisdom-1459520703)

If you are a Christian there are some very important dates in the calendar. We all know about Christmas and Easter, of course, but many people do not observe other days of the Christian calendar. The week before Easter is sometimes called Holy Week. We traditionally have a service on the Friday before Easter and that day is often called Good Friday, but the service is somber. Sometimes the Good Friday service is called Tenebrae Service because tenebrae means darkness. It recalls the fact that man tried to snuff out the Light of God by crucifying Jesus. We will have a Tenebrae Service this Good Friday on March 25 at 7:30. I hope you will join us!

On Easter Sunday the tone of remembrance will change from somber to celebratory! And we want to start as early as we can. For centuries Christians have met at "Sunrise Services" on Easter morning. We won't meet that early, but we will have a breakfast at 8:00 and a service at 9:00AM! Come join us!

The Christian Hymnal illustrates the “simple but substantive” of Christ that we are prayerfully asking for our church life. Hymns by Christians of all stripes, denominations, eschatological views, historic periods, and conflicting ideas of practical Christian living are wonderfully unanimous in content and yet remarkably substantive. It’s not finding commonality in the lowest common denominator. Quite the opposite; it’s finding unity in the highest common denominator.