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Text Box: From Pastor Jodi, HAPPY NEW YEAR! No, I’m not a month early with my new year wishes! I’m just thinking of the church year. In the church, our calendar is a bit different than our everyday calendar. The church year is not based on the Roman calendar, but rather on the life of Jesus and the Church. We start the church year with the season of Advent, which means coming. This is the season we again await God’s coming among us. While Christmas is always celebrated on December 25th, the starting date of Advent is movable. Advent begins four Sundays before December 25th. This year, Advent begins the weekend of November 29th and 30th. While in the rest of society, the Christmas season seems to begin with day after Thanksgiving sales (or even earlier), this is not the case in the church. We have a time of waiting, of hope, of expectation, of preparation. This is the season of Advent. For us, Advent falls in a time of year when the days are shorter, and dusks and dawns are filled with dark hues of blues and purples. But yet, these times are filled with hope and expectation. This hope and the color are communicated as the paraments (the cloths that decorate the sanctuary) are blue. We use a wreath with four candles, lighting one each Sunday, as we anticipate Christmas. From Sundays and Seasons, a worship resource: “In the days of Advent, the church welcomes the blues and purples of dusk and dawn as the Christian community gathers under an evergreen crown and prays for the coming of God’s gracious light in our time and place. Amid Advent’s blues and purples, we light our candles for the Messiah who has already come and dwells among us. And yet our lives and our world cry out for the fulfillment of the promise that God’s justice and peace will flourish in our midst.” We know that Christ has been born, has died, is risen, and will come again. This means that Advent cannot only be about preparing for a birth that has already taken place. But it can be about preparing for God’s presence among us, for working to fulfill God’s purposes and God’s vision of justice and peace in the world. It is much easier to begin celebrating Christmas in early December, to look back at what happened in a stable so many years ago, to replay beautiful traditions of Christmases gone by. And these are not bad things, but what about looking forward? What about preparing for God’s presence in our troubled world and working to make God’s peace and justice a reality? In this season of Advent, I invite you to anticipate and hope for God’s presence. I invite you to work to make God’s peace and justice a reality in our broken world. I invite you to worship and work with this faith