There is another season that we can choose to enter into that comes between Thanksgiving and Christmas: the season of Advent. The word Advent means coming or arrival. And in modern times Christians typically focus the coming weeks of Advent on remembering and celebrating the anticipated coming of Christ as a baby in a manger, the long awaited savior born in Bethlehem. However, Advent was also a term that originally described waiting not just for the coming of Christ’s birth, but also describing our waiting for the coming of Christ’s final return. And we don’t want to miss that aspect of our waiting. That even now, with the hope we have of Christmas, we still await a final and better hope. We await our eternal home which we have been promised where there is no more fear, anxiety, sorrow, pain and exhaustion. We are calling our Advent series this year “Missing Home.” Because this is a time that we often long for home if we are away, but also because it’s easy among all the holiday clatter to miss what this season has to tell us about our true home. The heavenly home we are waiting for made possible by Christ’s birth, life, death and resurrection over 2000 years ago. This morning as the first Sunday of Advent we are going to take the morning to look ahead to the hope and the home we are still waiting for in Christ’s return before looking back in the weeks to come to the hope that has already come in the manger.
