Advent Pastoral LEtter

 Advent candles burning bright
Gods love shown in flickering light
Love and Joy and Peace and Hope
It’s with God’s help that we can cope
Advent candles glowing fair
Driving out fear and despair

When the nights grow long and cold
Gods promise calls us to be bold
A promised child, with us to dwell
Jesus, our Emmanuel
See the candles glowing there
Shining Gods love everywhere.
(Untitled poem ©November 2006 Rev. Gord Waldie, Atikokan ON)

November 25, 2024

Friends in Christ,
Grace, Peace and Advent Blessings to all of you!

All of a sudden another year has gone by and we are starting Advent again. Once again we enter the time of lighting candles and looking for Hope Peace Joy and Love in the world around us. Once again we sing the carols and tell the stories. Once again we await God breaking into the world in the form of a helpless infant. What will the Advent journey bring us this year? How might God surprise us in this time of waiting and preparing?

I don’t know. God tends to reveal them-self in ways we don’t expect after all. But some things I do know.

I know that we at St. Paul’s will continue to open the door (or maybe a window) to let God come in. I know that we will continue to welcome all God’s Beloved Children to join us in worship, either in person or via YouTube, as we light candles, explore the Advent themes, and remind ourselves that Jesus is coming. I know that the CGIT and Explorers once again invite us to join them for the Vespers service at 7:30 on December 1^st as a way to launch us into the Christmas Season. I know that on Christmas Eve many of us will gather in the sanctuary at 8:00 for a time of singing and storytelling as we celebrate the birth of the Word-Made-Flesh and hear again the words of the angel “for to you is born this night...a Saviour who is Christ the Lord”. These things I know. I just don’t know what God will do or reveal as we do all these things.

Like any community, we have traditions at St. Paul’s. One of our traditions is to highlight our Local Outreach Program during the Advent season. In the past this has meant collecting items to pass on to our partners. More recently we have made cash gifts to them. This year our Local Outreach fund has been a bit depleted which limited our options. We realized we could not support as many agencies as we had in the past. One of our long-time partners has been the Elders Caring Shelter and as they are an agency that tends to have less public support we decided that we would make a special appeal for funds to share with them. The other goal is to replenish the Local Outreach Fund so we can continue to provide grocery vouchers to our neighbours throughout the year. St. Paul’s has consistently showed itself as a very generous community and I thank you for that.

For many of us the Christmas season is a time of great joy and anticipation. For others it is a time of sadness and uncertainty. There are members of our community who feel quite strongly the absence of a beloved family member or close friend. There are some of our neighbours who will be stressed about the costs of trying to have a joyful season. Amidst the bright lights and the bouncy songs there is ‘blueness’. We need to make space for that. One way we do that is through our memory tree, where folk are invited to put a name or names on an ornament and add it to our tree. At the same time I encourage all of us, in our Advent and Christmas prayers to name the ‘blueness’ and uncertainty of the season and lift it up before God. Jesus comes into the world to meet us where we are and bring the assurance that God is with us in the bright lights and shadows, the loud joy and the quiet sorrow.

Each of my planned sermon titles for the four Sundays of Advent this year start with “Jesus Is Coming”. To me this is not only about preparing for a birth. Advent is a time to get ready for Christmas but it is also a time to make room for the Risen Christ who breaks into the world, and our lives, on a regular basis. Jesus comes into our lives, into the world, meets us where we are and invites us to be transformed. Jesus is coming to invite us to follow him into a whole new world. Jesus is coming to help us see the world through a different set of lenses. This Christmas season as we make room for Jesus to come into the world, into our lives, again may we keep our eyes open for Hope in a chaotic world, may we relax into Joy, may we allow ourselves to be refined for Peace, and may we sing of Justice and dance the steps of Love.

Have a Blessed Advent and Christmas season friends. May God surprise you with Hope, Peace, Joy and Love
Gord