Advent and Christmas

This Advent season at St. Luke's, we invite you to experience the wonder of Christmas in ways that will touch your heart and transform your faith.

I can hear Andy Williams’ voice singing already: “It’s the most wonderful time… of the year!” Indeed it is.  Advent feels to me like a central quiet kernel of God’s sacred presence encased in layers and layers of joy and hope and generosity.  There are celebrations and gift exchanges, prodigious amounts of sweets and extravagant beauty all about.  There are familiar sentimental songs and hymns that draw out our longing and our praise.  There is the music of laughter among friends, and the harmonic strains of orchestras and church choirs.  There is a twinkle of anticipation in the eyes of children, and the smell of good things cooking in the kitchen.  Through the season, we journey through all of that celebration, working our way deeper and deeper, experiencing fully each layer on our way down to the very center.  Finally, underneath all of this commotion, we discover the quiet but lovely purity of an infant, the incarnation of the love of God, born in a barn in a tiny town in a tiny nation, laid in a cradle made out of a stone feeding trough.  It is that quiet truth at the climax of the season that gives meaning to all the rest of it, and makes us sing with the shepherds “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace!”  
Tom Pace