Gilead holds a moonshine mass (thanks, Jennifer!) to mark “Christian new year” as often as the weather and global pandemics allow. And every year, we try to tell new student pastors what, even, “Christian new year” is. It’s made up, we say (although the liturgical calendar is real. Sort of). It’s witchy, we say. It’s about letting go of what needs letting go of. It’s a chance to get together and drink moonshine and/or gather around a fire. (Just kidding! We wouldn’t make a fire in public! Dangerous! Illegal! [probably])
A few years ago, pastor Rebecca Anderson wrote an essay about “Christian New Year” for the Paper Machete and we think it explains pretty much everything. (It doesn’t.) Here you go.
Happy New Year, mxtherfxckers!
Get out your Advent calendars! Get ready to light up those Advent wreaths! Out with the old, in with the new!
As you know, and are all tracking, today is the last day of the liturgical calendar. The liturgical calendar is that Christian calendar that marks the annual seasons and cycles of church life and holidays. Tomorrow is the first day of the new year. Not because it’s December 1 but because it’s the first Sunday of Advent, which is always the first day of Advent. Let’s not get into the specifics. What you need to know is that at midnight tonight, the liturgical calendar turns over to the beginning of a new year, the beginning of a new advent, the four weeks leading up to Christmas.
Maybe when you were a kid, like me, you had an Advent calendar. Every day in December, you open 1 of 25 partially perforated windows on a scene of 19th Century small town Christmas. Behind them, there was a bible verse, or, like, a cute mouse peeking out.
Maybe you had a wreath with four candles on it, one that got lit each Sunday of Advent. As a preacher’s kid, I had both the calendar (Bible verse variety), and the wreath.
Now for most of us, it means either…nothing…or that you buy chocolate Advent calendars, or whiskey Advent calendars. And to you I say: Namaste.
At midnight tonight, when the calendar flips back to the beginning, to Advent, what we’re changing from is Ordinary Time. Ordinary time is a long green stretch on the liturgical calendar, of regular days, uninterrupted by feasts, like Easter, or fasts, like Lent. A long continuous string of normal days, unbroken by celebration or lament. Unbroken, anyway, by communal celebration or lament. There’s always plenty of the personal kind.
* * *
Couple of things about me, so you can relax:
1) I’m really a pastor. Like, regular ordained, not online. I worked really hard and took out a lot of loans, and yes I’ve heard of the universal life church and know I could’ve “just done it online.” I’m glad you officiated your sister’s wedding.
2) I don’t care if you’re a Christian. I don’t want to convert you.
3) If someone Christian was shitty or did some kinda violence to you, I’m genuinely sorry.
Little more background:
I don’t care about the war on Christmas, mostly because it’s not real.
I don’t care when people start listening to Christmas music because life is hard and if that shit cheers you up, go for it!
I don’t care if you hate Christmas music. I also don’t really want to hear about it.
I don’t actually care about the liturgical calendar.
And maybe that seems obvious to you. Like: who does care about the liturgical calendar? But as someone who spends a LOT of time with other clergy, let me tell you: a whole lot of people care a whole lot about the liturgical calendar. On their FB pages or over Styrofoam cups of bad coffee with non-dairy creamer, they’ll tell you exactly why the calendar is so important. They’ll tell you why you shouldn’t sing Christmas carols until Christmas day, and then why you should sing them through Epiphany, when everyone’s already sick of Christmas. They’ll tell you that Advent is a period of waiting, and expectation, and hoping, and preparation for Christmas and how it’s completely RUINED if you sing Joy to the World too soon. They’ll tell you how it pushes back against the consumerism of Christmas in the US. And, ok, I do care about the consumerism thing.
A few weeks ago, I was sitting with some clergy who got super worked up over a plan to reclaim an old tradition of Advent, when Advent lasted 6 weeks instead of a measly 4. There were excited follow-up emails about the opportunity to reconnect with our roots. But, I was like, um, guys, Advent hasn’t been 6 weeks long since the end of the sixth century. That ship has sailed.
Advent had only started in maybe 4th century, or at least by then. Like everything else in the calendar, it started locally, based on what people were already doing, and cared about. It was the churches in Spain and Milan who first got excited about it. In France, the full six-wk Advent was adopted by the end of the 5th century at the Council of Mâcon. Advent wasn’t a cozy time of decorations and candle lighting. It was a fast. A whole second Lent. Some people think, in fact, that like Lent, it was a fast to get people through a lean time with dignity.
Here’s the thing: by some measures, Christianity has been on a long, downward trajectory ever since the Roman government got involved. Like, the last time it was really a persecuted grass roots movement was before the year 312, when emperor Constantine converted, mostly because of his mother, Helena. Before 312, everyone knew that Christianity was for losers. Not losers like they are now, powerful, asshole losers, but regular, powerless losers, the kind of losers anyone would recognize as losers. Vulnerable losers, hunted down and killed for sport.
By the time the liturgical calendar started to come together though, by the mid-300s, Christianity was already in the hands of the powerful, and the Christian calendar was part of a plan for revitalizing the city of Jerusalem by attracting more tourists, in the form of pilgrims, encouraging them to celebrate religious holidays by visiting certain “holy” spots and spending their tourist Roman currency there.
Advent, like everything else in the calendar, is made up. Or, at the very least, totally arbitrary. Based on what people needed, and what some city-planner-cum-theologian wanted for Jerusalem’s budget, fiscal year 350 A.C.E.
What’s not made up — and I can feel you, steeling yourself for me to make some truth claims, but don’t worry! — what’s not made up is that life happens in cycles, our lives, and every year: full of feast and fast, celebrations and lament, and many, many, totally ordinary days. So much ordinary time.
* * *
If Advent, like everything else, is made up, and we get to take what we want and shake off the rest like so many extra weeks of fasting — looking at you, Pope Gregory the Great — then here’s what I want from Advent.
I want the scary shit. The readings that the liturgy queens want us to stick to before we get to the cozy ones about the baby. The ones about John the Baptist hissing at religious leaders that they are a brood of vipers, gathered there praying around the president — or wherever. Just an example. I want the madman in the wilderness screaming that the ax is at the root of the tree ready to take down, to take out, what claims to be good but is evil. Laws that claim to protect life but strip people of dignity and choice and bodily autonomy. I want the signs that something new and beautiful is about to happen just when it feels the most unlikely and necessary: deserts in bloom, the rich sent away hungry. I want consumerism fucking gouged, not scaled back, not toned down. I want it burned down – in love.
I want not just the vulnerable, not just us losers, to notice that ordinary time is coming to a close. That we’re just about done with that.
But that’s me. I guess I do care about some of the liturgical calendar stuff.
* * *
So let’s practice for tonight. As the old, liturgical year passes away at midnight, as you hang up your Advent calendars, and put on your ugly Council of Mâcon sweaters, and get ready to light that first Advent candle on the wreath, remember: there are signs that this shit is about to burn down. That it needs burning down. There are signs that the old ways are coming to an end and it’s time, again, to overthrow the powerful and protect the vulnerable. It’s time for those who’ve wielded religion and fear of all kinds as weapons to have their swords beaten into plowshares, to make sure that no one has to fast to make ends meet. Out with the old, in with the new.
[10, 9, 8…]
Happy new year. Ordinary time is over.