Advent Reflections

Another year is coming to a close, and what a year it has been! We have all experienced life in a new and challenging way, and have had to make many adjustments to accomplish day to day tasks -adjustments, which a year ago, would have looked unreal.

We have needed to be distant physically, and have had to interpret speech and facial expressions which are muffled by the needed life saving mask. In this milieu, one finds solace in tradition, the comfortable home where we know we find meaning and sustinence. At this time of the year we anticipate the valued tradition of the Advent Devotional, a publication which has provided insight and joy over the course of many years.

We still uphold the tradition, but present it in this new way, and it is the hope that this Advent project will carry you through the days of waiting for the birth of Jesus with song, sound, word, sight and inspiration.. When we share in this way, we draw closer to each other. There is no threat of disease or worry of boundaries. We can be together as a family in faith.

We celebrate and thank those in our church family who have shared their gifts to us all in a variety of creative ways. You are invited to experience these expressions as you travel in your own way, at your own speed, through this Advent Reflections offering of 2020.

So much of life is spent waiting.

• We wait at the intersection for the light to turn green
  
• We wait at the checkout line at the store
  
• We wait for the seeds we’ve planted to germinate and grow to produce their fruit or flower
  
• We wait for a pregnancy to run its course and deliver a healthy baby

My word for advent 2020 is hope. As I reflect on this year, it seems devoid of hope. My final year before I leave for college has blended into a blur of cancellations, “being flexible,” and making do. I’d be completely lying if I said I haven’t felt hopeless at main points this year. As we look to the Christmas season, it’s easy to think about all the things we’re missing, like Lucia fest, time with friends and family, and candlelight Christmas Eve services. It’s natural to feel like without these traditions, Advent and Christmas won’t be what they should.

Last month here in New Mexico, I did something I hadn’t done in years – I baptized a newborn baby. These many years as an administrative exec in the Covenant denomination have not allowed that blessed opportunity very often, which was so frequently mine as a local pastor years ago. But now I’m serving in transitional ministry back in a local church; so imagine my delight to be asked by members to officiate their daughter’s baptism! To make matters even better, this coming Sunday we are doing three baptisms by immersion in the church, two on new confession of faith. I feel like I have died and gone to heaven!

Baby Ruth was born back in June nearly eight weeks early, at a slight three pounds and thirteen ounces. Since then she has grown amazingly, to the point where she now seems to me on par with others her age, a lovely and dimple-smiley little one who charmed the worshipers the day of her baptism. During a visit several months back, her father showed me a photo I fell in love with; I asked for a copy thinking I might use it on my blog some day. When I came across it this week it arrested me, and spoke loudly that it was to be this month’s photo of the month.

Tender Trinity,
Threefold love of old,
Triune ancient might,
By prophets told—

O Mighty Three,
Enclosed for me
Within such small
Humanity—

Star bursts in wonder,
Angel sings,
When Godhead moves
With earthly things.


(From Circle of Prayer, by Joyce Denham,
Lion Publishing, Oxford, 2003)

Music: William Byrd- O Lux Beata Trinitas

One of my warmest memories of Christmas was from a cabin 18 miles north of Crosby, Minnesota. This was a very small two room cabin on a lake, which was purchased by my father sight unseen that we lived in for sixteen years. What made it special was we all gathered somehow at Christmas time and for it to be a real traditional Christmas for our very Swedish family meant in no uncertain terms certain foods would be needed and eaten during the Christmas days.

Around Christmas time in Sweden, one of the biggest celebrations is St. Lucia's Day (or St. Lucy's Day) on December 13th. The celebration comes from stories that were told by Monks who first brought Christianity to Sweden.

A few years after Clyde and I were married we moved to Great Falls, Montana with our young daughter, Carrie, where Clyde had a teaching job in a large high school. We felt bad because we took our parents' granddaughter so far away they hardly got to see her.

So every year we made the 1,100 mile journey home for Christmas, even after we had three more children. Walking into the old house everything looked the same as it always had at Christmas. The tree twinkled with the same old lights that pa had used electrician tape to wrap around the cords to keep them intact. The Bethlehem scene my sister Ramona and I had painted on long butcher paper years ago was in its place on the wall behind the piano and the red and white bells were hanging in the archway. Mama's prune tarts, that looked like stars were ready to be consumed.

We all gathered on Christmas Eve... my brother, two sisters and their families and us. After a chicken dinner, it was time to gather for the opening of gifts, to be followed by singing Christmas carols with our sister, LaVerne, playing the piano. Then it was pa's turn at the piano. He'd had a stroke but it didn't take away his love of music which he played by ear. An immigrant from Finland, he was the only one in the family who was not a Christian and he clung to his socialist/communist ideas, believing Jesus was a made-up story. With his thick, stiff fingers he played the songs of his homeland to which Ramona and I sang. Suddenly he gathered our graduation pictures from the top of the piano and placed them on the music rack in front of him. Then as if in a world of his own, he sang his melancholy songs to us with tears streaming down his face. Memories, joys, regrets, sadness, fears... it was all there. With tears in my eyes, my heart ached as I silently watched... oh, pa, if you could only know the saving grace of Jesus.

It is another of the truly great Christian songs of all time – Joy to the World – with music and lyrics written by two of the greatest musicians of all time, Georg Fredrik Handel (of Messiah fame) and Isaac Watts. Joy to the World (no, not the Three Dog Night version!) is perhaps the most well known Christmas carol in the English language, and is actually and verifiably the most published. My favorite rendition of it happens to be by The Canadian Brass in a recording given to me years ago by a dear friend; but since I cannot find that version on YouTube, you can check out a similar rendition by the Percy Faith Orchestra if you put that in the search engine. You have my permission to ignore the cheesy picture.

It is only in recent years, however, that I have appreciated the nature verses.

The nature verses? Yes. Perhaps something was lost to me in the song’s familiarity, or in the simple joy of singing something so magnificent at such a wonderful time of the year. But the more I ponder the nature verses the more astounding the song seems to me, absolutely brilliant lyrics. Enjoy the whole prayer of praise, but note especially the lyrics highlighted:

Joy to the world, the Lord is come!
Let earth receive her king.
Let every heart prepare him room
And heaven and nature sing!

Joy to the earth, the Savior reigns!
Let all their songs employ,
While fields and floods, rocks, hills and plains
Repeat the sounding joy!

No more let sins and sorrows grow,
Nor thorns infest the ground:
He comes to make his blessings flow
Far as the curse is found!

He rules the world with truth and grace,
And makes the nations prove
The glories of his righteousness
And wonders of his love!

It is really very, very good theology, actually. The last line of the first verse reminds us that all of heaven and all of nature join in the celebration. In other words, we sing, and, somehow, all creation sings with us: Jesus said that if the people of his day failed to praise him, the very rocks would not be able to hold back (Luke 19:40); Isaiah said that the trees of the field would clap their hands as God led us forth with such joy (Isaiah 55:12); and Paul said that all of creation even waits as on tiptoe to see the marvelous coming of the King of Kings (Romans 8:19)! Indeed, the “…fields and floods, rocks, hills and plains” CAN AND DO “repeat the sounding joy!”

And what’s that in verse three about a curse? You have to go all the way back to Genesis 3 for that one: the curse is the woe to the world that came with Adam and Eve’s sin in the Garden of Eden, and the salvation of the promised Messiah is the curse’s breaking as ‘far as the curse is found.’ Add to all this the fact that Watts was said to have had Psalm 98 in mind when he wrote it, and it is no wonder that the lyrics have lost nothing of their richness over the three centuries since their writing. Woe to the world? No, joy to the world!

I don’t know about you but I will sing this song lustily this season, thrilled with these thoughts. As you sing it, too, imagine all of creation joined in praise along with you!

Blessed Advent!
Pastor Rick Mylander

(This writing was adapted for Bethlehem’s 2020 Advent from a December blogpost Pastor Rick had done on his blog “Naturally: Reflections on Creation and Christian Spirituality.” The blog can be found at www.rickmylander.com.)

The crunch of the newly fallen snow disturbed the quiet evening as Candy and I walked along on our special errand. It was an exciting evening for many reasons, but especially because it was fun to be with my cousin from far off California, and most especially, because it was Christmas Eve!

Smells of potatis korv and Swedish meatballs were just beginning to waft from the kitchen when my dad, then pastor at North Park Covenant Church in Chicago, realized that he had forgotten the bag of chestnuts on his office desk when he had left work to come home.

“Do you girls think that you can go get them ?” he asked.

We girls were quite happy to oblige, since it was a tradition to roast these treats late after gifts had been opened, and also because we hadn’t seen each other for a long time and needed to catch up. At ten years old, we had important things to share.

Today is the winter solstice in the Northern Hemisphere. Though the day officially launches the season we call winter, it curiously also marks a seemingly contradictory turning point: as of this day in the earth’s annual trek around the sun, the Northern Hemisphere increases its direct angle toward the sun’s rays. Consequently, here in the north, daylight will begin to lengthen starting this very day, as will our hemisphere’s warming, and these two phenomena will continue for the next six months until the summer solstice in June similarly heralds a return to winter. Of course, the opposite of these are true in the Southern Hemisphere: today is their longest daylight of the year.

It is curious to me that the first day of winter is also the first day of winter’s expiration, its demise. One would think winter’s opening day would portend more of the same with nothing to contradict it, nothing but cold, dark barrenness, bleakness, or as the poet says, earth standing “…cold as iron, water like a stone.” We don’t call it the ‘dead of winter’ for nothing.

But there it is, the illogical and illuminating contradiction: light. Its return mocks winter, scoffs at the cold, derides the bleakness. Each day that follows, the sun rises just a little earlier and sets just a little later. Winter anticipates spring, death foresees life, dark predestines light, cold envisages warmth: these are the paradoxes of the seasonal change we call the winter solstice.

So it is no coincidence that the early church chose to recognize the solstice as the most appropriate time to celebrate the birth of Christ. Now, in actual fact, Jesus’ birth likely took place some time during what we call October. I am not certain how that is surmised, but it has something to do with the timing of Jewish festivals and the typical season a census would have been called by Rome (see Luke 2:1-4), not likely the dead of winter.

But no. ‘Indian Summer,’ beautiful as it is, just won’t do. To celebrate something as significant as the incarnation a time is needed that makes a statement, a time that belies its context, that refutes the cold, that calls out the stony spiritual stupor right in the midst of its bleak midwinter and long underwear. Solstice. Now there is an appropriate time to celebrate the Light of the world!

And so we do. We know there is no life without light. Light begets being, a commonly known biological fact.

The same is true in the spirit world. St. John the Evangelist puts it this way: In him (Jesus) was life, and that life was the light for humanity. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not overcome it. (John 1:4-5) Or later, sharing the very words of Jesus himself, he writes, And Jesus spoke to them saying, “I am the light of the world; he who follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” (John 8:12). Or take it all the way back to a prophet hundreds of years before Christ. Anticipating the coming Messiah, Isaiah foretold: The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned. (Isaiah 9:2).

Light dispels darkness, not the other way ‘round. Open a door into a dark closet and what happens? Does the darkness come creeping into the room in which you stand? No, the opposite holds, and always will. Light trumps darkness.

So, solstice is here. I look forward to it not only because of Christmas but because it heralds the return of summer. Celebrate the Light with me. Proclaim the truth of the Christmas carol:

Light and life to all he brings,
Ris’n with healing in His wings
  ~~ from Hark the Herald Angels Sing by Charles Wesley, 1739

Or, if you prefer, fast forward to Bing Crosby 1963:

The Child, the Child, sleeping in the night:
He will bring us goodness and light.

Let There be Light!
Pastor Rick Mylander

(This writing was adapted for Bethlehem’s 2020 Advent from a December blogpost Pastor Rick had done on his blog “Naturally: Reflections on Creation and Christian Spirituality.” The blog can be found at www.rickmylander.com.)

Julotta at Bethlehem is one of my fond memories of childhood. It was a struggle to get out of bed early on Christmas morning and hike over to church in the darkness and snow for the 7am service, but once inside, it became a very special time of worship. Candles were glowing, families were huddling close together for warmth, and there was Swedish music. It was always easy to find the opening hymn, “How brightly shines the morning star” because the pages in the red hymnal were marked with drips of wax from previous years of singing. There could also be excitement like when one choir member’s robe caught on fire during the candlelight procession. We all survived and lived to tell the story!

Bethlehem Covenant Church has marked the pages of many lives. Pastors and Sunday School teachers, choir directors and youth leaders have shaped a community of Jesus followers over the decades. Diversity and dialogue were the hallmarks of real fellowship. Bethlehem taught me that you could belong even before you believe. It is a lesson that continues to shape my life and my friendships with the refugees and immigrants I meet in Sweden.

The Apostle Paul wrote these words to Jesus friends in Corinth, “You yourselves are our letter or recommendation, written on our hearts, to be known and read by all; and you show that you are a letter of Christ, prepared by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.” 2 Corinthians 2:2-3

May God continue to bless Bethlehem Covenant Church with marked pages, lives touched, and hope shared.

In Christ Jesus our Lord, Steven Swanson,
Serve Globally missionary with the Evangelical Covenant Church

In our home, my dear and otherwise good wife doesn’t allow Christmas music to be played until the day after Thanksgiving, says she wants to keep it special and not get tired of it before Christmas rolls around. Never mind that we might not be home long enough during Advent to listen to Handel’s Messiah all the way through. Me? I’d play it all year ‘round if I had my druthers, at least from our own recordings, as the only thing I tire of this time of year are the cheesy tunes the radio tries to pass off as Christmas music.

So here it is the day after Thanksgiving and I’ve already kicked off the morning with Messiah and Mannheim Steamroller. It has put me into enough of the holiday spirit that I thought I’d share a couple seasonally-fitting photo images I took while hiking in Florida earlier this year. They’re not much as photography goes, but, of course, there’s a story…

I was simply checking out the plants among the dunes at Hobe Sound National Wildlife Refuge on Florida’s east coast north of Palm Beach, and what should I come across but a small, wild poinsettia! It bore little resemblance to the cultivated variety used everywhere in seasonal displays, what with their enormous red bracts and all, so I didn’t make the connection at first. But soon the light went on and I let out an, “Oh, wow, look what’s here!” Though the close-ups make them look larger than they were, the bracts were actually very small, only a half-inch in length. So it was the unique leaf that cinched the recognition for me.

Only in researching them now do I find that the red bracts are always small like this in a poinsettia’s uncultivated form – it’s only a manipulated, grafted variety that gets large and showy like the plants we see in the stores today. I saw some this weekend at Costco that were enormous, with the ‘flowers’ twelve and fourteen inches in diameter.

Poinsettias are native to Mexico and Central America, and grow in the wild into shrubs or small trees. The particular plants I came across while hiking, or their seeds, may have come in as a cutting on some storm, blown ashore with other jetsam. The typically red ‘blooms,’ as you may know, are not the flower petals at all; the flowers are the tiny, tiny yellow blooms that barely catch our attention. And concern that the plant is poisonous? It actually only has very mild toxicity.

Cultivated poinsettias, of course, are wildly popular as Christmas decorations in the U.S., growing so in Europe as well, but this is a relatively recent development. Though the plant’s association with Christmas goes back several hundred years to rural Mexico (with the bracts only turning their color this time of year as night-time dark fully lengthens near December’s winter solstice), it took an enterprising German immigrant family from California by the name of Ecke, in the mid 1900’s, to popularize them there. Having first sold them from street stands at Christmastime, the family also perfected the graft technique that enlarged the show of red color. And the combination of the color red, symbolic as it can be to the shed blood of Jesus Christ, and the pointy leaves, which some characterize as expressive of the star over Bethlehem or Christ’s crown of thorns, it was only a matter of time before the poinsettia’s marketing would permeate the seasonal culture. And what could be bad about that, beautiful as it is?

Jesus said, “Walk out into the fields and look at the wildflowers. They never primp or shop, but have you ever seen color and design quite like it? The ten best-dressed men and women in the country look shabby alongside them! And if God gives such attention to the appearance of wildflowers, don’t you think he’ll also attend as well to you? So steep yourself in God-reality… You’ll find all your everyday human concerns will be met.” (Matthew 6:28-30,33, MSG)

Be reminded of God’s attention and intention toward you!

Have a blessed Advent!
Pastor Rick Mylander

(This writing was adapted for Bethlehem’s 2020 Advent from a December blogpost Pastor Rick had done on his blog “Naturally: Reflections on Creation and Christian Spirituality.” The blog can be found at www.rickmylander.com.)

Song: Silent Night sung by Fiona (17) & Meara (15) Cummings 2010.