Advent | Presence (sermon from Africa) | Isaiah 64: 1-9 | Week 1

"{Recorded at Denver International Airport on the way to Ivory Coast, Africa.  Ryan Paulson and Aaron Bjorklund went to help at a leaders' and pastors' conference.}

The English word 'advent' comes from the Latin word 'adventus.'  It means coming or visit.  It's a four-week season in the church calendar where churches all around the globe prepare for the birth of Christ.  It's a time that's epitomized by three postures of the soul.  One of those postures is intentional waiting.  We remember that there's a certain transcendent longing within us for something more, and we allow ourselves to hope.  The second posture is anticipating.  This emptiness that we sometimes feel in our soul?  We expect that God will come in and meet us and fill us.  Then there's this posture of preparation.  We take some inventory of our life, we take time to think and we invite the Spirit of God to work in us and move in us that we would become little bit different people, over the course of the next four weeks.  

No one really knows when the season of Advent started.  The church universal has been practicing it since 567, at least.  It was that year that a number of monks decided to undertake a season of fasting leading up to the birth of Christ.  Their practice of fasting was adopted by the church to eventually become the season we now know and celebrate as Advent...."