The provision for Advent, and the weeks that precede it, is one of the most distinctive contributions of The Promise of His Glory. No one can pretend that the Church is unaffected by the spirit of the age, that is, by the anticipation of Christmas. The result of this is that Christmas carols crowd out the keeping of Advent, and the Church hardly has time for the 'earnest looking forward' -- for the watching and waiting for the coming of the King in his kingdom now. Throughout Advent we are preoccupied with the pastness of the past in our concentration on preparing for Christmas with everyone else.
While Advent shares with Lent a spirit of restraint, preparation and penitence, the provision in this book hopes to restore to the Church the distinctive eschatological thrust of Advent, with its expectant longing for the coming of Christ's kingdom in power and the spirit of penitence which that engenders. At the same time we need to use creatively the stubborn popular conception of Advent as a lead into the Christmas festival.
So while we have retained a four-week Advent as such, the tradition of an Advent of variable length, or of some preliminary Sundays with an Advent flavour, is also reflected in our provision. The main thrust of our proposals is that the Pentecost 'green' season comes to an end with a 'white' feast day, All Saints' Day, celebrated on the first Sunday in November. Then there is a change of mood. Our proposal is that instead of one Sunday (Stir-up Sunday) before Advent with a feeling of looking forward in expectation there should be three. This is a pattern that is both closer to ancient tradition (Stir Up Sunday is a left-over from a five-week Advent in the Middle Ages), and at the same time more tuned to the feel of November, so full of commemorations of the past.
We have designated these Sundays 'Sundays of the Kingdom' and allocated to them readings which reflect the Messianic hope of the Old Testament and the coming of the Kingdom of Christ in the New Testament. This note is struck by the three-year Roman Catholic Lectionary, which includes the observance of a feast of Christ the King on the Sunday before Advent. The Taizé calendar, too, makes provision for a season of the Kingdom, although it is observed earlier in the year.
The first of these Sundays will usually be Remembrance Sunday, and the lections we have provided for that day are more in keeping with the Remembrance theme than those in earlier lectionaries. The Sunday before Advent has been given material celebrating the kingship of Christ. Some may wish to celebrate this as a festival, but our preference is to explore this kingship theme rather more in terms of the darker mood of approaching Advent and of the one who comes as King and Judge.
Experience of the ASB's ninth to fifth Sundays before Christmas, with their Old Testament themes but still within a 'green' season, has not been entirely satisfactory. The Ninth Sunday often falls at the schools' half-term, and that pattern is then interrupted by both All Saints-tide and Remembrance Sunday. Nor has that pattern, though it has had fairly widespread commendation through The Joint Liturgical Group, been taken up elsewhere in the Anglican Communion. While some will be content to follow the pattern of the ASB or BCP Calendar while drawing on the resources of this chapter for Advent and some will wish to use the provision of Lectionary 2 to explore the themes and scriptures of the season in a different way, others -- and this is the logic of our provision -- will wish to move to a more full-scale adoption of the Advent ethos straight after All Saints' Sunday than the ASB's five sundays encouraged. This could include a change of liturgical colour to the Advent colour, the use of the more penitential options in the liturgy, and the choice of hymns of an eschatological character.
Advent itself has a change of gear: the last two Sundays, focused on the forerunners John the Baptist and Mary the mother of the Lord, look forward to the particularity of the Incarnation. If these two weeks are unduly dominated by the demands of Christmas, there remain in our proposals some four or five weeks beforehand to treat the eschatological themes. But whatever calendar and lectionary routes are followed, there is the period from Advent 3 to The Feast of the Baptism of our Lord (Epiphany 1) where local preferences should give way to a common core.
We have not provided one major Advent rite in the same way as can be provided for some feast days, for instance, for All Saints' Day and for The Presentation. Our principal concern is that the whole season should have a flavour of its own. Rich provision of eucharistic propers, sets of readings, collects, canticles and responsories for use throughout the season has been made in the hope that local selection will be made imaginatively.
Nevertheless, in many churches there is one major Advent liturgy usually, though not necessarily, celebrated on Advent Sunday itself. This could be eucharistic: with the full use of the Advent eucharistic propers a fine and distinctive Advent Eucharist could be celebrated. But there is already a widespread practice of a non-eucharistic Advent rite, often in the form of an Advent Carol procession, making full use of prophetic scriptures and some ancient Advent texts. We have provided for this in a number of ways in the section that follows, and can envisage a characteristic Advent liturgy built on the Light Service and Vigil pattern together with the use of the Advent introductions, collects, endings and solemn blessings.
Many Advent liturgies in current use depend on the darkness/light theme, and several of our patterns are consonant with this. But there are other themes that churches would do well to explore, especially when the light theme is to be fully developed at Candlemas. Many of the forms of Advent Service that have been popularised in recent years have also had too much of the feel of a first Christmas Carol Service about them. While we recognise a 'change of gear' in mid-Advent, when with the forerunners, John the Baptist and Mary, the Mother of the Lord, the church begins to look forward to the celebration of the Nativity, there is no need for such overlap: Advent has strong themes and material of its own, and the many Patterns for Readings in Chapter II should be explored.
In Lent, Holy Week and Easter the Church was given two penitential rites as part of a response to a feeling that modern liturgy had not provided sufficient opportunity for Christian people to reflect on human failure and sin. In The Promise of his Glory we have provided two more, both with an Advent flavour. The first is a reflection on The Four Last Things, and more appropriate to the first part of Advent; the second is based on the Great Advent Antiphons, and strikes a note of hope and expectancy as much as penitence, setting human sin in a more cosmic and less individual context. Both can be used in a variety of ways, but are probably at their best as reflective corporate liturgies of penitence in preparation for Christmas.
Provision is also made for some popular Advent customs to be used as effectively as possible by the Church. The Advent Wreath and the Jesse Tree have potential both in the church building itself and in the homes of Christian people, as well as in schools.