Most people are familiar with two of Christianity's holiest days -- Christmas and Easter. But those are just two of many holy days, or holidays, celebrated by Christians who follow a liturgical calendar. And the calendar has seasons that lead up to the high festivals.
Even people who have sung "The 12 Days Christmas" hundreds of times don't think of Christmas time as comprising two distinct liturgical periods. Until the 12-day festival of Christmas arrives, the four weeks prior are Advent in the Western Church, which mark a solemn time of prayer and preparation for Christmas. The season begins in mid-November for the Eastern Church and is called Christmas Lent.
I like watching for stories that talk about what it's like to celebrate the holy days of the season as a liturgical Christian, so I was pleasantly surprised to find this one from Tim Townsend of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
But Advent has another purpose that is at even greater odds with the office partying, extreme shopping, egg-nog-sipping customs that the month of December has come to represent. According to the HarperCollins Encyclopedia of Catholicism, Advent "has a twofold character: It prepares for the commemoration of the Incarnation ... and it looks forward to Christ's second coming at the end of time." Pastors say that second message is even harder to push through the wall of commercialism that Christmas in America has become.
The first part of Townsend's story quotes extensively from St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke's written column and a previous homily on Advent. He also speaks with a theology professor at Xavier University in Cincinnati and pastors at Presbyterian, African Methodist Episcopal, Roman Catholic and Methodist parishes. And that's wonderful. But it made me realize that I rarely see any Missouri-Synod Lutherans in Townsend's pieces. In fact, the last time I remember a piece about my brand of Lutherans was when our Synodical President faced an election challenge two and a half years ago. Ths could be an oversight of my newscrawling capabilities, to be sure.
But the reason it's interesting is not because Missouri Synod Lutherans are one of the largest Protestant church bodies in the United States; it's that they are headquartered in St. Louis. So I hope Townsend is spending time digging into the stories that are happening in his backyard. But I am completely compromised on this topic.
Let's look at another example of a local news site and its relationship to the local religious scene. Recently The Washington Post started a religion blog called On Faith. The "conversation on religion," hosted by Jon Meacham and Sally Quinn, is still getting started.
So far, 75 panelists take part in the conversations. By my rough count, you have a dozen Muslim experts or adherents, almost the same number of Jewish scholars, eight Anglicans, eight Roman Catholics, and several Baptists and evangelicals. This is based on my interpretation of their biographies, so I could be wrongly ascribing a religious view to panelists. A Latter-day Saint, Native American spiritualist, Wiccan practitioner, Hindu, Greek Orthodox, Lutheran and Baptist round out the discussion.
Why not include someone from the Seventh-day Adventist church, whose world headquarters are in Silver Spring, Maryland? It sure couldn't hurt. Leaving them out would be like the Post neglecting to mention crab cakes in a regional food review. Any other suggestions for missing voices on that site?