Wednesday, November 30, 2005

What's Andrew got to do with it?

Today is St Andrews’s day, a day on which the Scots, Russians and Greeks who have him as their patron saint do ….? Well what do we do? To be honest I’m not sure what most Scot’s do, we seem to have kept the day and lost all the traditions.

I must admit that I’ve struggled a bit with this falling within advent. I mean whose idea was it to let St. Andrews day fall within advent, should our focus not be 100% on Jesus? Is this not a distraction from the “main thing?”

I thought about this as I walked home last night and concluded that it is actually quite appropriate for us to think about St Andrews day during advent.

My sense of knowing that as a Scot I’m supposed to do something today but I know not what is perhaps like many who know there’s something special about advent and that there’s more to it than candles and coat hangers (this only makes sense if you grew up watching Blue Peter). But they don’t know what to do. We (i.e. society at large) have this period of advent and Christmas day but we’ve lost the context. So here’s the challenge….do I spend advent reflecting upon Emanuel in a privatistic or narcissistic way? Or is part of my reflection upon the birth of Jesus the imperative to help others to find Him, to this advent discover what it’s all about. This leads me to my second thought.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

And yet the incarnated Jesus is God. He is the centre of the entire sweep of God's purpose in history; the realisation of God's purpose to redeem mankind. To focus on Jesus -- the Christ -- is inescapably to focus on God.