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Expectant Joy
The Third Sunday of Advent focuses on the joy of coming redemption. It is traditionally called Gaudete Sunday, a day that, "...takes its common name from the Latin word Gaudete ("Rejoice"). Throughout Scripture, God's people are reminded to take joy in the midst of waiting and to remember what God has done in the past:
"Rejoice in the Lord always; again I say, rejoice. Let your forbearance be known to all, for the Lord is near at hand; have no anxiety about anything, but in all things, by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be known to God. Lord, you have blessed your land; you have turned away the captivity of Jacob (Phil. 4:4–6; Ps. 84:1)."
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Advent Quotes
"The Advent season is a season of waiting, but our whole life is an Advent season, that is, a season of waiting for the last Advent, for the time when there will be a new heaven and a new earth ... We can, and should also, celebrate Christmas despite the ruins around us … I think of you as you now sit together with the children and with all the Advent decorations — as in earlier years you did with us. We must do all this, even more intensively because we do not know how much longer we have."
-Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letter to Bonhoeffer’s parents, Nov. 29, 1943, written from Tegel prison camp
"Celebrating Advent means being able to wait. Waiting is an art that our impatient age has forgotten. It wants to break open the ripe fruit when it has hardly finished planting the shoot. But all too often the greedy eyes are only deceived; the fruit that seemed so precious is still green on the inside, and disrespectful hands ungratefully toss aside what has so disappointed them. Whoever does not know the austere blessedness of waiting—that is, of hopefully doing without—will never experience the full blessing of fulfillment. Those who do not know how it feels to struggle anxiously with the deepest questions of life, of their life, and to patiently look forward with anticipation until the truth is revealed, cannot even dream of the splendor of the moment in which clarity is illuminated for them...For the greatest, most profound, tenderest things in the world, we must wait. It happens not here in a storm but according to the divine laws of sprouting, growing, and becoming."
-Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letter to fiancée Maria von Wedemeyer from prison, Dec. 13, 1943
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Advent Resources
Advent Devotionals
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The Ethiopian Churches of Lalibella
"We tell the people that God became human and a human became God. Because of Christ, we went from being punished by God to being his children again. Christmas is the day that forgiveness was born." -Tsigie Selassie Mezgebu
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