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    The Season of the Nativity: Confessions and Practices of an Advent, Christmas & Epiphany Extremist
    The Season of the Nativity: Confessions and Practices of an Advent, Christmas & Epiphany Extremist
    The Season of the Nativity: Confessions and Practices of an Advent, Christmas & Epiphany Extremist
    Ebook184 pages1 hour

    The Season of the Nativity: Confessions and Practices of an Advent, Christmas & Epiphany Extremist

    By Sybil MacBeth

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    About this ebook

    Sybil MacBeth writes that Advent and Epiphany are the often-neglected parentheses around Christmas. And they deserve more attention and better publicity. This Season of the Nativity sets the stage the liturgical year, our yearlong journey through Scripture and salvation history. Sybil MacBeth’s memoir, front-porch theology, and pages of practices and activities invite individuals and families to enjoy this season in a way that has more peace and more Christ and less chaos and guilt. She offers simple tools for busy people – perhaps to reclaim a joyful and yes, serious nativity season for the first time. Sybil MacBeth is a dancer, a doodler, and a former community college mathematics professor. Her books include Praying in Color: Drawing a New Path to God, Praying in Color: Kids’ Edition, and Praying in Color--Portable Edition. Learn more about Sybil and her work at prayingincolor.com.

    "This gorgeous book is going to remain at my reading chair, dog-eared and bookmarked, all through the Yuletide season. It will also be under the tree of just about everyone on my gift list. We will all have more interesting winters, and greater intimacy with Jesus, because of it."
    —Lauren F. Winner, author of Still and Mudhouse Sabbath

    “This beautifully designed book caters to those of us for whom waiting for Christmas is the very best part about the holidays. With activities like Advent calendars, games, doodles, carols, and my personal favorite—"flaunting the color purple”—Sybil MacBeth helps us see the Nativity as an entire season stretching from Advent through Epiphany, each day an opportunity for Technicolor grace.”
    —Jana Riess, author of Flunking Sainthood and Flunking Sainthood Every Day

    If you think you’re already familiar with Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany, think again! After reading this book, you’ll never see those seasons in the same way. With humor, spiritual wisdom, and innovative activity suggestions, the author makes you open your eyes in wonder.”
    —Linda Douty, spiritual director and author of 5 books, including Rhythms of Growth: 365 Meditations to Nurture the Soul

    “With heart-open honesty, Sybil MacBeth opens the door to a new exploration of the three-part Nativity Season. With personal and family-friendly practices and her appealing approach, Sybil invites both seasoned Christians and curious seekers to prepare in Advent, nestle into Christmas, and wonder anew in Epiphany. Extremist? Not really, but perhaps the leader of a new awakening.
    —Connie Denninger is a retreat leader, teacher of prayer and spiritual disciplines, and advocate of the Arts in Christian Practice

    Sybil MacBeth’s genius is for getting the grand themes – like prayer and yearning and waiting and birth and joy – into real life. She starts with scripture and tradition and solid theology and ends up right on the kitchen table or living room (where children and adults alike are actually enjoying one another). As an on-the-ground parish priest, I want this book in every home of every parishioner. That’s because I know they want what I want – not to dread the approach of Christmas and feel inadequate in its wake – but to truly experience God’s great activity before, during and after in a way that’s full of pleasure and meaning. This book lines out the very concrete path from the wish to the reality.
    —Rev Carleton Bakkum, Episcopal Priest and Rector of Grace Episcopal Church, Yorktown, VA. - also an artist

    The “Season of the Nativity” by Sybil MacBeth is an invitation into spiritual growth through frameworks and forms – by sharing with the reader some familiar and many new ways to prepare for and celebrate Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany. Her book is an incarnational feast of ideas – both thoughtful and fun, challenging at times and delightful as well. You will want your own copy as well as several to share with your friends.
    —The Reverend Canon Meredith Hunt, Episcopal Priest, Diocese of Western Michigan

    As Luther translated Scripture in the language of the
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherParaclete Press
    Release dateNov 1, 2014
    ISBN9781612616131
    The Season of the Nativity: Confessions and Practices of an Advent, Christmas & Epiphany Extremist
    Author

    Sybil MacBeth

    Sybil MacBeth is the author of Praying in Color: Drawing a New Path to God (2007) and Praying in Color Kids’ Edition (2009). Praying in Color uses doodling and coloring as a way to get still and listen to God. Sybil combines her lifelong love of prayer with her experience as a community college mathematics professor to offer workshops and retreats throughout the U.S. and Canada. Her workshops, both prayerful and playful, engage people of varied learning styles. Sybil is married to Andy MacBeth, an Episcopal priest, and is the mother of two adult sons.

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      Book preview

      The Season of the Nativity - Sybil MacBeth

      Introduction

      The Nativity Season

      Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany

      Here is a skeleton snapshot of the Nativity season. Throughout this book more flesh, muscle, and sinews will be added to these barebones definitions of Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany.

      Advent recounts and remembers the events prior to Jesus’s birth. For more than a thousand years, the ancient peoples who became the Israelites longed for a Savior. They wanted freedom from slavery and captivity. Abraham, Sarah, Moses, Isaac, Rachel, and a host of other spiritual relatives trusted the One God to listen to their cries and send a Messiah who would rescue them. Advent recalls their longings, their dreams, and their waiting for the One who would free them. The Scripture readings, the themes, and the songs of this season are full of the promises, prophecies, and predictions of the Savior and Liberator whom God will send.

      Christmas

      celebrates the birth of Jesus. Christmas is the fulfillment of Advent waiting. This is the time for rejoicing and Alleluias. God has given the world an unexpected Savior, born in a small town in a small stable or cave to people with no worldly status. Peace will come.

      Epiphany

      heralds the ramifications of Jesus’s birth. The arrival of the Magi from foreign lands foretells the day when faraway people will learn about this surprising Savior. Jesus cannot be contained in his own land with just his own people. His saving work will go viral and spread to the ends of the earth.

      Chapter

      1

      Confessions

      It’s five in the evening. An almost-winter sunset of fuchsia, salmon, and hot pink paints its way above the rooflines in my Memphis neighborhood. It’s so beautiful I gasp. I grasp for words to describe what I see: cotton candy, tie-dyed T-shirts, cooked shrimp. Words fail, turning the magnificent into verbal mush.

      In just a matter of minutes the scene changes: the sun descends and the colors morph from reddish, pinkish hues to gray and midnight blue. Darkness comes fast now. And as if directed by a tuxedo-dressed conductor standing in the middle of our street, hundreds of tiny lights pop on with the rhythmic energy of a Brandenburg Concerto. Back and forth across the street, red, green, and white lights burst forth to highlight trees, eaves, and doorways. Santa appears on the right side, reindeers on the left; penguins on the right, snowmen on the left. It’s a symphony of light and color. It’s spectacular and magical—an amusement park light show right in my neighbors’ front yards. The darkness is aglow with Christmas celebration. I am at once delighted, then horrified. Good grief, it is only November 15—a full six weeks before Christmas.

      I have sometimes hated Christmas. For the first twenty years of my adulthood, I tried to create the perfect Christmas. I roamed malls and overbaked and sent Christmas cards and threw in some spiritual reading here and there. By the time December 25 rolled around I was tired, irritable, and needed to make amends to everyone in the radius of my voice. My not very successful, excessive gift purchases and the twenty-three kinds of cookies from my Christmas bake-off turned my stomach. Nobody really wanted the items I had chosen to clutter their house and closets; nobody wanted all of the sugar and butter I had baked to cling to their arteries and thighs. I’ve toned down the gift giving and the culinary prep a bit, but the temptation to host a magazine-worthy Christmas still looms and lures. If the previous sentences make you think What a Scrooge! and Bah! Humbug! lady, please bear in mind, I only partly hate Christmas.

      I also love Christmas. Christmas, in my opinion, gets short shrift. For some reason, Christians have made the death, atonement, and resurrection of the Easter season the most important focus of theology and worship. We seem to have forgotten the mystery and wonder of Jesus’s mere existence and life on earth. The concept of the Incarnation—God coming to dwell among us as flesh and blood—is so fanciful and so reckless, it deserves more attention. Christmas heralds Jesus’s birth and therefore needs better PR and better coverage as a spiritual celebration. It is not just the lightweight cousin of Easter.

      What I really love is the parentheses of weeks on either side of Christmas called Advent and Epiphany. Advent rolls out the red carpet in anticipation of Jesus’s birth. Epiphany extends the carpet into the future beyond his birth and birthplace. The whole Nativity Season deserves to be relished. The Nativity of Jesus includes the three seasons of Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany. These seasons form a triptych—a three-part picture of the events surrounding the birth of Jesus. I want people to luxuriate in the fortyplus days called Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany: Let Advent start four Sundays before Christmas and last until the night of December 24. Celebrate Christmas from December 25 until January 5—all Twelve Days. Gather on January 6 Eve for the start of Epiphany and let it linger until, well, maybe even, Lent.

      The first part of the Nativity triptych, Advent, is my favorite season of the year. The darkness and cold of impending winter set the stage for the four weeks of preparation before Christmas. If people have a home season, mine is winter. As the days shorten and the sunsets grow more colorful and more ominous, my mood becomes pensive and dark. Advent invites me to hunker down and nestle in. It encourages me to go indoors and inward. I love the waiting and the anticipation. During Advent, Mary is pregnant with the Christ child; I am pregnant with longing and hope for a new way to know God.

      I call myself an Advent Extremist. Other people call me an Advent Fundamentalist or Advent Militant. Get on with the holidays, the merriment, the celebration, people sometimes say. Why the doom and gloom, the seriousness? "Advent is serious," I say. But for me, it is also full of delight. Advent is both work and play. Without the work and the preparation, there are no fireworks and no real party at Christmas, just a high and a letdown. Without Advent, the celebration of Christmas feels a bit empty.

      I also love this time of year for another reason. The Nativity season gives me permission to be—do I dare say the r-word?—Religious. Religious has gotten a bad reputation in the past hundred years. It has come to mean pious, self-righteous, holding mindless belief, and practicing empty ritual. Although I am tempted at times to describe myself as spiritual but not religious—because

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