The Season of Advent

Join us at our weekend coffee hours Saturday, November 30, or Sunday, December 1, for a talk on the meaning of Advent and its place in our liturgical calendar cycle, featuring our very own Gene Schlesinger!

The church’s calendar puts us strangely out of step with our neighbors, beginning with the beginning. Our year starts with Advent, a month ahead of the “normal” calendar. And while everyone else is celebrating the “Christmas Season,” we’re told to wait and prepare for the end of history and Jesus’s second coming. It’s a recipe for confusion! But it’s also an invitation to a joyful celebration of the holidays.

In this talk, St. Luke’s parishioner and Santa Clara University religious studies professor Eugene Schlesinger will explain these oddities, and how the Advent-Christmas-Epiphany sequence fits together. Along the way, we’ll consider some ways to more fruitfully engage with the holiday season.