Ready?

When the idea to create an Advent Devotions blog arose, I of course thought and said, “Easy!”

Not that writing devotions is ever just a toss-off, do-it-while-I’m-waiting-for-a-traffic-light-to-turn activity. No indeed.

But we’re not creating it from scratch.

For openers, for what seems like forever (certainly as far back as I remember — and I was a little kid here at SUMC!), members and friends of Sudbury UMC have been writing devotions for our Lenten Devotional Booklet. And until a couple of years ago, that was a roughly hundred-page paper booklet that people could fetch from a few locations around our church building, take with them, and read. One devotion every day, from Ash Wednesday to Easter, preparing for the resurrection of Jesus and all that it means to us.

For the last couple of springs, we’ve offered that set of Lenten devotions — in paper format still, yes, but also in this online blog space. (If you scroll downward, you can read two years’ worth of Lenten writings — archived for all time!) Now, the Lenten Devotions can travel with you, and in a form that takes up far less physical space. We might not be able to carry a hundred pages of 8 1/2 x 11 paper with us at all times, but we can and do have our phones with us all the time. Magic! And convenience.

So, an online Advent Devotions blog? There’s precedent. And, refreshingly, it’s not something that we’ve had to invent out of whole cloth because of this blasted COVID-19 pandemic.

We were prepared. We were ready.

For making an online Advent Devotions “Booklet”, anyway.

Something to help us make ourselves ready for the coming of the Christ Child.

The writings that follow, here — posted every morning from now until Christmas Day — are based on writing ideas that largely line up with the four sections of a book that will be the centerpiece of SUMC’s adult Christian-Education series: “Light of the World”, an examination of the Christmas story from a Jewish perspective, written by Biblical scholar Amy-Jill Levine.

And they are, as usual, all written by members and friends of Sudbury UMC. One of those pleasant and rare examples of something that “we’ve always done this way” and which nonetheless makes sense.

[As is only possible with the online format, we have some of the writings ready to go, but there is still quite a bit of “space” remaining … so if you’d like to have a go at writing something for inclusion here, BY ALL MEANS contact us (rhammerton@earthlink.net) and we can set you up.]

Ready?

Off we go…

-Rob Hammerton