I have blogged in previous years about the colors of Advent, about some of the fairly new traditions of Advent, including the Advent wreath here.

Traditionally, Advent was a penitential season, much like Lent, hence the use of the same liturgical color, purple, in both seasons. Recent liturgical changes have downplayed its penitential aspect and emphasized the theme of waiting or expectation, as well as being alert.

There’s a profound disconnect between “the holiday season” and Advent, perhaps most apparent in the lectionary readings. One aspect of Advent that remains as true today as ever is that the focus for much of the season is not on the birth of Jesus Christ, but rather on his second coming. Apocalyptic themes predominate. On the first Sunday of Advent, we will hear from Luke’s version of Jesus’ apocalyptic preaching; later, we will hear similar themes from John the Baptist.

The focus on the Second Coming explains the earlier penitential emphasis. But there’s another way of thinking about Advent’s apocalyptic side. The first Sunday of Advent is the Church’s New Year’s Day, the beginning of the liturgical calendar. Advent, first or second, is all about God’s time. We rarely consider the importance of how we think about time. There’s been an enormous cultural transformation in recent years. The move from analog to digital in a way masks the passing of time. We don’t watch the hands of the clock moving across the dial, instead we have the constantly flashing beacon of led displays.

A couple of years ago, one of my colleagues was lecturing about the changes in the early modern period that came to the conception of time, and how people related to it. He began the lecture by asking students to tell him what time their watches read. In fact, only a handful of the eighty students had watches. All the rest kept time by their cellphones.

The Holiday Season, with its bustle of activity–shopping, parties, concerts, and the like–each year makes enormous demands on our time. Advent, which sees God breaking into time, breaking into history, twice; once in Bethlehem, the other at some point in the future, reminds us that even as we are slaves to the time of the season, God operates by a very different clock. Indeed, God exists outside of time, and it should be our goal to view time sub specie aeternitatis.