Our Advent Reading Plan

Starts December 1. Please join us!

Hi friends,

In my post the other day, Rediscovering The Wheel, I proposed five ‘baby steps’ for re-embodying our faith. The first of those steps was daily, communal Scripture reading. Our little Virginia Beach community has had a shared reading plan for the last couple years. Now would be a great time to join (or rejoin) if you’re interested. The readings this coming month are geared toward Advent, and though Advent doesn’t officially begin until this Sunday, December 1 will do!

What’s Advent?

Advent, as you may know, means “coming.” Traditionally, the church has devoted this season to waiting on our Lord in two particular senses. First, in the season leading up to Christmas, as the days grow darker and colder, we embody Israel who waited expectantly for the Messiah to arrive. Second, since we know that he has come, we wait for him to come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.

As I have said elsewhere,

The Christian celebration of Advent and Christmas has an already-not-yet structure to it. We sing O Come O Come Emmanuel in a minor key, imagining ourselves as Israel long ago, waiting for the king to arrive: “Rejoice, Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel!” But that longing is also truly our own, since we too wait for the day when He will come again and wipe every tear from our eyes. We sing, “Joy To The World, The Lord Is Come,” knowing that he did come 2000 years ago, but also imagining and enacting the day when He will come and make all things new. Christianity is not just a past-tense religion. Thus, Christians have recited the following words in their worship services for a couple thousand years:

Christ has died
Christ is risen
Christ will come again

The Plan

If you’re the analog type, you can access the reading plan here and print it out or bookmark it on your phone or computer. This link will continue to update the readings, so you can stick with us not just through Advent but year-round.

More conveniently, we have a personalized plan on the Dwell app (FREE for you!), which automatically loads each new day’s Scriptures. You can read or listen right on the app. It’s pretty awesome. You have to create an account to get started, but once you’re in, it’s free thanks to VB Fellows footing the bill (we welcome your donations to help keep it going).

Why These Readings?

Most months the readings don’t skip around this much. We’ll read from maybe one book in the OT and one in the NT. This month is a bit different. First, I’ve chosen all the Psalms which I think give the strongest taste of the coming Messiah. This includes all the proper “Messianic Psalms” and also a few others that I think speak clearly and beautifully of the coming of Christ. For the other readings, I mostly used the traditional Advent readings which the church has read for hundreds of years during this season (also about the coming of Christ, of course). This also includes the main “Christmas” readings from the Gospels, and finally ended some key Christmas and Advent passages from the New Testament epistles, which are mostly about the Second Coming. Traditionally, those should come before Christmas obviously, but that was too much, so I figured they’d fit well in between Christmas and New Years.

One cool thing about this plan: The traditional lectionary tends toward snippets, say 3 or 4 verses from this chapter, 2 or 3 verses from that. This was for the sake of brevity, since the chosen passages were meant to be read during Sunday worship. But for private reading, I think it makes more sense to read the whole chapters. You get way more of context and, therefore, meaning. Plus, each chapter becomes a little Easter Egg hunt, “Where is Jesus in this?” In fact, that’s a good guiding question for each day’s reading.

3 Quick Tips On How To Read The Bible

1. How To Not Quit: Ours is not one of those reading plans that takes a big time commitment. Again, we like baby steps. We have purposely kept it short and simple, so that it can be sustainable for a lot of people with different rhythms and attention spans to consistently do it together. Even still, some of us will fall off and miss a few days in row. That’s okay. Don’t give up. Don’t feel like you have to go back and catch up. Just pick up on the new day and keep going.

2. How To Get The Most Out Of It: As I mentioned in my last post, I recommend saying a short prayer as you begin, then reading or listening to the two passages, then ruminating on some small part of the reading the rest of the day. Also, it’s good to have a couple of other people in a group chat who are also committed to read with you. Then you can share encouragements and questions about whatever stood out to you from the day’s reading over text. So, if you begin tomorrow, don’t do it alone. Invite one or two friends to join you.

3. How I Read The Bible: A number of people have asked me how I approach the Scriptures. I won’t answer that here. But a couple of thoughts: 1) Rumination: When I was young, I would get so excited when I came across any part of a passage that I thought I really understood. And then (nobody told me to do this, but…) I would ruminate on that little nugget of light for the rest of the day. “How can I use that key to unlock other doors in the Scriptures? How might that key unlock doors in my own life?” Etc. It helped me a lot. Now that I’m a 40 year-old geezer, I tend to get more excited about the bits of Scripture I don’t understand. I’ll take those dark, mysterious nuggets where Jesus says something seemingly incomprehensible, or where two back-to-back stories in a Gospel reading seem to have nothing in common—e.g. “Why on earth did Matthew place these stories next to one another?”—and I’ll chew on that the rest of the day. Rumination is a major, though somewhat hidden, theme in the Bible. Some truths can only be seen if you wait, stay awake, and keep your eyes on the seemingly invisible prize. So…ruminate. 2) Images Over Words: A big breakthrough for me was realizing that the Bible is made up more of images than words. Through our modern lens, words tend to be more important. We like things to be precise and technical. So when we see a certain word recurring, we want to give it a precise and technical definition. “Justified…what does that mean?” [Google what the experts say.] “Oh, now I understand. Ok, sanctified…” [Repeat the process.] Don’t get me wrong, you can learn good things that way. But ultimately, it won’t go deep enough. When Paul, for instance, uses the terms justification and sanctification, he’s not merely using technical terms. Justification is an image from the world of the law court. Sanctification is an image from the world of the temple. When he uses these terms, he doesn’t just want you to cognitively understand. He wants you to step into the picture he’s painting. To come into his world. This is why Jesus speaks almost entirely in images or parables. Even the actions he takes—healing a blind man, feeding 5000, pulling a coin from the belly of a fish—are more like living parables (like the dramatic acts of OT prophets) than mere factual occurrences. Once you see that, the Bible comes alive in a new way. Across the Old and New Testament, images hyperlink to each other far more effectively than mere words. Once you see the images, you begin to see the connections. Another way to say it: the words on our Bible’s pages are simply not the words of the original text. They are translations from at least three different languages. Specific words themselves may even be debated. But the images remain transcendent. The words are there to express the images, and the images are there to express realities that go far beyond words. In a possibly apocryphal story, Hemingway was once asked how he managed to write so simply and briefly. His response was, “I would use no words if I could.” Hemingway didn’t want his readers to get caught up in the means of narration itself. He wanted them to feel like they were living in the pictures he presented. He wanted them to taste and see, not merely to define and understand. In this, I think he was accidentally imitating Jesus.

That was more long-winded than I wanted to be. But as Pascal once said, “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.” Much love and happy almost-Advent!

— Ross