Advent Archives - Joel Rieves

Advent South Of The Border Style

No, not Mexico, I’m talking about The Tackiest Place On Earth, good old S.O.B., located right on the border of North and South Carolina. To the uninitiated, this may seem like an odd comparison to make, but someone who’s driven the stretch of I-95 between Virginia and Georgia might just get it. Why, you ask? […]

It’s Advent (Sigh) Pt V

It’s usually around this point that I begin wondering why I chose to do a series of blog posts and this time is no exception. Chalk it up to my ADHD, but maintaining focus on a subject for more than a couple of posts can be difficult, to say the least. But, we’ve come this […]

Angels Without Wings

On occasion, the staff at College Park Baptist Church will ask members for stories about our lives. At the beginning of Advent, they did it again, this time asking stories about times we might have been visited by angels. Being that CPBC is a rather progressive church, these stories are about people who have come […]

It’s Advent (Sigh) Pt IV

It’s time for the next installment in this curmudgeonly bitch-fest about Advent. Today, we will discuss “joy”. And, before you ask, I don’t have a problem with joy: I have a problem with the way we talk about joy. The word gets thrown around like it’s no big deal and, really, it kind of is. Our approach […]

It’s Advent (Sigh) PtIII

In the continuing saga of my issues with Advent, we talk about yet another of those words connected with it: hope. Now, one of the best things about being a Baptist is that you aren’t bound to liturgical things like the lectionary text. This past Sunday at College Park Baptist Church, that freedom allowed our […]

It’s Advent (Sigh) Pt II

On Monday, I wrote about my problems with Advent. After a rather snarky start, I said Advent was hard for me, in part, because of the words associated with it: hope, peace, joy and love. At the end, I said that I would take a word a week and write about my problems with it. To […]

It’s Advent (Sigh)

Yesterday was the beginning of Advent and posts about it are starting to show up in my news feed. I am not happy about that, in part, because Advent posts are almost as irritating as people who are whiter than sour cream saying “That’ll preach” at every opportunity, thinking it makes them sound hip(And, by “hip”, I mean […]