At Home In Advent

The following words for reflection are taken and adapted from “At Home In Advent - A domestic journey from Advent to Epiphany” from Gordon Giles (BRF - Bible Reading Fellowship). The entire book is available from Eden.co.uk and would be recommended to get a fuller experience of this time of devotion and meditation.

The purpose of these devotional is to give you something of an everyday object or motion which can focus our thinking through Advent. There are 3 sections:

Travelling in Advent
At Home in Advent
The run up to Christmas

We have travelled home, we have made some preparations, and now we settle in for the last run up to Christmas.

Christmas Dinner - Talking Turkey

Read: Luke 2:12 - 20

For years I have prepared my Christmas Day Dinner on Christmas Eve, and that includes the centrepiece of a Turkey. It’s traditional! However, turkey wasn’t the original centrepiece piece, the turkey only came in from the New World and introduced in Spain 500 years ago - I suppose we can call it fully traditional now…

For our American cousins today the turkey is also the big Thanksgiving meal, and it is to our cousins we own the expression of Talking Turkey.

The expression means to get to the heart of the matter directly, no trimmings just get in there. Maybe our problem is that we like the trimmings too much… We like the carols, we like the children’s plays, the like exchanging gifts, we like the decorations and all the paraphernalia that goes with Christmas. So let’s talk turkey.

Magi, shepherds, Bethlehem, the lot can appear to many as a quaint fairy story… however the extravagant nature of the story in the time it was written actually attest to its authenticity. Nobody would make up something like this, it just doesn’t make sense.

And that is why it is so important this Christmas that, as we sit around our tables enjoying dinner with whomever we can mix with, we focus on the Christ who most certainly has stepped down to be among us and will come again.

Glory to God in the Highest!

Pray for one another this Christmas