In this collection of Advent Sermons, you will hear echoed time and time again that Advent is my favorite liturgical season.  For me, this season is the richest season of the Church’s liturgical year.  The combination of celebration, anticipation, repentance, and joyful preparation – all important themes of Advent – brings so many elements into our worship and into our life.  I truly believe, perhaps naively, that if the world better understood and practiced Advent, then there would be less of a commercial bent on Christmass. 

I have chosen to begin with the sermons first presented in 2011 to the parish family of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Mancos, Colorado, to whom this book is dedicated.  These sermons, while referencing the appointed lessons from Lectionary B of the Revised Common Lectionary, (RCL) are mostly based upon the poem, A New World by John van de Laar.