Advent Against Empire: The Beginning of Another World

Join us for our Advent Worship Series • Sundays at 10 am

This Advent we are being guided by Liberated Together and Erna Kim Hackett who writes:

Advent arrives as a guide in the middle of all the confusion. It orients us when we feel pulled in a dozen directions and numbed by unrelenting trauma. Advent reminds us to pay attention to how God actually chose to enter the world. What we are getting in Jesus is the most practical and embodied demonstration of how he expects those with power to live and wield their power. He scrubs off and lays down all of his glory, power, and control, and moves into the limits of a womb and the limits of a human body.

Advent, at its core, is a radical re-education of power. It’s a divine intervention for anyone who has been taught that dominance is leadership and control is the goal. It’s an invitation to unlearn. Matthew’s opening chapters read like a manual for that unlearning:

Joseph - a masculinity not driven by fear.

He refuses to weaponize purity, piety, or patriarchy.

Herod - a warning about what power does when it’s afraid and lacks empathy.

A mirror showing how empire deforms the soul.

The Magi - they follow a star instead of a colonial enforcer.

They refuse to become errand boys for empire.

And Jesus - the undoing of it all.

Power remade in vulnerability.

RESOURCES

Download your Advent devotional guide here or a redacted version without profanity here.

Take a look at the suggested practices here.

Learn more about Liberated Together and see Erna Kim Hackett explain her vision for this Advent here.

Follow Erna through the Advent journey on Instagram here.

Celebrate with us. 

Please join us at 10:00 am Sunday at 515 Woodford St in Portland, Maine, or via Zoom, for a time of worship and fellowship. We'll share some music, lift up our joys and concerns, pray together, and share Communion. (If you're joining us from home, feel free to bring a beverage and crackers, or whatever you like, to your screen so you're prepared to receive Communion with the in-person worshipping community.)

We post our weekly Zoom Worship meeting link on our main worship page.