Welcome to the Good Faith Podcast. I'm your host, Curtis Chang. And the Good Faith podcast is a production of

Redeeming Babel, and it's where friends who follow Jesus help each other make sense of the world.

And we hear in Good Faith are in the middle of a series on Advent, because I really believe that Advent is

actually designed to help us make sense of the world,

but perhaps in ways that might surprise us a little or that we're not used to from our usual

Christmas culture. So just to recap, Advent comes from the Latin word Adventis, which means the

coming or arrival. It's translated in Greek to Parusia. And that word is a,

is a potent word in Greco-Roman culture. It is the word that usually was used to announce the arrival

of a new king. Some new king that had basically kicked the butts of all other rivals to the

thrones, won the battle, and was now sending messengers into all of the different cities of his new

kingdom to say, there's a new boss in town, there's a new king, and that was the Perusia,

that was the announcement.

And so when Christians adopted this term to announce Jesus' both first arrival, his birth, but then also

his coming future forecasted return, that was the linguistic world in which that word was used.

And so Advent, which right now, for us in our current culture, so far removed from that, has come to mean lighting of candles, Christmas carols, and presents.

It had a very different meaning in first century world.

It really was a much more potent word that said, something challenging has arrived, has broken into the world that presents a challenge to the ruling kingdoms

of the world that this kingdom announcement now comes into. And so I wanted our Advent series

to recapture something of that edge, something of that original challenge of the original meaning

of Advent. And we're doing that by trying to re-look at, re-examine the four classic senses that have come to define Advent,

which are the senses or the virtues of hope, peace, joy, and love.

And are there ways in which we actually, when we really think about the advent as the

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