This Advent season, we’re collaborating with writers across the Augustine Collective, a network of student-led Christian journals, to bring you a series of short devotional articles. Find this series also published by Cornell Claritas.
We at the Penn Epistle and Cornell Claritas are very excited to announce a collaboration between our two journals for the Advent season. We’ll be posting two articles every week—one from the Epistle, and one from Claritas. We hope that our readers will enjoy what our teams have to offer, and that this will be an opportunity to foster exchange and dialogue between our two schools.
In our modern day, we often think of Christmas and Advent, the four weeks leading up to Christmas, as the season of giving. We give Christmas presents to our friends and family, just as the wise men gave the baby Jesus frankincense and myrrh. However, unlike the gifts of the wise men, our gifts often come with an expectation of reciprocity, whether conscious or not. Our Christmas season has been inundated by massive corporations chasing their bottom lines, a picture of excess and consumerism rather than joy and worship for the one who has come to save us during the first Advent. It has become filled with expectations of give-and-take.
Therefore, it would be easy for us to view this collaboration through a similar model of reciprocal giving. You get an article, we get an article. You get a banner, here’s an introduction. It’s easy to forget that Jesus’s ultimate sacrifice on the cross, pointed to as we celebrate His birth, was given freely and without expectation of return. It’s easy to forget that the wise men, traveling from afar, gave their gifts out of joy, love, and worship, not out of obligation.
I barely remember what I’ve received for Christmas in years past. What I do remember is working together to set up decorations and gathering in fellowship around the dinner table. We’ve called this project a collaboration for a reason—we wanted it to be a project where we worked together. Just as the wise men did not give gifts out of a sense of obligation or to secure their place in heaven, we do not write and create because we desire reciprocity. Instead, we desire to create something that glorifies God.
As we prepare for and anticipate Christ’s birth and look ahead to his second coming this Advent, let us try to remember why He came—to give an impossibly free gift of unlimited grace. Perhaps that reminder can help us in our spirit of giving and collaboration this Christmas season.
– Brandon Fong, Co-Editor in Chief of the Penn Epistle
Penn Epistle 