“The season of Advent often gets combined with Christmas, thanks to retail and academic calendars encroaching on the liturgical calendar and a general love for celebration and excess. Our duty as preachers and teachers, however, remains to remind our people that Advent is a time of quiet and profound preparation for the liturgical coming of the Lord; a time of reflection, of muted anticipation, of patience.”

Those are wise words, and they come from a piece by Leroy Huizenga at the Christian Leadership Center’s homiletics website, which I mentioned yesterday. You can find the rest here.

Matthew Schmitz is the deputy editor of First Things. You can follow him on Twitter.