Kia ora e hoa mā. It’s with a tingle of excitement that we offer you this playlist for Advent 2024, best experienced by finding a quiet spot at dawn, turning off shuffle, and listening as the sun rises.
We’ve had an image in our heart as we’ve sat with these songs. It’s of someone waking in a dark field, stirred by a glimmer of light on the horizon. As she rises, the light grows—a wondrous light, the most magnificent sight she’s ever seen. She can’t catch her breath. It’s like the night is cracking open, like a star is exploding before her eyes. Colours ripple toward her and across the sky. It’s so beautiful: it feels as if her heart will burst out of her chest. She can’t fully grasp what is happening, or what is coming. But she knows she is witnessing the dawn of the One she’s longed for—that the day is coming, that she is being called into it, and that she cannot go back into sleep.
The season of Advent invites us in to such a dawn. The time in which we live is a twilight: Christ has appeared, and now our aching world waits, crying out for all things to be made new. As wartime pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it, Advent joy is felt as the nearness of Jesus, “Master of joy beyond compare,” mingled with a “homesickness” for the coming world of the resurrection.[1]
Within that twilight, we have been sensing a more personal invitation. “You know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep” (Romans 13:11). Christ has come and changed us, yet still he asks us to turn to him, move toward the light of his face, let him transform our hearts and teach us to live for others.
May this Advent season bring to each of you a fresh sense of invitation into the new day.
Arohanui,
Ash and Ryan
[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Sermon on 1 Peter 1:7b-9, Berlin, Ascension Day, May 25, 1933,” in Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Berlin: 1932-1933, trans. Isabel Best and David Higgins, English ed., ed. Larry L. Rasmussen, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2009), 468-71.
