DECEMBER 2023/JANUARY 2024
CENTENARY UNITED METHODIST CHURCH
Distant Music
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Can you hear the distant music sounding from the pipe and horn, bearing news of joy and gladness “Christ, the King of heaven is born."
hese words open the Invitatory Carol of this year's Festival of Lessons & Carols, and they call us to train our hearts on a reality that we far too often overlook. After all, the rush is on! We've emerged from the Thanksgiving holiday with long to-do lists, calendars growing fuller by the day, and stress levels ascending. Should we choose to give in to these perennial conditions, we are likely to altogether miss the “distant music” that carries the capacity to reorient our lives, our priorities, our identities, our purpose. This season is filled with Music & Arts offerings at Centenary - our Festival of Lessons & Carols, the Winston-Salem Choral Academy, Piedmont Wind Symphony, and Bel Canto Company in concert, a beautiful Neighborhood Showcase in our Atrium and 4 ½ Street Galleries, Carillonneurs and Creative Arts Experience in worship, children's art in the Atrium, and more. And yet, if we treat these offerings as a list of events to complete, a series of programs to attend, we will have missed their purpose. Advent calls us to a place of internal clarity. It beckons us to suspend the extraneous and superfluous distractions of our lives until we can hear and feel a “holy harmony” made known to us in and by the coming of Christ, poignantly expressed by these anonymously penned words: Thou shalt know Him when He comes, not by any din of drums, nor His manners nor His airs, nor by anything He wears. Thou shalt know Him when He comes, not by His crown or by His gown, but His coming known shall be by the holy harmony which His coming makes in thee. Thou shalt know Him when He comes. This Advent, may we listen, may we watch, that we might truly know Him when He comes. - Jonathan Emmons, Director of Music Ministries