The Christian Community celebrates at Christmas-time not only the historical birth of Jesus, but a renewed awareness of His presence in our time.
The Advent festival, with its four Sundays, prepares for Christmas. We remember how mankind needed a Saviour 2000 years ago, an on-going result of the Fall, and how Mary and Joseph were the final and crucial link in a long chain extending from Adam to Jesus.
Acknowledging the meaning of advent, "coming", The Christian Community has a modern understanding of how the returning, re-appearing Christ can be perceived already in our time by individual men and women in special moments of destiny. His Coming is a long process, not a once-off event for everyone simultaneously.
The angels on the Ascension mountain (Acts, chapter 1) foretold that Christ would return in the being of the clouds; this is another way of saying that He will re-appear in the sphere of the life-forces that move on and around the earth.
In South Africa the might of the mid-summer sun can point us to the future full, glorious revelation of the returning Son of Man, the Christ, from cosmic heights.
In The Christian Community Christmas is celebrated for 12 days - as old legends also have it. This period of 13 holy nights (from Christmas Eve to 6th January) and 12 days, "the time between the years" can be experienced as a special time of grace. The Eucharist service of The Christian Community is celebrated at midnight on 24th/25th December and on each successive day.
January 6th, originally the day when Our Lord`s birth was celebrated, is now commemorated as the day of Christ`s baptism in the river Jordan (the "birth" of the Christ, when Jesus was 30 years old: Luke ch. 3, verse 22, in some old manuscripts).
The day also marks the arrival of of the three wise men at the home of the child Jesus and his parents (Matthew ch.2), the epiphany or "showing" of the child to the representatives of the ancient world.This festival of Epiphany lasts from January 6th through the following four weeks. It is a time to reflect on and inwardly digest the happening of Christmas - each year anew for "human beings of good will" who seek a real connection to the spiritual world and to Him whose life spans that world and ours.