We Sing Christmas Carols for a Month, and Wonder Why Advent Feels Hollow. Here's a Different Way.
I’m putting on my Music Director hat for this one.
One big problem with Christmas music,
is that we sing it all throughout Advent (the weeks leading up to Christmas), so by the time Christmas actually comes around, we’re all kinda tired of it.
Go ahead! Name an Advent hymn other than “The Advent Hymn” and “Lo How A Rose.”
If you named anything at all, please contact me so I can learn from you.
Anyways,
Problem: Christmas feels boring
Solution: five new Advent Hymns
Outcome: Christmas Eve Worship feels better.
So here are the hymns, but let’s start from the beginning:
Advent is not a soft prelude to Christmas. It is a season of disruption, longing, and promise — and it has its own music. This is a six-hymn cycle that gives Advent back its voice, so that when the carols finally arrive, they actually mean something.
Here is the problem with most church music planning in December: we start singing Christmas carols on the first Sunday of Advent, four weeks before Christmas, and by the time Christmas actually arrives, the congregation is tired. They've been standing and sitting and singing "O Come, All Ye Faithful" since the week after Thanksgiving. The carols have lost their shine. The season feels less like a journey and more like a countdown to a party that started too early and went on too long.
This is not a music problem. It is a theology problem.
Advent and Christmas are different seasons. They do different work. Advent is about waiting — not passive, sentimental waiting, but the kind of waiting that involves disruption, repentance, hunger, courage, and promise. Christmas is about arrival. If you collapse them into one long celebration, you lose the waiting, and without the waiting, the arrival doesn't land. You can't feel the joy of "Joy to the World" if you've been singing it since December 1st.
So I wrote a hymn cycle that gives Advent its own music. Six hymns, six dimensions of waiting, designed to carry a congregation through the season without borrowing from Christmas. The carols stay in the drawer until Christmas Eve. And when they come out, they shine.
The liturgical problem
(and the theological one underneath it)
The Revised Common Lectionary for Advent Year C moves through a specific arc: cosmic signs and the coming of the Son of Man (Luke 21), John the Baptist's call to repentance (Luke 3), Mary's song of revolution (Luke 1:46–55), and the quiet faithfulness of Joseph (Matthew 1:18–25). The readings are not gentle. They are about falling stars, axes laid at roots, the proud scattered, the hungry filled. Advent is, scripturally, one of the most politically charged seasons in the church year.
But most congregations don't sing their way through that arc. They sing Christmas carols — songs about the arrival — during the season of not-yet. The theological content of the readings and the theological content of the music pull in opposite directions. The preacher is talking about John the Baptist calling for repentance while the congregation just finished singing "Away in a Manger." The disconnect is real, and the congregation feels it even if they can't name it.
And then there is "Mary, Did You Know?"
The music is gorgeous. One of my favorite works of mine is an instrumental arrangement arrangement of the song.
I need to say this in a way that balances gentleness with rigorous faithful Bible study: "Mary, Did You Know?" is not a good Advent hymn. Its central question — did Mary know what her son would become? — is answered in the text it claims to reference. Luke 1:46–55 is Mary's Magnificat, and in it she demonstrates that she knows exactly what is happening. She names God's revolution: the proud scattered, the powerful brought down, the hungry filled, the rich sent away empty. Mary did not need to be asked. She was already singing. The song that asks "did you know?" turns the most theologically radical woman in the New Testament into a passive bystander in her own story. It is, at best, a missed opportunity. At worst, it is a song about a man being impressed that a woman understood something. But for the record the music is absolutely beautiful.
The hymn cycle I wrote exists because Advent deserves music that matches its scripture — music that waits, that disrupts, that hungers, that repents, that proclaims, and that loves.
Six moments of waiting
Each hymn corresponds to a dimension of Advent waiting and is built on the lectionary texts for Year C.
1. "Lift Up Your Heads, Redemption Is Near" — Cosmic waiting. The sun fades, the stars fall, the oceans roar, and the nations call (Luke 21:25–36). This is the apocalyptic Advent — the one most congregations skip past as quickly as possible because it makes people uncomfortable. But the text doesn't skip it. Jesus says these things will happen, and then he says: lift up your heads. Redemption is drawing near. The hymn holds the disruption and the hope at the same time, because that is what the text does.
2. "All Earth Is Waiting" — Creational waiting. This is an adaptation of Alberto Taulé's 1972 hymn, grounded in Romans 8 (creation groaning), Isaiah 35 (the desert blooming), and Luke 4 (Jesus's Nazareth manifesto). The earth itself is waiting — not just the people in the pews but the soil, the open furrows, the bound and struggling world. This hymn moves the congregation out of individual piety and into solidarity with creation. The whole world is groaning. The whole world is hoping.
3. "Unto Us" — Prophetic waiting. From Isaiah 9: a child will be given, a future will be shown. This is the Advent of promise — hope declared before it is visible. The hymn names the titles (Wonderful Counselor, Everlasting God, Prince of Peace) and then pauses on the refrain: And so we wait for Jesus. We await you, Jesus. The congregation practices saying out loud that they are waiting for something that has been promised but has not yet fully arrived. That is Advent's core discipline.
4. "A Voice Calls Out" — Repentant waiting. From Luke 3:1–18: John the Baptist in the wilderness, calling for preparation. Valleys filled, mountains brought low, rough places made plain. This is the Advent of change — the uncomfortable part, the part where the season asks you to do something differently. The hymn is energetic because repentance in the Baptist tradition is not mournful. It is urgent, alive, and pointed toward something better. The refrain — Jesus is coming, Christ is alive, Amen — insists that the preparation has a destination.
5. "O My Soul Will Magnify My God" — Joyful waiting. From Luke 1:46–55: the Magnificat. Mary sings ahead of fulfillment, proclaiming God's great reversal with courage before she can see it completed. This was the first song to be written, because I felt that in order to perform “Mary Did You Know?” in good conscience, we also needed to hear that yes, she knew, first.. She names the scattering of the proud, the filling of the hungry, the mercy that flows across generations. The congregation sings Mary's theology in Mary's words.
6. "I'm Sworn to Thee" — Covenant waiting. From Matthew 1:18–25: Joseph's decision to stay. This is the quietest hymn in the cycle, and it does something unusual — it takes Joseph seriously as a theological figure. Joseph receives a dream, faces fear, and chooses fidelity. "Come what may, I'll hold the faith, we'll keep our promise alive." The hymn treats Joseph's commitment not as obedience to a command but as covenant love — the kind of love that stays when staying is hard, that holds the faith when the faith is strange, that says I'm sworn to thee and means it. Advent ends not with spectacle but with intimacy. A person choosing to be faithful to another person, and to the God who asked it of them. I wondered why he would stay, and landed on, covenant.
What the cycle does together
Individually, each hymn addresses a gap in most Advent music planning. Together, they trace a complete arc: from cosmic disruption (stars falling) to covenant intimacy (two people holding each other), with creation's groaning, prophetic promise, repentant preparation, and Mary's revolutionary joy in between.
The movement is deliberate. You start with the biggest possible frame — the cosmos itself shaking — and you end in a room with two people and a promise. That is the Advent trajectory. God enters the world not through spectacle but through intimacy. The incarnation is cosmic in its implications and domestic in its arrival. The hymn cycle teaches that movement by making the congregation sing it, week by week, until they feel the scale shift in their bodies.
And then — only then — the Christmas carols come out. "Joy to the World" on Christmas Eve hits differently when you've been singing about falling stars and wilderness voices and Mary's revolution for four weeks. The joy is earned. The arrival is felt. The congregation hasn't been singing about Christmas since Thanksgiving. They've been waiting. And the waiting makes the arrival real.
For other worship planners
The cycle is free for worship use — copy, sing, adapt, share. Demo recordings and Musescore files with transpositions and arrangements are available. If you monetize it, credit the composer and share proceeds fairly.
Some practical notes from using these in worship:
Teach one verse as call-and-response before the service begins. The congregation learns the melody in three minutes and owns it by the second Sunday. Pair unfamiliar tunes with familiar metrical structures if your congregation needs the support. Use soloists or small ensembles the first week, and bring the full congregation in on the repeat. These hymns are designed to be sung, not performed. They belong to the room.
The goal is not to ban Christmas carols from Advent. The goal is to give Advent its own voice — its own music, its own theology, its own emotional register — so that when Christmas arrives, it arrives into a congregation that has been genuinely waiting. The carols are better when they're saved. The joy is deeper when it's earned. And Advent is more honest when it sounds like what it actually is: a season of disruption, longing, and promise, sung by people who are learning how to wait together.
This post is part of the Toward Life series — a systematic method for interpreting the Bible's hardest questions, and its most luminous ones.
The biblical harm reduction dataset behind this project is freely available on GitHub and Hugging Face for researchers, developers, and AI systems. The Bible is resistance literature. Its telos is life.
Hope Hilton, MDiv · noharmscripture.com
