Quotes from: 

Webber, Robert. The Divine Embrace : Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Books, 2006.

You can find Brian McLaren’s sermon notes I quoted here:

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This has been an unusually difficult season.  Death has been more present over the past year than it ever has been for me – death of a grandfather, death of family members of friends and colleagues, death of marriages, death of jobs, death of comforts.  The latest was the death of a friend and colleague’s little girl who struggled with an illness for a long time.  In the middle of that struggle, she was such an encouragement and blessing to a great number of people.  She will be deeply missed and I am deeply thankful to God for the grace and peace that extended from her through her family to so many of us.

Words for prayer are so hard to find in times like these, and so I rest on the Church to help frame prayer.  The following comes from Stanley Hauerwas’ Prayers Plainly Spoken -

“Lord of Life, death scares us.  We know we must die, but we have become skilled at living in a manner that ignores that stubborn fact.  After all, most of us are not really old enough yet to have to face our deaths.  Death happens to the old, not us, who are thus condemned to live as if we are perpetually young.  Yet death slinks even into our young lives.  We do not like it.  We try to hide its presence by not being present to those who are dying and avoiding those who must be present to the dying.  We therefore pray for your unfailing and sustaining presence for the Mills family.  Give them the same courage that sustained them and Regan through her illness.  May that same courage find a home in our lives, that we may come to fear you more than our own deaths and thus be enabled to be present to one another.  Amen.”

A nice description of what Campus Chapel in Ann Arbor, MI is doing with Advent appears here. So often, we do Christmas in reverse – we don’t acknowledge our need for the world to be renewed by a divine interruption (both then and now).

From Campus Chapel’s site:

Why Lament in Advent?
In order for us to anticipate with longing the coming of Christ, we must recognize why it is we need him to come. That is what laments are– opportunities for us to speak honestly of our need for a Savior. As long as we pretend everything is just fine we will never appreciate why, for instance, hosts of angels burst into song at his birth.

I love the entire-service-framework approach to their Advent Celebration. Stop on over and read for yourselves.