Today is the first Sunday of Advent, a season on the church calendar that begins our collective journey that ends at Christmas morning with the birth of Christ. As we take this long walk together, we will spend the next few Sundays telling and retelling the Christmas story. The story should sound familiar as, no doubt, you’ve heard it many times before. But after such a difficult year, a year unlike any other, my prayer is that the story takes on new meaning and offers a renewed hope. All good stories have a plot, plot twists, unexpected characters and a hero. Today, however, we start simply by setting the stage. It turns out that our 2020 experience gets us closer to the setting of Christmas than you might realize.