Golden light tearing open the night sky over desert hills

A four-week, DONATION-BASED online Advent class

Tear Open
the Heavens

Advent for Indifferent Strangers

Four weeks with Andrew Root and Tripp Fuller on the Advent texts, timed so each one lands before you preach it — or before you have to survive December.

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THE COST? A course like this is typically offered for $250 or more, but we invite you to contribute whatever you can (including $0) to help make this possible for everyone!

This Advent, Andy Root and Tripp Fuller take up Isaiah's ancient prayer — O that you would tear open the heavens and come down — and ask what it means to pray it now.

A figure gazing at the heavens torn open with golden light

We'll read the Year B lectionary texts alongside the crisis thinkers who keep naming our moment: a secular age that lost its vertical, an acceleration that leaves no room to wait, a burnout culture that cannot linger. Advent, read slowly, has something to say to all of it.

Each lecture releases the week before its Sunday, so the texts land in time to shape what you preach — or simply to steady you through the longest month. Livestreamed conversations follow on Tuesdays, and every replay is available on the Class Resource Page.

This class is for pastors who need sermon fuel before Sunday, theology nerds who want to go deeper, and anyone wondering what Christian hope sounds like to people who never learned the words.

Why This, Why Now?

Congregations are chasing growth. Pastors are exhausted. And Advent — four weeks of darkness, waiting, and longing — gets swallowed whole by the machinery of December before it can do its work.

Meanwhile the neighbors changed. Schleiermacher wrote his Speeches for the cultured despisers of religion — people who knew the faith well enough to reject it. Those people are disappearing. In their place: indifferent strangers who don't know the story well enough to reject it. They aren't arguing with the church. They just aren't asking.

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What do you say when nobody is asking?

Advent is built for exactly this. Isaiah begs the sky to split. Second Peter waits on a thousand years as a day. John the Baptist is a voice who is not the light. And God refuses David's magnificent temple — choosing instead a womb, a yes, a girl's song.

A Lutheran crisis theologian and a process theologian walk into Advent. The two of them don't resolve it — and that's the point.

We'll spend four weeks on what the church says, sings, and does when nobody is asking — and on the one night of the year they walk in anyway.

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Everything's included.

Four weeks, four kinds of substance — lectures, live conversation, reading, and a real community. Read all of it, some of it, or none of it.

4

Pre-Recorded Lectures

Two from Andy, two from Tripp — 30 to 35 minutes each, released the week before each live session so the text is already in you when the conversation starts. Watch on your own time, as many times as you need.

5

Live Conversations (70 min)

The host who didn't lecture runs it — opening with the thing they don't buy. Questions sorted by pastor, laypeople, and the nerd question. Tuesdays at 10am PT / 1pm ET with replays available on the Class Resource Page.

30–40

A Reading Packet Every Week

Thirty to forty pages you can finish in an evening: the lectionary texts in full, plus Taylor, Rosa, Han, Bonhoeffer, Luther, and Schleiermacher's Christmas Eve Dialogue. Read all of it, some of it, or none of it. The lectures stand on their own.

1

A Real Community

Pastors, lay readers, grad students, and the non-religious curious — in one room. Replays and packets live on the Class Resource Page for at least a year.

The 4-Week Journey

01Advent 1
Sun Nov 29

Lecture: Nov 16 · LiveSTREAM: Nov 24

Is there anything above the ceiling?
Isaiah 64:1–9 · Ps 80 · 1 Cor 1:3–9 · Mark 13:24–37

Advent began as the season of the last things, and Isaiah’s prayer assumes there’s a heaven to rip open. We’ll explore what happens to that prayer inside Charles Taylor’s “immanent frame,” where life is lived as if this world is all there is. Andy makes the surprising case that mainline Christians need more heaven, not less, and that we can’t deal faithfully with money and growth without a real sense of eternity.

02Advent 2
Sun Dec 6

Lecture: Nov 25 · LIVESTREAM: dec 1

What in your December exists because stopping would look like failure?
Isaiah 40 · Ps 85 · 2 Peter 3:8–15a · Mark 1:1–8

Waiting has become the one thing modern people can’t do, and it’s the whole content of Advent. With Hartmut Rosa on acceleration and Byung-Chul Han on burnout and the lost art of lingering, we’ll ask why our churches and our calendars keep speeding up. We’ll also ask what it would mean to receive what we cannot control, and what “comfort, comfort my people” says to a pastor and people running on empty.

03Advent 3
Sun Dec 13

Lecture: DEC 2 · LIVESTREAM: dec 8

Do you have to be the light, or just say where it is?
Isaiah 61 · Ps 126 / Luke 1:46b–55 · 1 Thess 5:16–24 · John 1:6–8,19–28

John the Baptist is defined by what he is not. He’s a witness to a light he doesn’t own. From a Nazi prison cell, Dietrich Bonhoeffer compared Advent to waiting for a door that can only be opened from the outside. He also asked what faith becomes in a “world come of age” that no longer needs religion. We’ll read Bonhoeffer alongside Han’s distinction between hope and optimism, and ask how a church can bear witness when no one is asking.

04Advent 4
Dec 20

Lecture: DEC 9 · LIVESTREAM: dec 15

What is your church trying to build for God that God didn't ask for?
2 Sam 7 · Luke 1:46b–55 / Ps 89 · Rom 16:25–27 · Luke 1:26–38

David wants to build God a house, and God says no. The lectionary sets that refusal right next to Mary's yes: a girl who asks how this can be, gets no explanation, and says let it be. Andy draws on his new work on the prophets and the fertility gods, the gods you serve to get growth, and on Luther's commentary on the Magnificat, where Mary is the prophet whose song pulls down the high and lifts up the low, to imagine a kind of growth that isn't escalation. Something grows in her that she didn't build, plan, or fund. For a church with a temple project of its own, that's the week's question, and the week's relief.

★Christmas Eve

The One Night They Walk In 

LIVESTREAM: DEC 17

What do you say to someone who doesn't know the story well enough to reject it?
Isaiah 9 · Titus 2 · Luke 2

Christmas Eve is the one night the indifferent strangers still show up, and the founder of liberal theology left us a parable for it. Seven years after writing the Speeches to religion's cultured despisers, Schleiermacher wrote the Christmas Eve Dialogue: a family on Christmas Eve, the women and children holding the feast through story and song and the presence of a child, the men delivering competing theological speeches, and then a latecomer who refuses to make a speech at all, says the night calls for something other than words, and asks for music. The theologian of argument ended his own Christmas text by giving up on argument. We read it as the model for the night: what to say and what not to say to the stranger in the pew, why the shortest possible sermon is usually the right one, and what the liturgy, the music, and the room have to carry when the words can't.

Thinkers We're Engaging

Charles TaylorThe secular age

The immanent frame — how belief itself became one option among many.

Hartmut RosaAcceleration · resonance

Why a world that moves faster feels less alive, and what resonance restores.

Byung-Chul HanBurnout · ritual · hope

The achievement society that exhausts itself, and the ritual that holds time open.

Dietrich BonhoefferAdvent sermons · prison letters

A cell door that can only be opened from the outside — Advent as waiting.

Martin LutherMary as prophet · Magnificat

The Magnificat as the most radical song the church still dares to sing.

Friedrich SchleiermacherSpeeches · Christmas Eve Dialogue

The cultured despisers — and his strange, tender dialogue on Christmas night.

Augustinevia Peter Brown

Desire, restlessness, and a heart that waits until it rests.

A short reading packet of excerpts accompanies each session — read as much or as little as you like.

Meet Your Hosts

Andrew Root

Andrew Root

Lutheran Crisis Theologian

Andrew Root is the Carrie Olson Baalson Professor of Youth and Family Ministry at Luther Seminary and one of the most read practical theologians of the last decade. His Ministry in a Secular Age series (The Pastor in a Secular Age, The Congregation in a Secular Age, Churches and the Crisis of Decline) brought Charles Taylor and Hartmut Rosa into the life of the ordinary congregation, and his recent books, The Church After Innovation, The Church in an Age of Secular Mysticisms, and Evangelism in an Age of Despair, keep asking the question the mainline would rather avoid: what if the church's problem isn't that it's behind, but that it's trying to keep up? His new work on the prophets, the fertility gods, and the logic of guaranteed growth is where this class begins.

Tripp Fuller

Tripp Fuller

Process Theologian

Tripp Fuller is the founder and host of the Homebrewed Christianity Podcast, which has spent eighteen years putting the best theologians, philosophers, and biblical scholars in front of people who actually have to live with the questions. He holds a PhD in Philosophy, Religion, and Theology from Claremont and did his postdoctoral work in science and religion at the University of Edinburgh. He has taught online courses to more than 20,000 students and is Visiting Professor at Luther Seminary. He is a process theologian with a higher Christology than most of his progressive friends.

What People Say About
Homebrewed Christianity Classes

As a minister these classes and conversations have enriched how I read and engage with our sacred texts.
Will Rose
Parish Pastor · Chapel Hill, NC
Homebrewed Christianity is in my opinion the best open and interactive community I've ever been a part of. I've learned so much from people who are not only brilliant but kind and fun.
Ednaldo Elme
Musician & lifelong learner
I've taken several Homebrewed classes over the years... I've learned things I wouldn't have otherwise had access to... It's been a treasure to be part of them.
Jonathan Stegall
Faith-rooted organizer, abolitionist, designer & coder
HBC classes have been an absolute lifeline for continuing education outside the adult Sunday school setting.
John Pohl, MD
Pediatric Surgeon

Questions, answered honestly.

Yes. A course like this is typically offered for $250 or more, but we invite you to contribute whatever you can to help make this possible for everyone! Give nothing and still get everything...the full class, packets, replays, and Christmas Eve guide are yours either way.

Lectures are pre-recorded, and every live conversation is replayed the next day. Submit your questions anytime. Everything stays on the Class Resource Page for at least a year.

Absolutely. Readers, grad students, and people who left church are all here. Every session is built to land in the pulpit and on a Tuesday afternoon.

Welcome. There's no recruiting. If you want a place to start, begin with Week 2 — on waiting, acceleration, and burnout.

No. The lectures stand alone. If you buy exactly one book, make it Rosa's The Uncontrollability of the World.

The first lecture drops Monday, November 16. Plan on roughly two hours a week — less if you skip the reading, more if you fall in.

Yes — and honestly, it's better that way. Watch the lecture together, bring your questions to the live, argue about it over coffee.

You'll get reminders about the lectures, links, replays, and the guide. Unsubscribe anytime.

The first lecture drops Monday, November 16. Join the class.

24Days
02Hours
57Minutes
02Seconds
Pay what you can, including nothing All replays included No credit card required Christmas Eve guide free to everyone join the class