Advent Meditations for December 15-21
Fifteenth Day of Advent Sunday, December 15, 2024
Scriptural Text: Zephaniah 3:14-20 “The Ultimate Homecoming”
Wars and rumors of wars. Sieges and standoffs. Deportations and liberations. The Bible has it all, although the details of that long and complicated history may seem little more than a blur in our recollection or interest. Yet even if the names and details of the lives of our ancestors in the faith are largely irrelevant to us at this distance in time and geography, the fact that we are here, still remembering them and worshiping the God for whom their witness so inspires our own—that is nothing short of amazing. Better put, it is nothing less than miraculous!
There is no disguising the fact that I’m a history buff. And I’ve long understood that history holds for us much more than dates and names to be learned and chronologically sequenced. For me, history is biography, or more pointedly, it is our collective human diary, preserving for us the testimony of people from the past who are more like us than we often care to admit. It is true that much of what we recall in historical record has been authored by those in power, those who ultimately endured and survived the tumults of wars, famines, plagues and genocides. Yet history also contains, in its art and artifacts, stories and songs, the very fingerprints of our collective story as human beings. Whenever we choose to either ignore or forget who we have been and what we have done in the yesterdays of our existence, we open ourselves to that peculiar form of cognitive myopia in which context and perspective become blurred, if not entirely lost. To borrow the language of gestalt psychology, we do ourselves a disservice whenever we permit our preoccupations with the “now” of our own experience to blind us to our connectivity with the historical, cultural and spiritual ground in which all previous “nows” were once lived.
Among the easily overlooked voices from our distant past, Zephaniah may stand out as one we may most easily disregard. For his very short book of oracles appears to be a variation on a theme more memorably and eloquently handled by those prophets who command greater air time from our pulpits, such as Isaiah, Jeremiah, Micah, or Amos. No matter who sings it, however, the prophetic theme song remains consistent and clear : Judah has disobeyed God; God is angry and is going to punish His people; but God will not ever forsake those who are faithful; and no matter how bad it gets, God will not forget His promises to redeem them. Zephaniah’s final few verses leave us with God’s pledge to bring home those who have endured both war and exile, that remnant of those who never ceased to remain true and obedient to God’s commands.
History reports that, at least on two occasions-—the decree of Cyrus the Persian liberating the Jewish refugees in Babylon, and the opening of Israel to Jewish emigrees after World War II—the descendants of the ancient Israelites came home to this land from which their identity was so linked. The first homecoming must have been a ragged one, coming in several waves and captured in bits and pieces in books like Isaiah, Ezra, Nehemiah, Haggai, and Zecharaiah. Valleys and mountains were not leveled out—except spiritually perhaps—and rough places were not made as plain as Isaiah’s wishful poem imagined. There was building to be done, land to be restored, conflicts to be worked out among those vying for leadership and strife to be managed with those living on the land who felt pushed out by the interlopers who had returned.
The prophet of today’s reading, Zephaniah, who lived in those days of trouble before Judah was destroyed and led into Babylonian captivity, could only dream of a far-in-the-future restoration of God’s people. The reality of terror, invasion, and the seemingly hopeless prospect of peace for the modern state of Israel and its neighbors can only make us wonder if the descendants of Abraham—Jews, Christians and Moslems—will ever see that Divine promise, made so long ago, come to pass. At Advent we would do well to pray that it will, and soon.
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Sixteenth Day of Advent Monday, December 16, 2024
Scriptural Text: Isaiah 11:1-9 “The Peaceable Kingdom”
If you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all. Such a comment could be said about the collection of over 60 paintings by the American Quaker preacher and painter, Edward Hicks (1780-1849). It goes without saying that he was drawn to both the spirit and detail of Isaiah’s idyllic picture of life in God’s realized kingdom. Wolves and lamps, leopards and kids, calves and lions, cows and bears, children and snakes—all living in harmony and bliss. The artist’s rendering of this scene, set in early American bucolic landscapes, is memorable, not only for the bland or even smiling faces of its human and animal subjects, but for the peaceful gathering of colonials and native Americans standing in the background. In looking upon his paintings the word utopian, heavenly and paradisiacal, come to mind.
The Peaceable Kingdom of Isaiah’s longing has served as a launching pad for many of our imaginings about heaven or the hoped-for world after God makes all things new. It is dreamy, idealistic, and so far-fetched that we likely dismiss it out of hand when hearing it read in our churches during each Advent season. I don’t say this because I am a hopeless cynic or prefer living under the harsh terms of a world in which an amoral law of the jungle seems to prevail much of the time. It just seems to me that what Hicks tried to capture in paint is just not real, and never will be. Permit me to explain why I feel this way.
Isaiah’s prophecy, while portraying an innocence that defies anything we’ve ever encountered with animals or other humans, nonetheless lays bare two of the Bible’s most enduring images: a hoped-for righteous leader, and a reckoning of judgment upon those who have chosen wickedness over goodness. It is not surprising that Isaiah expected this anticipated leader to emerge from the royal family line of Judah’s King David. Rule by this family is all he had ever known, and he, like so many others living in the Jerusalem of that era, felt that God’s unconditional favor rested uniquely on this line of kings. Yet the continued failure of these sons of David that so disappointed him must have provoked him to imagine a time when things would finally get better, when God’s covenant with Israel would be fully realized. So he dreamed of such a time, when one of these leaders would actually live up to the righteousness of God, administering with wisdom and a proper reverence for justice, deciding on behalf of the poor and meek and acting with both fairness and compassion? Then all of the earth would be so filled with the very presence of God that, even in the animal kingdom, predators and prey would live in peace.
It is quite an image to contemplate, surpassing anything that any artist might conceive, or any prophet might capture in words. As we move through Advent into the Christmas season, where expressions of good will and charity compete with the greedier and more violent angels of our nature, perhaps Isaiah’s voice will provide us with more than dreamy idealism. Perhaps then the Christ child about whom we sing, that shoot from the stump of the Jesse tree we claim as Emmanuel—will be to us in our time what Isaiah longed for in his.
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Seventeenth Day of Advent Tuesday, December 17, 2024
Scriptural Text: Numbers 16:20-35 “An earthshaking judgment”
Sometimes in reading biblical stories you find yourself asking, “did this really happen?” The lectionary text from Numbers is such a story. In fact, it seems so tailor-made for DeMille’s Ten Commandments, that I’m surprised it wasn’t included. Or was it? If my memory serves me correctly, Korah’s insurrection—which came much later in the Exodus narrative—was lumped into the story of the Golden Calf rebellion, both of them portraying a God who held nothing back in meting out punishment on those who challenged His authority. Most theater-goers, then as now, could care less as to the accuracy of a modern retelling of such an ancient saga. The simple truth is that no matter how convincing Hollywood tries to portray biblical history, seeing it in technicolor on the silver screen makes it no more believable than reading it in the privacy of our homes.
I won’t be surprised if some of you reading this meditation might not agree with my suggesting that that there is an element of myth or fantasy in biblical lore. Yet it remains for us a challenge of faith whenever we try to square such a biblical account with reality as we know it in living each day on this planet. On the question of did, or could such a thing happen we must face the underlying issue of how God works in this world, writing natural events or through supernatural, indeed magical, insertions? And that is a divide that often puts us at odds with each other over the meaning of myth, truth, and fact, especially when it pertains to the scriptures.
But aside from whether we choose to believe that God punished Korah by swallowing him and his confederates up in a gaping fissure, the larger issue for me is not one of supernatural agency, but of theological likelihood. Does God ever act like this? Our ancestors, living prior to scientific explanations of how things work, would say yes, for nothing is impossible with God. Yet for me the quandary is deeper than that. How can we possibly reconcile such a portrayal of God as a take-no-prisoners tyrant who has no patience with those who challenge Him with the image of Jesus, on his knees, scribbling in the dirt, convincing an angry mob of the righteous to spare the life of an adulteress? Or how do we square God’s uncompromising justice with Jesus calling for clemency on those who betrayed, abandoned, and tortured him on Calvary?
Korah’s rebellion was an unsettling vote of no confidence by a faction of those Israelites who, in wandering through the Sinai desert, felt their leader no longer warranted their support. Moses seems to have weathered such insurrections on more than one occasion, each one falling short of its designs to unseat him. The details of what actually happened to Korah and his supporters is likely beyond our explaining or proving with certainty. Yet given how out of synch such a targeted earthquake is with our own understanding and experience of natural disasters, I suspect a less fantastic solution to the uprising lay buried within the many layers of textual tradition.
On the question of did God slay the rebels who challenged Moses, my faith makes me say no, for it turns God into an Olympian tyrant who acts on passions that not only diminish any claim to divinity—they reduce God to a being whose motives are no more virtuous or controlled than our own. And whenever we let ourselves depict God in such violent and self-serving terms, we make of God the worst of idols—one created in our own image.
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Eighteenth Day of Advent Wednesday, December 18, 2024
Scriptural Text: Luke 7:31-35 “A generational comparison”
I am one of the ever-shrinking number of folks who came to life sometime between 1946-1964. Perhaps not as noble in reputation as the Greatest Generation who parented us, we Baby Boomers have been the recipients of the freedom they fought so hard to secure in World War II. We’re probably also the first of several generations to be regarded as pampered and spoiled by our elders, even though such reputations, like all generalizations, are neither entirely true nor false.
Boomers like me once set the tone for the cultural transformations that have come to full-blown expression in today’s world: rock music in its many forms, unconventional dress and hairstyles, blatant sexual expressiveness, the open defiance of authority and a widespread cynicism of most traditional values. Now we find ourselves on the opposite side of the “generation gap” that so distanced us from the values and habits of our elders. I guess what goes around does come around if you survive long enough to witness it.
While still rather tender of age by Boomer standards, Jesus nonetheless seems to have found himself at odds with his own generation. “To what shall I compare this generation?” he mused in speaking to audiences who didn’t know what to make of him. In reading this I sense that Jesus’ contemporaries preferred heroes they could contain within categories in which their words and deeds could be easily understood and stereotyped. Such simplistic depictions made it easy for them, as with us, to judge them as like us or not like us, good people or bad, those worth following or deserving of our contempt. Imagine that!
It was against such black-and-white, either-or attitudes that Jesus offered the sarcastic assessment of his generation in Luke 7. John the Baptist’s proclamation from God left them stunned in its strident criticism of what they must do to inherit the Kingdom. His wild, Elijah-like persona was too extreme and severe for most of them to stomach. So his arrest and execution came as no surprise to those who could write him off as another misguided religious fanatic. And then Jesus came along, speaking much the same message, but cutting a figure quite the opposite of John in both temperament and lifestyle. How could the God of Israel have chosen such a spokesman as him? Not only was he cavalier in ignoring the kosher rules governing what God had commanded us to eat and drink—but he openly consorted with publicans, sinners and tax-gathering Roman sympathizers!
What do they want? How often Jesus must have asked himself. John was too harsh and condemning, and I’m too casual and welcoming. What are they looking for, and how will God ever be able to reach the people of this generation? If only they could put aside their self-righteousness and become as trusting and accepting as these little children who flock to me. For only to such can the Kingdom of God be perceived, and in turn, received.
What do we want, really want, for Christmas this year? Will it come in the mail, or rest among the colorfully wrapped things that only money can buy, awaiting our discovery on Christmas morn? Or is the present we think we want to be found in the Presence we really need to rediscover in our hearts, that no-thing short of God can provide?
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Nineteenth Day of Advent Thursday, December 19, 2024
Scriptural Text: Jeremiah 31:31-34 “A covenant without words”
“It was the best of times, the worst of times.” Dicken’s opening lines to A Tale of Two Cities often strikes me as among the most profound introductions to any saga of human existence. For it not only captures the conflicting nature of human perception, in nearly every age of history. At the same time it throws us back upon the subjectivity of our impressions of any moment in time, past or present. For the meaning of any historical moment lies less in the passage of events than in the human interpretation of those events.
The prophet Jeremiah well could have quoted Dickens if it weren’t chronologically impossible for him to have done so. He witnessed how the great promise of Israel as a united kingdom called into being by God was in shambles. Most of the original twelve tribal regions had long been swallowed up by Assyrian armies, rendering them little more than a reminder of former glory. The tribe of Judah alone had somehow managed to hang on, a bullet-dodging that had given many who lived in Jerusalem a false sense of their unconditional protection from God. Jeremiah didn’t buy it, however. It wasn’t that he doubted the promises of the Lord—he just didn’t think that the attitudes and the conduct of the Judahite survivors marked them as any more righteous or deserving of God’s immunity from judgment than their most hated enemies. And he made a career of letting everyone know of the catastrophic fate he believed God was about to bring upon them.
For his efforts in warning his countrymen he was mocked, abused, and imprisoned on multiple occasions. Yet he persisted, believing that God, like a potter working malleable clay on his wheel, would soon have no use for a Judah whose flaws were now set and hardened. For him it was, without doubt, the worst of times. Amazingly he never completely lost hope. While he was skeptical of the resolve and intentions of the king and his cohort of priests and prophets to reform, yet he never doubted the commitment of God to the people He had called out of Egypt to be His own.
The days are coming, said Jeremiah, when I will restore Israel and Judah as a nation that I can once again call my own. But the covenant that I enjoin with them shall not be in laws carved on tablets or promises written on scrolls.. In that new Israel I will be present as intimately as the air they breathe and as persistently as their ever-waking thoughts. And I will be so close to them, and they to me, that they will never need to wonder where I am or if I am.
In moments where the indwelling of such a hope took hold of Jeremiah, he caught a glimpse of what the best of times would be like. And while he never lived to see it come to fruition as he might have imagined or wanted, yet the vision he was able to express did not die with Jerusalem’s capture and Judah’s destruction. Nor was it lost on those generations who lived out their days in Babylonian captivity, or under Persian vassalage, or when the pogrom’s of the tyrant Antiochus threatened to extinguish all reminders of their ancestral faith. More than five hundred years after Jeremiah dared hope for the day when God’s imminent presence might be seen and felt in human hearts, a child was born who became, for millions of souls, the ultimate expression of the prophet’s hope : Emmanuel—God with us. It is a hope that we, too, may share, even as we live out our days in the best and worst of times.
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Twentieth Day of Advent Friday, December 20, 2024
Scriptural Text: Hebrews 10:32-39 “Enduring Advent”
Christianity, like all religious traditions, has its share of identifying words and slogans that both distinguish it from other faiths or serve as bridges to mutual understandings. The season of Advent provides us with a number of them, such as hope, promise, prepare, awaken, anticipate, joy, peace, love, Emmanuel. Churches highlight these words in the candle-lighting liturgies that so many congregations observe in the four Sundays of the Advent season.
Both as a prelude to Christmas and an invitation for spiritual reflection, Advent has a way of exposing church goers to something deeper than the agendas and values of the feel-good, immediate gratification culture in which we live. For within the gathered church, in which the Body of Christ finds its most tangible form and substance, the Christmas story is reborn in a context that is more real and honest than outside it.
Real and honest? That may sound strange to the ear, as so much of our Christmas mythology seems anything but real, and honest. Santa Claus, flying reindeer, gifts magically appearing in living rooms decked out in seasonal attire—is this not our sincere but fruitless attempt to relive a lost childhood, one that seems much better in memory than it ever was in actuality? I believe Advent can help steer us to Christmas along a more spiritually meaningful path.
The road to Bethlehem for Christian doesn’t have to take us through American marketplaces where seasonal sales and Black Friday frenzies hold no spiritual claim. Advent urges us back to a troubled time when political realities made belief in God a precarious confession, when the birth of the Christ child was not openly celebrated but secretly observed in prayer and supplication for God’s presence in the midst of tragedy and persecution. Advent beckons us back into that moment.
The text from Hebrews reminds us of the mindset that gripped our ancestors in the faith. Its’ words echo Revelation’s opening letters to the seven churches that were once in Asia. These important scriptures do hint at some of those words we emboss on our Advent candles or stitch into vestments of purple that adorn our pulpits and altars. But the word I hear standing out from the others is this: endure. Perhaps as much if not more than the others we call upon this season, it speaks to the real and honest spirit of Christmas.
For enduring is more than surviving. To endure is to continue in hope and faith born of the assurance that if God is with us and for us, then nothing can ever separate us from His love in Christ Jesus. The writer of Hebrews implores 2nd generation followers of Jesus to cultivate that inner trust in and commitment to God from which endurance serves as more than a wish and a prayer. Enduring becomes a way of living in a world in which we accept the fact that life will bring us both pain and joy, suffering along with blessing. Enduring for us is possible because we know, in Christ, that God endures alongside us and within us.
Advent is not only a time to summon hopes that God’s kingdom may someday come to fruition on earth. It is a time to get real, and get honest, in seeking God’s presence—with us and in us—knowing that whether we live or die, we will always belong to God.
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Twenty-First Day of Advent Saturday, December 21, 2024
Scriptural Text: Psalm 80:1-7 “How long will you be angry?”
“How long?” It is a question deeply rooted in our souls, no-doubt predating its expression by a nameless psalmist more than two millennia ago. “How long…” comes naturally to our lips when we’ve hit rock bottom, when in our despair, angst, and hopelessness in trying to play the hand of cards life has dealt us, we turn our eyes to God for an answer, or at least some assurance that we are being heard. Like most questions, it reveals more about us than about the one in whom we seek an answer.
“How long,” is both a plea for help and a veiled complaint triggered by the apparent disappearance or willful negligence of a Creator whom we believed would love and care for us. As a plea it is a call for the strength to endure what seems unendurable. Perhaps in such a petition the Lord will be moved by the sincerity of our predicament, and provide us some relief. In such desperate straits we would be happy with anything, a sudden improvement in health, a restoration of fortune, an outpouring of comfort and support from friends. Many of us have sought help from on high that, over time, seems to have been a prayer answered, perhaps clearly and directly or in that backward glance of a perspective changed by time and suffering.
But “how long” can be uttered with clenched fists and locked jaws as we rage against the supposed cruelties and injustices of this world. In such moments our impassioned cries resound with anger at a God who seems to have forgotten us or, worse yet, turned life against us. The psalmist lived in a time when hardships and illnesses were easily regarded as the judgment of a God whose vacillating moods kept us as fearful as we were faithful. Breast beating, tears, and sacrifices often fell short of placating this God when His anger turned against His people. The prophets, too, wondered “how long” as they tried to reconcile the promises of God with the corruptions and unwise alliance of their leaders. And as one hostile neighbor after another brought threats of their defeat or wholesale annihilation to the very gates of their strongest citadels, their supplications to their Lord and protector grew stronger, more impatient, and less hopeful that salvation was at hand.
Advent is our season to wonder, along with them, “how long?” How long will this world labor under tyranny and injustice masquerading as peace and prosperity? How long will the many be victimized by the few? How long will we so many people resort to violence as an answer to the many circumstances that divide us, be they economic, political, social or religious? How long will any of our lives be saddled with worry over what we cannot control or fix? How long will we be paralyzed with fear of what may happen to us and to those we love as we face a future that holds more shadow than light, more doubt than certainty?
The psalmist shares our existential frustrations of prayerful petitions seeming to fall on God’s apparently deaf ears. Yet Advent invites us to do more than question and complain. It calls us to observe and to perceive how the birth of Bethlehem’s babe revealed how fully God was and is with us. And it awakens in us the possibility that, no matter what cup we must drink or cross we must bear, God will never forsake us; God’s love will never let us go.
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