Advent Meditations for December 22-24
Twenty-Second Day of Advent Sunday, December 22, 2024
Scriptural Text: Micah 5:2-5a “O Little Town of Bethlehem”
When meeting people for the first time we customarily fall back on three getting to know you questions, each offered to help get a conversation moving: who are you, where are you from, and what do you do? These familial, geographic and occupational inquiries often trigger responses that pique our curiosity and stir us to want to learn more about this new acquaintance. More than one lasting friendship has been set in motion from what was gleaned from such introductory exchanges. Occasionally, however, the answers we receive may seem so different from our life experiences or range of interest that we politely move on from folks who will remain little more to us than forgettable ships we pass in the night.
For many of us, Christmas may likewise feel far more like a spiritual fly-by moment than a deeply felt and soul-transforming encounter with God. So loud and distracting is the noise of our elaborate festivities that we have little chance to really meet afresh, or be reintroduced to the One we easily call upon as Lord and Savior. As a result we may never really get to know who it is about whom we sing our carols and offer our praises. Advent may, however, provide us with the best of opportunities to make His acquaintance. How might we do this, and what would that encounter reveal? It’s worth imagining...
Who are you? Biblical scholars tell us your name was Yeshua, son of a Yosef about whom we know almost nothing. We prefer to call you Jesus, although we just as often address you as Lord, Christ, messiah, and savior. But do these terms of reverence and endearment draw us close to you, or do they consign you to titles of power or holiness that leave us at arm’s length from your embrace? And do our imaginings of who you were—who you are—come close to capturing your real being, or are they merely projections of our self-centered longings and idealistic aspirations?
Where are you from? Prophets like Micah were certain that a messianic Son of David would be born in the birthplace of their ancestral, larger-than-life king. But if you were really born in Bethlehem, why were you known as Jesus of Nazareth? Were you really from a royal lineage, or was that something our ancestors wanted you to be in fulfilling their agendas for the national restoration of Israel? Does it really matter where you started out as much as where your life took you over pathways where you healed and taught, changing for us what we came to understand as true and value as important.
What do you do? I guess there could be as many answers to this question as there are people, like us, who may ask it of you. I do believe that, for those of us who have lingered in your company, and tried our best to walk in your footsteps, you have changed the way we see God, even daring to regard, like you, as Abba, Father. And we have tried to emulate the very way you gave witness to God as the source of unconditioned grace and unqualified forgiveness. How much easier it once was for or us to persist in seeing God as a legalistic arbiter of judgment and dispenser of punishment. But not now, not after meeting God in you.
Oh to imagine speaking directly to the One who has inspired prophetic dreamers and angelic choirs singing from the heavens, in cathedral chancels, and in the most modest of our human dwellings. Advent may give us permission to let our imaginations take us to such a meeting with Jesus. If we accept that invitation to dream, to reflect, and to accept the indwelling of God in this world in the spirit that was in the Christ, we will, in ways both new and profound, make His acquaintance once again. And should that happen, even for an instant, we will never, ever, be the same again. Nor will we ever look upon the world, or our friends, or our enemies, with the same eyes.
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Twenty-Third Day of Advent Monday, December 23, 2024
Scriptural Text: 2 Peter 1:16-21 “A lamp in the darkest of nights”
Like most children, I once was rather afraid of the dark. Admittedly I can still get spooked while walking through unfamiliar neighborhoods at night or sitting alone in a dimly lit house, a creepy film noir movie playing in the background. Happily for me, such things no longer paralyze me with fear or cause me to tremble like they once did. I guess I just needed to grow up, gain some confidence, and realize that most things that go bump in the night exist more in our imaginations than in some real form deserving my attention or dread.
One of the most distinctive symbols found in Christian worship is the lighted candle or candles which adorn our altars, communion tables, and Advent wreaths. Years ago I took notice of the choreography by which candles were lighted and extinguished in the course of a Sunday or evening service. Sometimes these rituals are carried out in such a cavalier or haphazard manner as to suggest the lighting of candles has no more significance than serving as a time filler at the beginning and end of worship. In other churches candles occupy a more elevated place in the liturgy, their entrance at the head of the processional and their yet-lighted departure ahead of the recessing congregation reminding us of God’s presence whenever two or more gather to pray, and scatter to serve. And are there any moments more charged with meaning and beauty than when congregations come together on Christmas Eve, candles ablaze in darkened sanctuaries that so tangibly recapture the wonder of holy nights and heavenly peace? Surrounded by so many lights shining in the darkness it is hard not to sense a holiness that neither sermons nor songs can surpass.
The light of a single lamp or solitary candle is as illuminating as it is assuring. Upon entering a pitch-black room we only need to strike a match or light a candle to behold the power of light to transform even the darkest space. It is a truth that our biblical ancestors well understood. From the first word the biblical author of Genesis 1 put into God’s mouth, to the poetic personification of Jesus in John’s Gospel we see how people of faith have understood a central fact of this universe: light is real, and it is eternal—darkness is neither. In fact, darkness is nothing more than the absence of light, devoid of both substance or energy. Philosophers from Plato to Augustine went so far as to compare light to goodness and darkness to evil, concluding that evil is not a reality in and of itself, but our distance from and separation from what is good. The further we stray from God, the darker it gets.
A first century Christian who wrote under the name of Jesus’ most trusted disciple, Peter, encouraged his congregations to always seek the light of God above all things. Comparing the prophetic promises of God to the illuminating power of a single lamp, he implored them to rely upon and trust God’s word to guide them in navigating through a world where so many places are enshrouded in darkness. He believed that since God was light, then wherever God’s word was proclaimed and God’s spirit was embraced, the emptiness of darkness would be be exposed for what it is and driven away from holding us in its grip.
We who now find ourselves living in the 21st Century are no strangers to the power of darkness to intimidate and terrorize. Our ears and our eyes bring to our attention so much that makes us anxious about tomorrow, for ourselves, for those whom we love, for our country and for our world. Could there be a better moment for us to seek the light of God’s truth, God’s love, God’s enduring presence than now? Could there ever be a more timely moment for us to behold the power of that light to illuminate our way through the darkest of nights?
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The Twenty-Fourth Day of Advent Tuesday, December 24, 2024
Scriptural Text: Isaiah 9:2-7 “Hope springs eternal”
On this final day of Advent we would do well to ask of ourselves if this has been a season for discernment, for seeking and recognizing what is real, what is true, and for training our minds and hearts on that which abides over the course of years, decades, centuries and ages. The scriptures have beckoned us to re-hear in the witness of our predecessors in faith so many powerful and timeless messages of hope, expectation and courage. They have called us across the ages to seek the light of God’s truth that it may illuminate our way, even in the darkest of nights, and strengthen us to endure in the face of the greatest hardships and temptations that the world may, and most certainly will, bring our way.
With the turning of the calendrical page in a few days, 2024 will enter the realm of a past which we will look back upon in celebration or lamentation, depending on how we managed to survive what it did to us or helped make of us. For those whom the blessing of life extends back into the 1900s, it may seem difficult to fathom that one-quarter of a new century will shortly lie in the rear-view mirror of our life perspective. With time and tide there are no freeze frames or pause buttons. All of us find ourselves straddling that mode of perpetual becoming which is both our fate and our hope. Perhaps this is how we are constantly reminded that the promises of God are never tied to only one time or place, or just to one people or era of human prosperity or misery.
Reading the Advent message for today, in which the prophet Isaiah of Jerusalem takes heart in the birth of a baby in the royal family, reminds me that, in every age, we may discover the hand of God at work should we care, and dare, to see it. For Isaiah, this newborn son of King Ahaz arrived carrying the promise that he would, in time, lead his people as no other king had fully been able to do. His counsel would be just, his righteousness god-like, and his reign would be so blessed by God that peace would not only prevail in the land of Judah, but extend across the entire world. The child about whom the prophet spoke, prince Hezekiah, ultimately fulfilled many of Isaiah’s hopes in saving his people from their enemies. But life denied him and his nation the full realization of the idyllic expectations Isaiah so beautifully left for us to ponder.
Many kings and messiahs would follow Hezekiah, each inspiring similar anticipations of the full consummation of God’s will on earth. When Jesus and John the Baptist came forth with their good news that the Kingdom was at hand, many saw in them the fulfillment of Isaiah’s dreams for their country. Jesus had other plans, however, and the course of life he charted has placed us at a quandary. Should we persist in our wishful thoughts about what God is determined to do on our national or personal behalf, when he will do it, and how? Or will we have the courage and faith to allow God to write a different future for us and the nations we so love?
The child of Bethlehem about whom we will offer our songs and praises and prayers this very night may not have been who Isaiah had in mind. He may not have followed the script that many of his countrymen set out for him, their Hosannas proclaiming him the Son of David drowned out within a week by their screams demanding his crucifixion. But to those of us willing to see in Jesus—in his life and in his death, his birth and in his resurrection—the very Word and Will of God, these last days of one calendar year will truly be for us the first days of a transformed life. For in him we will know that the kingdoms of this world have truly become, for us, the kingdom of our Lord, and of his Christ. For us he will, indeed, be our Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, and Prince of Peace. And in that affirmation it just might happen that we, who once walked in darkness, will see the way to walk in the light, a light so pure and true and enduring, that no darkness will ever be able to extinguish.