Advent Meditations for December 1-7, 2024
First Day of Advent Sunday, December 1, 2024
Scriptural Text: Jeremiah 33:14-16 “In those days…at that time”
Are you a dreamer? I know I am, although my ability to recall them has a half-life measured in seconds I’m afraid. Sleep researchers tell us that we all dream, whether we recall much, if any, of our nightly, eyes-closed visualizations. What’s worse, they seem to flicker across our semi-conscious minds without our having much control over what, if anything, they may reveal to us or about us. Since most dreams seem to dawn on us at sunlight’s first gleamings, only to dissipate like dew on the morning grass, we rarely hold on to them very long. Perhaps our dreaming is like a nocturnal cranial reboot clearing the way for us to mentally function another day. Not all dreams, however, come to us at night nor lie beyond our controllable reach. Some we apparently have a hand in choreographing during our waking hours, dreams in which our imaginations take hold of our loftiest wishes or most dreaded fears.
It is upon such dreams that the season of Advent finds both its heart and its voice. This is a time when, all over the globe, we of the Body of Christ, in spite of our sectarian brokenness, set aside four weeks to reawaken ancient expectations for the coming of that One we call the Christ. It is within him that we find our identity and discover our most coveted hopes for a better world. Yet the scriptures we hear in Advent worship or ponder in a daily devotional exercise like this, engender gloom and despair in so many of their prophetic oracles of judgment and calamity. I suspect most of us in these latter days of biblical irrelevancy tend to endure them more than take them to heart. After all, isn’t the birth of the Christ Child God’s real end game? Certainly we should be able to stand four weeks of ominous scriptural messaging knowing that it will all be forgotten on Christmas morn?
Perhaps that is the best we can do. But should we dare to listen to the ancestral heralds of ancient warnings that buffet our ears each Advent, maybe, just maybe we will discover in both thundering rhetoric and still small voices something that seems meant for our ears, and our times. Today’s initial Advent scripture excerpted from Jeremiah is just such a word. “In those days … at that time,” the voice of this prophet from such a faraway time and place makes us wonder if we might actually be living in those days and that time. And could it be that we really are? Do we not still seek justice to heal the wounds of social inequity, exploitation and racism? Do we not yet long for a righteousness that far exceeds the promises of our politicians and good intentions of our Sunday confessional prayers? Do we not continue to yearn for the safety and well-being of our children, our neighbors, our nation and our world? Jeremiah the prophet did, and in times just as foreboding and uncertain as our own.
In some ways, the Advent message for today is really a dare, a challenge for all of us now poised to enjoy and endure this latest version of an American Christmas. For it stirs us to consider whether we really believe that God intends all of these good things for His world, whether we find it reasonable to think that those promises made to our ancestors in the faith might actually be true for us? Jeremiah never lived to see his dreams come true, yet he peeked around history’s corner and believed that, someday, one from King David’s lineage would prove keeper of that promise. Perhaps Advent is our summons to believe it too.
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Second Day of Advent Monday, December 2, 2024
Scriptural Text: 2 Peter 3:1-18 “Not slow…but patient”
Patience has never come easily for me. Especially not in the weeks leading up to Christmas. Noting the excited anticipations and distractedness of elementary school-aged, Santa-believing grandkids, I see how much a challenge it is to be patient in December. And when our hopes are riveted on more than presents and holiday festivity, the impatience we feel for more significant and lasting change—change for the good of all humankind—may turn us from hopefulness and optimism to despair and cynicism.
How much longer must we wait for things to get better? How many times must we endure the frustrations, the strife and the sufferings that seem so unavoidable on this planet that has increasingly grown more complex and impersonal? It is a question shared by those who have turned from God as well as by those struggling to understand the Creator’s will whenever sickness, tragedy and war come knocking. For me it is the underlying plea of the faithful in all ages, brought into clear focus for us during Advent.
The writer of the epistle that tradition assigns to Peter-—whether it was “The Rock” or one of his disciples in those 1st Century decades of the Church’s infancy-—tried to offer the impatient souls in his congregation some perspective on time and providence. We can imagine he had plenty of reasons to do so. The movement that sprung into life in the stories of Jesus’ resurrection seemed to be running out of time. Hadn’t the Lord Himself said that not more than one generation would pass before God’s promised Kingdom would be fully revealed? And hadn’t Paul, that trailblazing evangelist, felt so strongly about this timeline that he counseled his brethren to neither marry nor divorce since Christ’s return was imminent. Hang on, he said, stay vigilant like those virgins with their oil lamps trimmed in anticipation of the bridegroom’s arrival at a time of our least expecting. Yet the days became months, then years, and death claimed more and more of those who had walked with the Lord while expecting the consummation of his promised Kingdom. Certainly the end must now be near.
But 2 Peter offers us no timetables nor promises. Instead the writer who penned this letter tried to shift their gaze from those unseen glories to come, for which they waited with growing impatience, to those realities of the day that they both knew and understood were part of the way of all the earth “from the beginning of creation.” Time had not changed in spite of Easter. The world had not changed even though a heavenly kingdom far greater than Rome now claimed their allegiance. But, in Christ, they had been changed. And that transformational vision of heaven and earth, and their place in it, freed them to trust God more than the terrors and uncertainties of anything that might come to pass on this side of eternity.
How can the words of a visionary from 2,000 years ago possibly penetrate the cacophony that bombards us at every turn in our 21st Century existence? Perhaps through the same agency that once struck a sustaining chord of hope and assurance to those who lived, and died and suffered long before we stepped onto earth’s stage. They heard because they wanted to believe, and they believed in spite of their impatience—all because they trusted God more than they feared the darkness. Amazingly it is on our own coinage that we are reminded in whom we should place our trust. But do we, and will we, put our trust in God more than ourselves this Advent season?
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Third Day of Advent Tuesday, December 3, 2024
Scriptural Text: 2 Samuel 7:18-29 “Who is like your people Israel?”
King David occupies a unique place in Jewish and Christian history. His Arthurian legacy as the “once and future king” casts an enduring shadow upon our faith. Not only has he functioned as the archetype of righteous leadership to which all succeeding biblical kings were compared. He has continued to serve as the prototype for the messianic preoccupations of biblical prophets and Christian eschatologists for the past 2500 years, both as an idealized conquering warrior and as a seemingly just and faithful administrator of God’s kingdom. Yet looking at his story in 1st and 2nd Samuel, however, we discover a leader as likely to disappoint us as he is to inspire our admiration. For while he was courageous, talented with lyre and verse, and given to expressions of deep reverence for God, he also succumbed to nearly every temptation of the flesh and ambition that has been the bane of countless aspirants for wealth and power right up to the present time.
For reasons that may baffle us in this era of politicians acting badly, David has nonetheless maintained an aura as perfectly chiseled as Michaelangelo’s near flawless marble representation of him. Perhaps that is why he looks on from the wings in so many Jewish prophecies of the yet-to-come messiah who bears a striking resemblance to many of our Christian hopes for Jesus’ return. David and Jesus have become inextricably linked for so many whose anticipations of the future include raptured saints, triumphant second comings, armageddon and days of final judgment. It makes me wonder, though, whether Jesus himself, who resisted the temptation for political power in taking on the role of a servant willing to suffer and die on behalf of his people, would endorse that connection with David that so many of us insist on making today. My reading of the temptation narrative and his agonies in Gethsemane make me think he must have felt suffocated by the weight of the shouts of Hosanna which, at least during one Passover in Jerusalem, steered him not toward’s a king’s throne but a cross.
Advent for us is the season of hope. Yet for modern Christians, Advent seems to have no end-point for fulfillment of our hopes, at least not on this side of death. Instead it is blended into that strange concoction of commercialism, festive indulgences, and wishful fantasies that have turned Christmas into our most lucrative season of wish fulfillment. This year promises to be no different than other Advent—Christmas seasons we’ve heretofore endured. Perhaps these words attributed to David can help bring us back to a more edifying and enduring notion of what it means to hope for what is real?
“Who is like us”, the fabled King wondered as he considered the miracle of his small country’s very existence. But for the grace of God how did such a tiny, backward kingdom come into being and somehow manage to survive, nestled in such a precarious crossroads between warring kingdoms? How did these people, this Israel, survive an exodus across the desert, endure captivity, and then find a way to hang on in the face of famines, droughts, internecine strife, diasporas, racist pogroms and holocausts? David wondered, and he marveled. Who is like us…how God must love us.
This wasn’t a braggart’s proclamation. Rather it flowed from a broken, contrite, and awe-struck heart willing to believe and trust in the Divine Grace upon which all life depends: the life of kings, the life of small nations, and especially the life of Advent believers wanting something to hope for that is truly everlasting. Do we share that wonderment as we greet each new day of our own miraculous existence?
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Fourth Day of Advent Wednesday, December 4, 2024
Scriptural Text: Luke 11:29-32 “A whale of a sign”
Of all the characters in the Bible that have entered popular lore, none may be more misjudged or misunderstood than the prophet Jonah. His story is quite a whopper by today’s reckonings. Imagine a human being surviving in the belly of a fish—while somehow writing a poem in those close confines—after being tossed overboard in a tempestuous sea. Perhaps because of that element of the unbelievable, Jonah finds an easy home in the fantasy world of children. Could God make a fish with a big enough mouth to swallow a person whole. Why not? That’s no more far-fetched than the unbelievable things our kids eat up on every kind of video screen they can watch or hold in their hands?
The question is not whether God could do something incredible—even though I suspect our Creator works most reliably in those systems which science enables us to observe, document and quantify. More importantly, as far as Jonah is concerned, is the fact that the story itself has the impact of a parable that Jesus used to chide the skeptics and dreamers of his day. When he referenced “the sign of Jonah” his point was not to give credence to a fundamentalist argument proving that Jonah was actually swallowed by a fish. Rather it was to characterize the attitudes of those who so mistrusted God’s sovereignty that they demanded heavenly signs to confirm their own judgments about when, and how God must act in restoring Israel to its former glory. The gospels include a number of verses in which Jesus appears to be pressured into supplying timetables and calculations that would help the fearful and skeptical stay one step ahead of that Divine Day of Reckoning in which they would be spared the destructions they knew God intended for His, and their enemies.
As I read Luke 11, not only is Jesus frustrated with their impatient, untrusting posture towards God. He answers their goading with a very pointed—one might say terse—response. “No sign will be given…” except what God has already given in the witness of Jonah. And what kind of sign was that? Certainly not that God could suspend nature and do miraculous, indeed magical things? The sign Jesus had in mind was that God could use people to speak the truth even when that message was unpalatable to both its messenger as to its intended audience.
You see Jonah is really not a whale of a tale. His is the story of how God can work with even the most stubborn and reluctant of prophets. Rather than offer the chance for forgiveness to Israel’s most hated enemy, the Assyrians, whose murderous annihilation of Israel served as background to the prophet’s unlikely message, Jonah chose instead to run to the furthest corner of the earth. And when that path was blocked by a raging sea, a suicidal death among the waves seemed his only means of thwarting God’s intentions. The thought of offering clemency to the Assyrians was as revolting and unthinkable in Jonah’s day as it would have been to those living under the heel of Rome, the very ones trying to make sense of Jesus’ perplexing analogy.
Therein lay the “sign” of Jonah I believe. It had nothing to do with fish. Jonah himself was the sign of how God is able to speak through us, in spite of our refusal to accept the message we’ve been given. Was not Jesus portraying himself as that very same kind of sign to a generation that only could hear and believe one way? God never ceases to speak, and in each generation many are called to convey His words, even though human voices are a most flawed medium. But how many of us have the inclination to listen that voice, or the capacity to really hear what is being said? While we claim that Jesus was the Word made flesh, how many of us can ever broaden our minds to think outside of the box of our beliefs, hear outside the sound of our own inner voices, or see beyond the blinders of our tunnel vision perspectives? Perhaps Advent may give us an excuse, an opportunity, perhaps even a change of heart, in really attending to God’s Word.
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Fifth Day of Advent Thursday, December 5, 2024
Scriptural Text: Philippians 1:12-18a “A good imprisonment”
“Try to make the best out of a bad situation.” Have you ever been offered that advice, or spoke such words to yourself in struggling to come to grips with setbacks or outright failures? The Apostle Paul seemed to live with that sentiment in mind as he traversed the Mediterranean world seeking to establish communities of men and women who were ready to respond to the gospel of Christ crucified. A quick perusal of II Corinthians 11 will remind us of the hardships, sufferings and sacrifices he made in witnessing to his faith in giving all he had in serving God.
The congregation of believers in Philippi may have been the first “church” he was able to establish in what we would now call Europe. His prior work in Asia (modern day Turkey) helped establish The Way as the first generation of Christians were likely known. In today’s Lectionary text we read Paul’s letter to the Philippian church, likely a very small group who had embraced his message and were now giving him much encouragement and hope as he languished in prison.
New Testament scholars differ in their understanding of where Paul might have been when he wrote this epistle, whether it was in Caesarea, Rome, Ephesus or even Philippi itself. But the circumstances of his incarceration can be clearly seen in the rather upbeat way he views his time in captivity. I read this impressed by the positive spin he places on his condition. In fact, he seems to be celebrating the fact that his detention—which we can assume was connected to the impact his teaching had in fomenting protests against him—would prove to generate favorable attention to Christ and to the community of believers standing firm for their faith. What would appear to be an embarrassment, or a shameful failure, Paul took to be an opportunity for him to witness. And it is here that we can sense his confidence in what he believed, offering not complaint or bitterness but courage and hope. That’s what I call making the best out of a bad situation.
Christianity was born in a social and religious climate wherein survival depended on making the best out of social ostracism and the threat of personal harm, including death. This should come as no surprise to us, seeing that the Gospel sprang from an unthinkable execution at the hand of the State and a difficult-to-grasp testimony of a resurrected Lord. Paul’s experiences, along with so many of those first and second generation Christians, give ample witness to the struggles that the Church had to endure before reaching that tipping point where its triumphs exceeded its setbacks.
As I read Paul during this season of Advent I take heart in his encouragement for all of us to be strong in our faith in the power of God to strengthen us when we find ourselves in the worst possible circumstances. Fortunately we no longer live in daily fear of arrest or persecution. Yet we continue to labor under social and cultural pressures to deny our faith in God and to forsake our calling to love, forgive, and serve one another. Are not these pressures somewhat like an imprisonment, not of bars, but of temptations and hindrances that, nonetheless, keep us from knowing and sharing the freedom we have in Christ. So, Paul encourages us to make our imprisonment one that is both good for us, and good for those who look to us for hope. What better time can there be than Advent, when even the secular world gives lip service to love and good will as spiritual values worth celebrating, for us to reorient our own outlook in the light of the promise of Emmanuel, that God is really and fully with us.
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Sixth Day of Advent Friday, December 6, 2024
Scriptural Text: I Thessalonians 4:1-12 “Can or Ought?”
Paul was, and continues to be, a divisive figure in Christianity. We either love him or hate him, ponder his testimony or ignore him altogether. That seems to have been his reputation in the 1st century, too, judging from the sometimes defensive, even rancorous tone of some of his letters. To the orthodox then and now, he comes across as a libertine, advocating a freedom in Christ that made obedience to the strictures of God’s Torah unnecessary. Yet at the same time he can resemble a misogynist when outlining the conduct of men and women within the hierarchies of authority he believed should govern church, family, and state.
Freedom and order, grace and obedience—these form the boundaries within which Paul hoped the communities transformed in Christ would manifest their salvation. In that spirit Paul wrote to the people of the congregation he helped establish in the Macedonian city of Thessalonika, apparently trying to steer their behavior from what they believed they could do as children of an accepting and forgiving God, and what Paul thought they ought to do as brothers in sisters joined in Christ’s fellowship.
Paul’s words lay bare one of Christianity’s great dilemmas. If we are, in fact, free from sin thanks to the redemptive sacrifice of Christ, then how can anyone tell us how we should live. It remains a most important, and oftentimes frustrating dilemma, not only for Christians but for all people. You see, an awful lot of space exists between what we can and what we ought to do with our words and our actions. The former demarks what is humanly possible, governed only by those immutable laws of nature such as gravity and the irreversibility of time. In other words, we can do most anything we want or set our minds to doing. Considering the apparently limitless trajectories that science and money seem now to be taking us, there seems almost no restriction on what people can do, both for good and to the detriment of humankind.
But what happens when all of us do anything we can, simply because we can? As often as not, people get hurt, lives become diminished, and all semblance of social harmony and order disintegrates. Whenever human life devolves into a chaotic struggle driven only by the impulse to survive, only the fittest, luckiest, wealthiest and most powerful have a chance to endure. For Paul, our freedom is never absolute, but must always be tempered by the well-being of others. And in that consideration—indeed in that preoccupation—lies the spirit of holiness that Paul sought to inspire among those who dared claim to be followers of Jesus the Christ.
For Paul, freedom in Christ is not freedom to do anything, but freedom to do as we ought and should in the eyes of God. That means that, while certain behaviors may be possible and even lawful, if they are not helpful and beneficial to others, if they tear down rather than build up, if they produce discord rather than peace, they have—or should have-—no place in the Christian life. In that spirit I am inclined to think that Advent is a very good time, perhaps the best of times, to think about what we ought and should be doing with our lives rather that what the world or our selfish inclinations tell us we are entitled to do and be. For whenever ought and should are informed by the love and goodness we feel for each other, then the great hope of Revelation, comes to fruition: The Kingdom of this world has become the Kingdom of our Lord, and of His Christ! Hallelujah!
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Seventh Day of Advent Saturday, December 7, 2024
Scriptural Text: Malachi 4:1-6 “A whole lot of shakin’ goin’ on”
Have you ever tried to read the Bible from cover to cover? A number of folks have, or at least claim to have run that course. Like climbing a mountain, it can leave us with a proud sense of satisfaction and accomplishment. But having plowed through this ancient anthology of history, poetry, wisdom, law and oracle, I sometimes think reading the entire Bible might be more an endurance test than an act of spiritual devotion. For in all honesty, the Bible is challenging, not only in what it implies for our beliefs and conduct, but in what it demands from us who try to navigate page after page of unfamiliar ancient names, archaic legal wranglings and the detailed descriptions and prescriptions of long abandoned religious rituals. There is no shame in admitting that much of what we encounter in the Bible is, at first and subsequent glance, far less relevant than the daily news and far less gripping than a modern crime novel. If you make it as far as the prophets, you realize it gets even more dense, cryptic, and intimidating. The fact that the Hebrew poetry in which the prophets occasionally spoke doesn’t smoothly translate into English rhyme and meter doesn’t help.
But should you persist in reading each line, and trying to parse every nuance of prophetic speech, you will probably discover that these “troublers of Israel” were an angry, judgmental and pessimistic lot. They resemble the “nattering nabobs of negativism” that one of our former Vice Presidents used to described American journalists during the late 1960s. How can God speak to us through rabble rousers who were as hard to take in their own times as they seem to be in ours?
Upon reaching the end of the Old Testament, we may find ourselves sorely challenged by the words of the last of the biblical “mouthpieces” for God: Malachi. Commentaries will tell us that biblical scholars place him in the post-exilic period of Israel’s history, that era after the Jewish exiles returned from Babylon, a passionate voice trying to revive their spirits as they struggled to rebuild what had once been an independent nation. This was not to be, however, as the best they could manage was vassalage under the Persians, and then the Greeks, and finally the Romans.
With their nation a limp imitation of its former self, their royal family little more than a memory, their temple a shabby reminder of the glory they once enjoyed, and lost, the remnants of the Kingdom called Judah had little left but hope. In Malachi that hope explodes off the page, kindling a fire in the minds and hearts of those who were determined not to let the desperations of the present diminish their trust in the Lord who had covenanted with their ancestors and pledged to never abandon them.
Malachi did not live to see the Day of the Lord come as he believed it would. But his words nonetheless bolstered the faith of those who, like him, would never let their impatience and despair extinguish their hope. In fact, that same prophetic voice resounded well after his generation was gone, reaching the ears of villagers in a small Galilean town called Nazareth, some four hundred years later, in the age of the Romans. And it convinced them to believe that God’s hand was moving afresh in their time, shaking the heavens and the earth in the preaching of one like Elijah named John. Jesus, too, understood him to be the herald of God’s dawning Kingdom, just as Malachi had foreseen so long ago. Those two shook things up in their days, the remembrance of which fills the pages of those four foundational texts we call the Gospels. And the aftershocks of their message continue to be felt whenever we believe and embrace the good news that the Kingdom of God is at hand. I wonder if, in this Advent 2024, we might possibly find ourselves shaken by the prospect of what God has done, is doing, and is yet to accomplish in our lives in bringing that Kingdom to fruition?