Advent, Love, God's Presence

 

Advent Prayer by Henri Nouwen (1932-1996) 

Lord Jesus, Master of both the light and the darkness,

send your Holy Spirit upon our preparations for Christmas.

We who have so much to do

seek quiet spaces to hear your voice each day.

We who are anxious over many things

look forward to your coming among us.

We who are blessed in so many ways

long for the complete joy of your kingdom.

We whose hearts are heavy

seek the joy of your presence.

We are your people, walking in darkness,

yet seeking the Light.

To you we say,

“Come Lord Jesus!” Amen.

Jesus, Firstborn over Creation

The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

—Colossians 1:15-17

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Today it is good to remember that Jesus Christ is “the firstborn over all creation.”

In him and through him the whole cosmos has been created.

In him and through him the empty space, the dark matter, the stars, the meteorites, the nebulas, the planets on their axes, and the moons in their orbits came into being.

In him and through him gravity, atoms, molecules, carbon, oxygen, the skies, the clouds, the rain, and the wind began to be.

He is firstborn over the deep waters, the shores and their tides, the rocky islands, the mountains and plains, the hills, the canyons, the cliffs, and the watersheds that nourish them all.

Firstborn over the green plants, the food plants, the flowering plants; the creator of photosynthesis—turning sunlight into food.

Firstborn over the fungi, the decomposers, and the microbes that break down matter and create new, healthy soil to grow from.

Firstborn over the elephants, the bats, the whiskey jacks, the lions, the lambs.

Firstborn over the whale that rises above our boats and firstborn over the beaver that changes the landscapes.

He is Creator of our eyes, our ears, our skin that prickles in the cold.

Creator of hair that whitens and imaginations that grow wise.

Firstborn over all human dreams, all forgiveness, all vulnerability, all laughter and sorrow, and every totally new child, never known before, unique before the love that begins and finishes this all.

In every one of our cells is the imprint of his story, good and true, beautiful and terrifying, just and merciful.

Love Each Other

MATTHEW THE TAX-COLLECTOR and Thomas the doubter. Peter the Rock and Judas the traitor. Mary Magdalene and Lazarus's sister Martha. And the popcorn-eating old woman. And the fat man in the pick-up. They are all our family, and you and I are their family and each other's family, because that is what Jesus has called us as the Church to be. Our happiness is all mixed up with each other's happiness and our peace with each other's peace. Our own happiness, our own peace, can never be complete until we find some way of sharing it with people who the way things are now have no happiness and know no peace. Jesus calls us to show this truth forth, live this truth forth. Be the light of the world, he says. Where there are dark places, be the light especially there. Be the salt of the earth. Bring out the true flavor of what it is to be alive truly. Be truly alive. Be life-givers to others. That is what Jesus tells the disciples to be. That is what Jesus tells his Church, tells us, to be and do. Love each other. Heal the sick, he says. Raise the dead. Cleanse lepers. Cast out demons. That is what loving each other means. If the Church is doing things like that, then it is being what Jesus told it to be. If it is not doing things like that—no matter how many other good and useful things it may be doing instead—then it is not being what Jesus told it to be. It is as simple as that. From am advent 1 devotional from Inter Varsity Press  But we do not lament as those who have no hope. Advent invites our honest dismay in this time between God’s first coming in unassuming humanness and his final coming in all-consuming glory, the “Time Between” (Rutledge). In the Incarnation, God in Christ achieved our salvation and inaugurated our transformation; in the Consummation, God in Christ will judge Evil and make all things new, not only humans made in his image, but all creation made by his Word. The power of the first advent underwrites the promise of the second, Resurrection guarantees Redemption. You've got to read this by Fredrick Buechner if you struggle with evil and the sovereignty of God. God is Mightily Present   AS I UNDERSTAND it, to say that God is mightily present even in such private events as these does not mean that he makes events happen to us which move us in certain directions like chessmen. Instead, events happen under their own steam as random as rain, which means that God is present in them not as their cause but as the one who even in the hardest and most hair-raising of them offers us the possibility of that new life and healing which I believe is what salvation is. For instance I cannot believe that a God of love and mercy in any sense willed my father's suicide; it was my father himself who willed it as the only way out available to him from a life that for various reasons he had come to find unbearable. God did not will what happened that early November morning in Essex Fells, New Jersey, but I believe that God was present in what happened. I cannot guess how he was present with my father—I can guess much better how utterly abandoned by God my father must have felt if he thought about God at all—but my faith as well as my prayer is that he was and continues to be present with him in ways beyond my guessing. I can speak with some assurance only of how God was present in that dark time for me in the sense that I was not destroyed by it but came out of it with scars that I bear to this day, to be sure, but also somehow the wiser and the stronger for it. Who knows how I might have turned out if my father had lived, but through the loss of him all those long years ago I think that I learned something about how even tragedy can be a means of grace that I might never have come to any other way. As I see it, in other words, God acts in history and in your and my brief histories not as the puppeteer who sets the scene and works the strings but rather as the great director who no matter what role fate casts us in conveys to us somehow from the wings, if we have our eyes, ears, hearts open and sometimes even if we don't, how we can play those roles in a way to enrich and ennoble and hallow the whole vast drama of things including our own small but crucial parts in it.