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Meditations for the First Week of Advent

Meditations for the First Week of Advent

Last updated on: November 29, 2015 at 11:18 pm by John Mark N. Reynolds

Meditations for the First Week of Advent 2015-11-29T23:18:21-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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First Sunday of Advent

Sing:

O come, O come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel, that mourns in lonely exile here, until the Son of God appears.

Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel!

Reflect:

No matter how much beauty, goodness, and truth we find here, Eternity is in our hearts. We can no more reach the Eternal than we can wish away death. The good news is that God came our way and appeared at a bleak time in human history.

In His own person, God reunited our world with His own. We need no more, because just as Jesus came, so He will come again. The bridgehead has been made and now full union will follow. The dead wait, the living mourn, but no longer as those without hope. Jesus came and will come.

First Monday of Advent

Sing:

O come, thou Wisdom from on high, who ordered all things mightily, to us the path of knowledge show and teach us in her ways to go.

Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel!

Reflect:

Knowledge has exploded and I can ask Siri almost any fact and the machine will help me. If we did not know the difference between knowledge and Wisdom before our time, we know it now. We can get the facts, but humanity does not know what to do with them.

We need Wisdom. The good news is that Wisdom is not just a “way” to follow, though Wisdom is that as well. Wisdom is a person and He came to dwell with us. He made the Way of Wisdom and will show and teach us to follow the Way.

The first person to hear this good news was Mary. She is blessed, not because she had a womb or was able to raise Jesus, but because she heard the Word of God and obeyed. She said: “Yes!” to God.

The messenger comes and says: The Holy Spirit wishes to overshadow you! We can say “yes” and He will come and with Him will come a love of truth, learning, and knowledge. No Christian should love the falsehoods that are too common, especially when we speak “evangelistically”. . . exaggerating our stories of what God has done.

The Evangel came to speak the Good News and if we don’t think what He wishes to do is enough, then we have missed the path of Wisdom. If we hate learning and dialog, then we have missed the path of Wisdom. The Holy Spirit wishes to overshadow us so that we too can bring “God with us” (Emmanuel) to the world.

God would be with us so that we can become as He is. God is Truth, so we must become true. God is All Knowing, so we must thirst for knowledge. God is Wise, so we must seek His way.

First Tuesday of Advent:

Sing:

O come, O come, thou Lord of Might, who to thy tribes on Sinai’s height in ancient times did give the law, in cloud and majesty and awe.

Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel!

Reflect:

From Syria to Colorado, we crave justice. Racism demands justice. Poverty cries out for justice. Some ask us to forget justice and practice a cheap grace. God knows that this will not help us, because covering up pain never helps. The pain grows underneath and breaks out worse than ever.

Jesus did not come to Bethlehem to give us a cover up. He wasn’t hiding that we had a social justice problem. Centuries of teaching even the rudiments of justice to one people have shown how stubborn we are. Worst was our personal failings: we live by our desires and our desires consume us. People in aggregate can be bad, but individuals can be worse. We hurt those we claim to love in ways that we would never do to strangers.

God came in all His power and gave us a good Law. We could not follow that law . . . not even though it was simple . . . less complex or onerous than we make for ourselves in our human resource manuals or in our governments. God will not cover up our failure. He allows us to see our failure, but does not leave us without hope.

We need justice, but we also need mercy.

First Wednesday of Advent:

Sing:

O come, thou branch of Jesse’s tree, free them from Satan’s tyranny that trust thy mighty power to save and give them victory o’er the grave.

Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel!

Reflect:

We are bad enough, but humanity has another problem. God’s enemies are our enemies and God has many enemies in the cosmos. Anyone who says “no” to love, “no” to justice, and “no” to purity will side against God. Satan was the first to say “no” and many angels fell with him to become devils.

They are great and powerful beings and in ourselves humans are easily duped. We create hell on earth at the promptings of devils . . . and the bleakness of our own brokenness. Death is God’s severe mercy on us to prevent endless war. The human soul once corrupted would plunge to endless depths of tedium, injustice, hatred, and stupidity. Death ends the battle, but the end is hard.

We need help. God did not just start over . . . He loves us . . . and He wants to save us, not make us pawns on His “side” of a civil war. God does not wish to lose any bit of His creation that will repent. Love will take eternity if needed to not just “fix” things or destroy us in order to save us. Instead, God came down and took on death Himself.

He lived out the struggle and took on all the pains of humanity and the temptations of Satan and all his devils. He came to win for us and Jesus did win.

There is hope this Advent.

First Thursday of Advent:

Sing:

O come thou, Key of David, come, and open wide our heavenly home; and make safe the way that leads on high, and close the path that leads to misery. Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel!

Reflect:

Eternity in our hearts, but misery on so many days. Which is real? Does life end in death?

Humans lie to themselves, even right up to the moment of death. We pretend the pain does not matter, that our failures do not count, and that the good we have done can die with us. If a few can live in self-deception, most of us cannot.

We long for goodness, truth, and beauty. We know that the soul is immortal in God and that nothing good is ever lost. We know that the crooked world will be made straight, but that the straightening might make us miserable first.

We could choose to remain crooked ourselves, to live in the misery of the straightening. We look at the hypocrites in the church and try for a short cut. We will reduce Christmas to cheap grace, easy forgiveness, and tolerance. We decide that if we judge nobody, or at least nobody “normal,” we will be good enough.

Not surprisingly, we end up letting people off the hook with the sort of personal vices we share. Somebody in another country, or someone who commits heinous acts is the bad guy. We will judge them and end up in an ever deepening pit of decadence. After a time, our decadence, our crudity, become our new normal.

Why not?

The simple answer is that misery is real. We are not saved from misery by tolerating what makes us miserable. We simply love the company.

And, in fact, God with us (Emmanuel) will not take away sorrow, but He will redeem it. If we allow him to come and live within us, then we have hope. We can follow His way . . . and recognize that the hypocrite has brought decadence, vice, and misery on himself.

Will we embrace Jesus? If we do, then Eternity will give us hope over misery. The door of happiness will be opened, not in this life fully, but in the life to come. The door to misery will be shut for all time.

Jesus was born for this.

First Friday of Advent:

Sing:

O come, thou Dayspring from on high, and cheer us by drawing nigh, disperse the gloomy clouds of night, and death’s dark shadow put to flight. Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel!

Reflect:

When I am sad, being told to cheer up is never effective. In fact, nothing is more irritating. I am no longer gloomy in my irritation, but this is no improvement.

Instead, Jesus comes and simply is.

He loves us and stands in solidarity with us. He is there full of joy, knowing that all things will be well. He has chosen the best road, the long road. He will not just “help” us by quickly solving our felt needs. Instead, Jesus is here making all things well.

This does not always cheer me up in the sense of making me feel jolly, but it does give me hope. If Jesus who would heal all our ills does not yet, then it must be better so. He is doing a deeper healing in a world so interconnected that one small change impacts the cosmos.

Jesus knows and so unlike simple minded me, the Lord Jesus heals me without doing any harm to anything else. God takes on any pain Himself and drowns it in His joy. The older I get and the longer I walk in the Way, the more sure I am that this is true. As a result, at times . . . O God, thank you . . .at times I feel this joy.

Christmas is for this: a foretaste of the consummate joy that is coming. O Emmanuel!

First Saturday of Advent:

Sing:

O come, desire of nations, bind in one the hearts of all mankind, bid thou our sad divisions cease, and be thyself our King of Peace. Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel!

Reflect:

Jesus came to end the divisions of the world. That will seem odd to us when religion is so often used to divide humankind. People have even been murdered in the Name of Jesus.

There is nothing so good that we cannot mess it up: not even the message of the Prince of Peace.

We cannot force any man or woman to see the truth. Jesus came to bring Wisdom and Joy together. His Way is the only Way that can maintain the humanities and science as equals in the university. Jesus is the only person who can inspire hosptials, schools, and justice. Only His message is fully True and so only His message can heal all our hurts.

We mess up his message, but we must not take for granted the good that His message brought. Christian civilization has been in the aggregate the best hope for humankind. We have failed the Prince of Peace, the Lord of Justice, almost as often as we have obeyed Him, but the message was there to correct us.

He stands, alive, the living Lord born in Bethlehem and gone to God reminding us. His standards never change and as history grinds to the consummation of all things, evils are revealed. He demands justice, but wants to bring peace.

We cannot control the world. We can stop. We can think about our own lives. We can practice peace now in our own lives and in the part of the community we touch. How can I bring healing today? How can I bring joy? Are there burdens I can bear from someone else?

Spiritual Reflections

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November 28, 2015

Gentle Happiness

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November 30, 2015 The Way Forward: The Constantine Strategy Applied

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