Tag Archives: Advent

First Sunday of Advent

Leave a reply

This Sunday begins the Season of Advent, leading to Christmas.

Advent is more about the future than about the past. Yes, we prepare to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ two thousand years ago, but we celebrate his birth because Jesus Christ changes the way we look ahead. He brings us hope.

The Jewish scriptures we read during Advent tell us the kind of hope Jesus brings.  This Sunday’s first reading is from the Prophet Jeremiah. God says to him:

I will raise up for David a just shoot ;

he shall do what is right and just in the land.

In those days Judah shall be safe
and Jerusalem shall dwell secure;
this is what they shall call her:
“The LORD our justice.”

Now, God spoke to Jeremiah as Jerusalem and Judea were being laid waste by a powerful Babylonian army that came from the north to level cities and towns, destroy crops, confiscate valuables and round up able-bodied Jews to bring them to Babylon as slaves. They spared nothing, brutally crushing everything.

So Jeremiah sees nothing but wasteland before him. The land he loved, life as he knew it was gone; everything has been uprooted.

However, God points to a shoot, a tiny sliver of life pushing up amidst the ruins. It’s a sign of life, and through it God will made Judah safe and Jerusalem secure. God will bless his land again.

It’s so easy to be overwhelmed by some great loss, some defeat, some bad situation that seems to take away all we know and love. Our world today, with all its many problems, can look like a wasteland.

The time of advent says, “Signs of hope, small though they be, are there in the midst of it all. God promises life not death in Jesus, whom he has sent. Look for those signs of hope.”

God Speaks

Leave a reply

The reading from William of Saint Thierry in today’s Office of Readings is a simple reminder that God speaks to us in Christ.  But shouldn’t we also remind ourselves, as we listen to his beautiful words,  that God speaks in many ways? To many among us, in our fragmented world, Christ does not speak directly at all.

Listen to William:

“You alone are Lord. Your dominion is our salvation, for to serve you is nothing else but to be saved by you! O Lord, salvation is your gift and your blessing on your people; what else is your salvation except to receive from you the gift of loving you” which comes through Jesus Christ.

“He taught us to love him by first loving us, ‘even to death on a cross.’

“You first loved us so that we might love you–not that you needed our love, but because we could not be what we were created to be, except by loving you.”

“He ‘loved us and gave himself up for us.’ He is your Word to us, your powerful message: while all things were in midnight silence (that is, in the depths of error) he came as the conqueror of error and the apostle of gentle love.”

“Everything he did on earth, all that he said, even the insults, the spitting, the buffeting, the cross and the grave–were actually you speaking to us in your Son, appealing to us in your love and stirring up our love for you.”

God speaks to us in many ways–that’s something believers know to be true as we listen for the voice of Christ. Not everyone will hear him this season, but our holy time calls all people to listen, as they are able, for God speaks to them too.

Advent is a time when we hear the Word made flesh, but  also a time to listen for the many ways God speaks. It’s meant for a bigger audience than Christian believers.