Devotional 12-12-14

Paul’s Call for Readiness, 

Fellowship and Faithfulness

I Thessalonians 5:16-24

Be joyful always; pray continually; give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.  Do not put out the Spirit’s fire;  do not treat prophecies with contempt.  Test everything. Hold on to the good.  Avoid every kind of evil.  May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through.  May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.  The one who calls you is faithful and he will do it.

On occasion, I will go online to see what remarks are made by Taylor Burton-Edwards, Director of Worship Resources of the General Board of Discipleship, regarding the suggested liturgy for a particular Sunday.  His words for the third Sunday in Advent gave me reason to think a little more carefully about the meaning of Advent:

“Advent puts Christmas into its proper place, not as a comforting destination or early winter way station, but rather as nothing less than the completely disruptive inbreaking of the God who, through this birth, makes all things new.

Advent helps us understand just how the news of the birth of Jesus we celebrate during Christmas Season (December 24-January 6) is so very good.  In Advent, we see, decisively, how God’s reign marks the breakdown and end of every other reign.  What the biblical writers knew, and we still know, is that every human reign is disordered, sinful, full of injustice and oppression.  Those who hold power find ways to make their disordered reigns seem normal or even good. But those damaged by such disordered reigns—the silent or silenced ones including the poor, the sick, the dying, the outcast, the hungry and the persecuted, among others—know in their bodies and often carry in their psyches for generations, wounds and scars that give a very different testimony.

Advent lays before us starkly their usually silenced voices, the voices of prophets who speak to them from God, and the assurance that indeed the worlds that try to keep them silenced for their own benefit have only one future—utter destruction and replacement by God’s reign.

As such Advent can, if we let it, disorient us from the dominant culture’s experience and expression of ‘Christmas time’ and its many ways to ignore or domesticate the wild prophet, Jesus, loudspeaker and embodiment of this world’s end and God’s reign coming upon us.”

I now understand more fully that Advent is not only the anticipation of the celebration of the birth of Jesus.  It is also a reminder for every Christian to be prepared for Christ’s Second Coming.  It’s a time of self-reflection and recommitment, and as Paul so aptly pointed out to the Thessalonians in this scripture, a call for readiness, fellowship and faithfulness.

Diane Feaganes