November 30

Prayer: 
Creator God,
Create in us a desire to hope,
A hope that sees the doors of our lives opened
Opened to you,
Opened to our neighbours,
Opened to strangers.
A hope that sees us all in the image of your Son,
Even in those places where our pride obscures that which has always been there in the other, You. Remind us as we hope for you,
that our hope is in you.
In all of you, in all the places that make us uncomfortable.
All the places we cannot see or refuse to see.
Teach us to desire you and your hope in renewed ways today.
Amen.

Reading: Isaiah 26:1-6, Matthew 6:25-33

Reflection: As we consider hope, our hope in our Saviour who came and will come again, we also consider that which prevents our hope, fear. We fear and our fears from job security and health to how we can perfect our Christmas experience for families, from the tree down to the dinner and ourselves we are left with anxiety and little if any hope. Our fears are not unique, for hundreds of years the hope that God would save his people became thin, as He was silent. As we worry, may we find new hope as we wait in this abbreviated season of waiting and seek the peace of God as we find ourselves worrying.

Application: It is hard and in many ways over simplistic to think we can fast from fear, but we can in those moment reorient ourselves, shifting to hope versus fear. Occupy Advent (@occupyadvent) suggests a simple way to reframe this, “If Jesus is Lord, ______ is not.” If you’d like to join their discussion or see what others are wrestling with consider looking at their Twitter page. But you do not need to do this on Twitter to do it in community, consider having the discussion in your small group or at your dinner table.

November 29

Prayer: 
We know about your presence
that fills the world,
that occupies our life,
that makes our life in the world true and good.
We notice your powerful transformative presence
in word and in sacrament,
in food and in water,
in gestures of mercy and practices of justice,
in gentle neighbours and daring gratitude.
We count so on your presence
and then plunge – without intending – into your absence.
We find ourselves alone, abandoned, without resources
remembering your goodness,
hoping your future,
but mired in anxiety and threat and risk beyond our coping.
In your absence we bid your presence,
come again,
come soon,
come here.
Come to every garden become a jungle
Come to every community become joyless sad and numb.
We acknowledge your dreadful absence and insist on your presence.
Come again, come soon. Come here.[1]

Readings: Micah 4:6-13

Reflection: Our hope is to be rooted in God’s faithfulness. As we wait and long we must also consider the faithfulness of God to us, a faithfulness that declares generation through generation I have a plan, you are my people, you are part of my plan, and you have always been a part of my plan. It is so often easy to lose sight of the delicately woven threads together in God’s plan as it even now only begins to unfold before our eyes.

Application: Consider your life and the people brought into your life. The relationships provisioned by God and take time to write one or more of them a card this season. You might already be planning on doing Christmas cards or have even already sent them out. If so send another card or enclose a separate letter and speak to the presence of Christ they have been in your life. In doing so there is an acknowledgement of God’s provision but also your friend’s faithfulness and it speaking to this faithfulness you offer life and love back to this person. You are offering them a chance to, if you will, feast on the love and faithfulness of God in a way that they might not have been able to see. This is a tradition that can be carried on through the year, especially in seasons that may be lonely like Christmas, Valentine’s Day or even birthdays and other significant anniversaries.

[1] Walter Brueggemann, Prayers for a Privileged People. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2008)

November 28

Prayer: 
Dare us to your hope.
The hope you declare, one counter to all we believe, know or think we understand.
Help us to see our places of aggression, wants beyond our needs in this time.
Remind us that it has been declared,
“They’ll trade in their swords for shovels, 
their spears for rakes and hoes. 
Nations will quit fighting each other, 
quit learning how to kill one another. 
Each man will sit under his own shade tree, 
each woman in safety will tend her own garden. 
GOD-of-the-Angel-Armies says so, and he means what he says.” 
That we may desire to see the coming of Your shalom,
even as it demands that our places of peace be shown for what they are,
places of comfort and privilege.
Make us uncomfortable as we hope for you.
Amen

Reading: Micah 4:1-5a

Reflection: Privilege and comfort are words we do not often stop to dwell on. In considering Micah 4:1-5, we are privileged, not necessarily in our gender or ethnicity but in our relationship with Christ. We are privileged to know what generations hoped for, the coming of their Messiah. We live in that privileged and the privilege it is to share in the work of shalom brought to Earth all those years ago as we hope for the return of our Messiah.

Application: Consider fasting from your morning coffee or lunch for today and tomorrow or another two days in this week. Set that money aside and use it at a time in this month to take out someone with whom you have daily interaction with and do not know well or a person with whom you have a strained relationship. It may seem inconsequential or you may even that you’d be able to afford to pay for them in addition to your costs but the purpose is changing our intention as we direct our intention at our Savior who came into our lives when he could have done it with all the comforts of His position and forfeit them all.

The purpose of this act of fasting and feasting is to reframe how we relate around food. If we look at scripture, Jesus is often seen feasting with those who were on the margins of society. You might know of someone in the margins by technical terms, you may not, but consider those who are new to your community or on the margins by other definitions.

Photo Credit

Sunday November 27 (First Week of Advent)

Prayer:
In our secret yearnings
we wait for your coming,
and in our grinding despair
we doubt that you will.
And in this privileged place
we are surrounded by witnesses who yearn more than do we
and by those who despair more deeply than we do.
Look upon your church and its pastors
in this season of hope
which runs so quickly to fatigue
and this season of yearning
which becomes so easily quarrelsome.
Give us the grace and the impatience
to wait for your coming to the bottom of our toes,
to the edges of our finger tips.
We do not want our several worlds to end.
Come in your power
and come in your weakness
in any case
and make all things new.
Amen. [1]

 As we pray with Walter Brueggemann we acknowledge the fragility of hope amidst the grinding despair and our places of privilege. The God in which we hope, the begotten Son declared to come to us is our hope. It is not just our hope. It is the hope of generations, it is the hope of salvation declared in Abraham as he stood over Isaac, it is the hope in the Passover and clung to in the desert. As we wait, as we hope, we pray that as a community we can press into the Advent season with all the voices that have come faithfully before and join in the hope of the present Church now as we hope for our present and our future, to hold both together as we seek to know and live more fully out of the knowledge of this hope.

Readings: Isaiah 2:1-5, Psalm 122, Romans 13:11-14 and Matthew 24:36-44

Spiritual Disciplines for the Week: Fasting and Feasting 

Fasting is often seen as individual activity rooted in asceticism that many of us do not relate to and if we are familiar with the discipline it normally set aside for special decisions. This season we would like to reframe fasting and its counter feasting. We are in a season where many of us indulge routinely and often without much if any mindfulness and this is not just limited to food or drink. We spend more that we may have in the declaration that this is a time to celebrate. It is indeed a time to celebrate. But what are we celebrating and how are we demonstrating that mindfulness.

Fasting is not limited to food, it might be more meaningful in your life and the lives of others if you’d would consider fasting from gift giving, this could be opting to fast from purchasing and only offering handmade gifts or opting instead to give to your community with your time or your money. For some of us the giving of our time is more demanding and challenging than giving of our resources. Fasting is by act a redirection of our spiritual and physical energies so that we may better serve Christ and resultant is our ability to serve others. 

Suggesting we should feast at Christmas seems simplistic and even a little ironic. This is an intentional feasting that follows fasting and sees the feasting as given by God to us, a time of celebration. You may want to consider breaking your fast only at Christmas Eve or Christmas day when we announce the joy of Christ, who came and will come again. Whenever you do approach feasting, consider how too with feasting you may witness to the work of Christ. Who is welcome at your table? As we journey through the week there will be more ideas how you can frame these disciplines.

[1]    Walter Brueggemann, Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth: Prayers of Walter Brueggemann, ed. Edwin Searcy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 148.

We Hope

We hope that these readings, guided prayers, introductions to spiritual disciplines and occasionally visual liturgies encourage you to think what Advent means for you and those in your life.

We hope that in re-framing Advent, seeing the radical event that was our Saviour come to Earth, to become flesh among us that you may consider how you too can become present to those around you.

We hope that you will be able to see Advent as call to be present to your community and the world, but especially your community.

We hope that you may be able to see the places where God is already present in the lives of your neighbours, your coworkers and your family and that you will be empowered to join in.

We hope that as you are challenged by God through His in-breaking into our lives, through relationships, resources or even these devotionals that you will push into the edges and the uncomfortable places.

We hope now, in the awareness of our Saviour already come, and await the Second Coming, and as such we join all those who wait, in all the places they do, with all the fears and anxieties and we remember.

Hope.