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.