Advent Love Quotes

It's not in the mainstream media yet, but the biggest jump in skin cancer has occurred since the advent of sunscreens. That kind of thing makes me happy. The fact that people, in pursuit of a superficial look of health, give themselves a fatal disease. I love it when 'reasoning' human beings think they have figured out how to beat something and it comes right back and kicks them in the nuts. God bless the law of unintended consequences. And the irony is impressive: Healthy people, trying to look healthier, make themselves sick. Good!

At this Christmas when Christ comes, will He find a warm heart? Mark the season of Advent by loving and serving the others with God's own love and concern.

It is not what a man is capable of doing, but what he chooses to do that is important.

I love all those who are heavy drops falling from the dark cloud that hangs over men: they herald the advent of lightning, and, as heralds, they perish.

My love for Christmas Eve goes way back to those big gatherings at my grandparents’ house, the focus on Santa Claus and childhood joy. As the years unfolded, I've moved to and visited different cities during the holidays, so my celebration of Christmas Eve took on multiple denominational tones and the focus became the Christ child.

...And then, just when everything is bearing down on us to such an extent that we can scarcely withstand it, the Christmas message comes to tell us that all our ideas are wrong, and that what we take to be evil and dark is really good and light because it comes from God. Our eyes are at fault, that is all. God is in the manger, wealth in poverty, light in darkness, succor in abandonment. No evil can befall us; whatever men may do to us, they cannot but serve the God who is secretly revealed as love and rules the world and our lives.

A love that left people alone in their guilt would not have real people as its object. So, in vicarious responsibility for people, and in His love for real human beings, Jesus becomes the one burdened by guilt.

I believe deeply that God does his best work in our lives during times of great heartbreak and loss, and I believe that much of that rich work is done by the hands of people who love us, who dive into the wreckage with us and show us who God is, over and over and over. There are years when the Christmas spirit is hard to come by, and it’s in those seasons when I’m so thankful for Advent. Consider it a less flashy but still very beautiful way of being present to this season. Give up for a while your false and failing attempts at merriment, and thank God for thin places, and for Advent, for a season that understands longing and loneliness and long nights. Let yourself fall open to Advent, to anticipation, to the belief that what is empty will be filled, what is broken will be repaired, and what is lost can always be found, no matter how many times it’s been lost.

God travels wonderful ways with human beings, but he does not comply with the views and opinions of people. God does not go the way that people want to prescribe for him; rather, his way is beyond all comprehension, free and self-determined beyond all proof. Where reason is indignant, where our nature rebels, where our piety anxiously keeps us away: that is precisely where God loves to be. There he confounds the reason of the reasonable; there he aggravates our nature, our piety—that is where he wants to be, and no one can keep him from it. Only the humble believe him and rejoice that God is so free and so marvelous that he does wonders where people despair, that he takes what is little and lowly and makes it marvelous. And that is the wonder of all wonders, that God loves the lowly…. God is not ashamed of the lowliness of human beings. God marches right in. He chooses people as his instruments and performs his wonders where one would least expect them. God is near to lowliness; he loves the lost, the neglected, the unseemly, the excluded, the weak and broken.

If death is no longer a fear, we're really free. Free to take any risk under the sun for Christ and for love.

Mary knew God loved her. From the moment Gabriel appeared to her, Mary has a distinct sense that God’s presence was with her and His hand upon her. She didn’t understand everything that was happening, but she was certain that God would be with her through it all.

God is in the manger, wealth in poverty, light in darkness, succor in abandonment. No evil can befall us; whatever men may do to us, they cannot but serve the God who is secretly revealed as love and rules the world and our lives.2

The thing I love most about Advent is the heartbreak. The utter and complete heartbreak.

I had fallen in love with a young man..., and we were planning to get married. And then he died of subacute bacterial endocarditis... Two years later with the advent of penicillin, he would have been saved. It reinforced in my mind the importance of scientific discovery...

We have become so accustomed to the idea of divine love and of God’s coming at Christmas that we no longer feel the shiver of fear that God’s coming should arouse in us. We are indifferent to the message, taking only the pleasant and agreeable out of it and forgetting the serious aspect, that the God of the world draws near to the people of our little earth and lays claim to us.4 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “The Coming of Jesus in Our Midst

What is love for, if not to intensify our affections—both in life and death? But, O, do not be bitter. It is tragically self-destructive to be bitter.

I have been all kinds of cheery, but positivity has become a burden. And it’s a burden I assumed when I decided that in the darkness of Advent I would save myself.

And that is the wonder of all wonders, that God loves the lowly…. God is not ashamed of the lowliness of human beings. God marches right in. He chooses people as his instruments and performs his wonders where one would least expect them. God is near to lowliness; he loves the lost, the neglected, the unseemly, the excluded, the weak and broken.

Amazing that we made Jesus into the consummate answer giver because that is not what he usually does. He more often leads us right onto the horns of our own human-made dilemmas, where we are forced to meet God and be honest with ourselves. He creates problems for us more than resolves them, problems that very often cannot be resolved by all-or-nothing thinking but only by love and forgiveness.

The long dawn of Advent will soon begin, and now we are all learning to wait. Christmas is coming and the baby Jesus will be born, but for now we must sit in the darkness.

The more I begin to love the commandments of God in creation and word, the more present they will be for me in every hour.

Festivals and fasts are unhinged, traveling backward at a rate of ten days per year, attached to no season. Even Laylat ul Qadr, the holiest night in Ramadan, drifts--its precise date is unknown. The iconclasm laid down by Muhammed was absolute: you must resist attachment not only to painted images, but to natural ones. Ramadan, Muharram, the Eids; you associate no religious event with the tang of snow in the air, or spring thaw, or the advent of summer. God permeates these things--as the saying goes, Allah is beautiful, and He loves beauty--but they are transient. Forced to concentrate on the eternal, you begin to see, or think you see, the bones and sinews of the world beneath its seasonal flesh. The sun and moon become formidable clockwork. They are transient also, but hint at the dark planes that stretch beyond the earth in every direction, full of stars and dust, toward a retreating, incomprehensible edge

Pity, Jane, from some people is a noxious and insulting sort of tribute, which one is justified in hurling back in the teeth of those who offer it; but that is the sort of pity native to callous, selfish hearts; it is a hybrid, egotistical pain at hearing of woes, crossed with ignorant contempt for those who have endured them. But that is not your pity, Jane; it is not the feeling of which your whole face is full at this moment—with which your eyes are now almost overflowing—with which your heart is heaving—with which your hand is trembling in mine. Your pity, my darling, is the suffering mother of love: its anguish is the very natal pang of the divine passion. I accept it, Jane; let the daughter have free advent—my arms wait to receive her.

You tell me that you fear love; why, my little one? Do you fear the light of the sun? Do you fear the ebb and flow of the sea? Do you fear the dawning of the day? Do you fear the advent of spring? I wonder why you fear love? ... do not fear love; do not fear love, friend of my heart. We must surrender to it in spite of what it may bring in the way of pain, of desolation, of longing and in spite of all perplexity and bewilderment.

In our seeking for the lost Child, our contemplation of Our Lady becomes active. The fiat was complete surrender. Advent was a folding upon the life growing in our darkness. Now the seeking is a going out from ourselves. It is a going out from our illusions, our limitations, our wishful thinking, our self-loving, and the self in our love.

The call of Advent is to practice putting down our desperate, human need for approval and fall in love with Jesus all over again, and to remember that nothing short of God’s love claims us. We are children of God, and that is enough.

If you look at your average contemporary person, the potential for tragedy is immense. The people and things we love and value are strewn across the globe. Any number of health disasters can befall you or them. The truth is depressing. We are going to die, most likely after illness; all our friends will likewise die; we are tiny insignificant dots on a tiny planet. Perhaps with the advent of broad intelligence and foresight comes the need for confabulation and self-deception to keep depression and its consequent lethargy at bay. There needs to be a basic denial of our finitude and insignificance in the larger scene. It takes a certain amount of chutzpah just to get out of bed in the morning.

No priest, no theologian stood at the manger of Bethlehem. And yet all Christian theology has its origin in the wonder of all wonders: that God became human. Holy theology arises from knees bent before the mystery of the divine child in the stable. Without the holy night, there is no theology. “God is revealed in flesh,” the God-human Jesus Christ — that is the holy mystery that theology came into being to protect and preserve. How we fail to understand when we think that the task of theology is to solve the mystery of God, to drag it down to the flat, ordinary wisdom of human experience and reason! Its sole office is to preserve the miracle as miracle, to comprehend, defend, and glorify God’s mystery precisely as mystery. This and nothing else, therefore, is what the early church meant when, with never flagging zeal, it dealt with the mystery of the Trinity and the person of Jesus Christ…. If Christmas time cannot ignite within us again something like a love for holy theology, so that we—captured and compelled by the wonder of the manger of the son of God—must reverently reflect on the mysteries of God, then it must be that the glow of the divine mysteries has also been extinguished in our heart and has died out.

Out of the Darkness, Into the Light: The Time before Christmas is the Time of Light and mutual Love.

two sheepdogs are mentioned in Psalm 23? They are called goodness and mercy (or “unfailing love”).

To live in the kingdom is to be ready to rub shoulders with all kinds. God’s love is given freely and is accepted by many. I pray for a heart that is open to those who are not like me.

In her memoir of living among the Bushmen, The Old Way: A Story of the First People, my friend Liz lovingly invokes an image first coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins: “You are standing beside your mother, holding her hand. She is holding her mother’s hand, who is holding her mother’s hand. . . . ” Eventually the line stretches three hundred miles long and goes back five million years, and the clasping hand of the ancestor looks like that of a chimpanzee. I loved picturing one of Octavia’s arms stretching out to meet one of her mother’s arms, and one of her mother’s mother’s arms, and her mother’s mother’s mother’s. . . . Suckered, elastic arms, reaching back through time: an octopus chorus line stretching not just hundreds, but many thousands of miles long. Back past the Cenozoic, the time when our ancestors descended from the trees; back past the Mesozoic, when dinosaurs ruled the land; back past the Permian and the rise of the ancestors of the mammals; back, past the Carboniferous’s coal-forming swamp forests; back past the Devonian, when amphibians emerged from the water; back past the Silurian, when plants first took root on land—all the way to the Ordovician, to a time before the advent of wings or knees or lungs, before the fishes had bony jaws, before blood pumped from a multichambered heart. More than 500 million years ago, the tides would have been stronger, the days shorter, the year longer, and the air too high in carbon dioxide for mammals or birds to breathe. All the earth’s continents huddled in the Southern Hemisphere. And yet still, the arm of Octavia’s ancestor, sensitive, suckered, and supple, would have been recognizable as one of an octopus.

Mere acquaintance with correct doctrine is a poor substitute for Christ and familiarity with New Testament eschatology will never take the place of a love-inflamed desire to look on His face.

A hero is a slave to his public image. To stay a hero, the world requires you to support their ever-changing notions of right and wrong. You’re not allowed to come to your own conclusions. You cannot have your own ideas of good and evil. If you follow your own conscience even once, you get crucified. All the love the world promised you vanishes, and they hate you worse than any villain

In John 3:16, Jesus teaches us that the God who exists loves. Let that sink in. The God who absolutely is. Loves. He loves. Of all the things you might say about God, be sure to say this: he loves.

Only when we have felt the terror of the matter, can we recognize the incomparable kindness. God comes into the very midst of evil and death, and judges the evil in us and in the world. And by judging us, God cleanses and sanctifies us, comes to us with grace and love…. God wants to always be with us, wherever we may be—in our sin, suffering, and death. We are no longer alone; God is with us.6 “The Coming of Jesus in Our Midst

But the Advent hope – indeed, the Advent miracle – was that this unknowable, un-namable, utterly holy Lord chose out of his own free will and out of love for us to become known: to bear a name and meet us where we are.

but the pleasures that we have chosen can be a long way off if their advent is certain and if, while we await them, we can give ourselves over in the meantime to an idle seeking to attract and to an incapacity for love.

When we soften our thoughts and open our hearts to the coming season of Christmas, we make room for Jesus: in our kind gestures, our giving hands, a warm smile and peace extended to our neighbors. Christmas is the season for His perfect love.

however damning, the conventional reservations about parenthood are practical. After all, now that children don’t till your fields or take you in when you’re incontinent, there is no sensible reason to have them, and it’s amazing that with the advent of effective contraception anyone chooses to reproduce at all. By contrast, love, story, content, faith in the human “thing”—the modern incentives are like dirigibles, immense, floating, and few; optimistic, largehearted, even profound, but ominously ungrounded.

It is only after we have been enabled to say, “Be it unto me according to your Word,” that we can accept the paradoxes of Christianity. Christ comes to live with us, bringing an incredible promise of God’s love, but never are we promised that there will be no pain, no suffering, no death, but rather that these very griefs are the road to love and eternal life. In Advent we prepare for the coming of all Love, that love which will redeem all the brokenness, wrongness, hardnesses of heart which have afflicted us.

Of the Father’s love begotten, Ere the worlds began to be, He is Alpha and Omega, He the source, the ending He, Of the things that are, That have been, And that future years shall see, Evermore and evermore! —Translated from a poem by AURELIUS PRUDENTIUS (Roman, ca. AD 348–415)4

Father, thank You for hearing my cry from the pit. I receive Your grace today and stand on the solid ground of Your righteousness. Every time I think of how You rescued me, my mouth can’t help but sing Your praise. I love You and am so grateful for You. Let my whole life sing Your song. Amen!

and an even more welcome one for the scrounging Scrooge. He loved the sound of the bell; it heralded the advent of more money. ‘Every time a bell rings, my money angel spreads his wings,’ he would laugh to himself, making a mockery of the sweet children’s saying about angels receiving their wings.

On this eve of Christmas, whether you feel yourself to be surrounded by earthly blessings or whether you feel your blessings to be few, set aside those thoughts and concerns long enough to remember what it is that we are celebrating: God’s loving plan to bring you home to himself, through the gift of Jesus Christ.

Thousands each year find their desire for salvation and holiness becoming too acute to bear, and turn to the One who was born in a manger to die on a cross. Then the fleeting beauty that is Christmas enters their hearts to dwell there forever. For who is it that imparts such beauty to the Christmas story? It is none other than Jesus, the Altogether Lovely.

One thing that can be so easy to forget when we are struggling with our faith is that God is not struggling with us. God sees the cavernous depths of our hearts, the meandering curves of our road, and has a mercy for us that transcends what we are capable of understanding. Because of this we can be encouraged even when we waver, knowing we are fully loved even still.

[Advent] is a time of quiet anticipation. If Christ is going to come again into our hearts, there must be repentance. Without repentance, our hearts will be so full of worldly things that there will be “no room in the inn” for Christ to be born again. . . . We have the joy not of celebration, which is the joy of Christmas, but the joy of anticipation. JOHN R. BROKHOFF

But Israel’s God was different. He was definite, and his character was immutably fixed. And they were to love him for it with everything they had. They were to love him with all their heart. In the seat of their deepest dreams and desires, in the place where they wrestled with their sorrows and clung to flickering hopes, they were to love him. They were to love him with all their soul. In the place that made each individual unique, in the inner court of the mind where decisions were made, in the forming of the bonds between friends and lovers, as well as in the coming together of a community, they were to love him. They were to love him with all their might. In the outward expressions of the passions and decisions of the heart and soul, in the places where men’s thoughts turned to action and resolve turned to progress, they were to love him. In their creativity and in their learning, in their working and in their resting, in their building up and in their tearing down, they were to love him. They were to love him as whole people, in all their weakness and in all their strength. On their best days and on their worst, in the darkest hours of their loneliest nights, and at the tables of their most abundant feasts, they were to love him. This was the heart of Israel’s religion: love. Only divine love made sense of the world. This love went beyond a mere feeling. This love was doctrine. Israel’s story was a story of being kept, and the only reasonable response was to love the Keeper.

We should think of others not as objects to be used, or annoying people in the way of realizing our projects, but rather as those whom we are called to serve. Instead of saying, “Why is this annoying person in my way?” we should ask, “What opportunity for evangelization has presented itself?” Has God put this person in your life precisely for this purpose? Reflect: How are evangelization and love connected?

Ring out false pride in place and blood, The civic slander and the spite; Ring in the love of truth and right,  Ring in the common love of good.  Ring out old shapes of foul disease; Ring out the narrowing lust of gold; Ring out the thousand wars of old,  Ring in the thousand years of peace.  Ring in the valiant man and free, The larger heart, the kindlier hand; Ring out the darkness of the land,  Ring in the Christ that is to be. The

These days I don’t care much for having an ironclad theology or an airtight apologetic. I know many people who have such things. Now I simply want my presence on the planet to result in less pain, less inequality, less poverty, less suffering, and less damage for those sharing it with me. I want the sum total of my minutes and my efforts to yield more compassion, more decency, more laughter, more justice, and more goodness than before I showed up. In other words: I just want to do Love right.

If you believe in Christ and in his advent, it is the highest praise and thanks to God to be holy. If you recognize, love, and magnify his grace and work in you, and cast aside and condemn self and the works of self, then you are a Christian. We say: “I believe in the holy Christian church, the communion of saints.” Do you desire to be a part of the holy Christian church and communion of saints, you must also be holy as she is, yet not of yourself but through Christ alone in whom all are holy.

This sense of being shaken up is Advent good news. Christmas should be more than putting up the tree and wrapping the presents. It should give birth to something that shakes up the routine, something that gets us to see the world otherwise. That shaking up is what it means to follow Jesus. To love one’s enemies is scary; to take up one’s cross is terrifying. Yet at the same time, Luke reminds us, there is a legacy that carries us forward and a promise that God will remember the covenant and bring about eternal justice.

Haven’t you ever lent your mind to the possibility of stepping out of the world as you know it and into something new…unusual that can elevate your mind to a place where you can experience a deeper meaning? Your pleasure is clearer, your perception of joy is sharper, and those things that confuse you—hurt you—become void, almost nonexistent. You can step out of who you know Alexis to be, along with all of her stressors and tap into a new advent of yourself.  Don’t think about what should be or could be; create your own path to contentment.

The words of prophecy were fulfilled: “There shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts, and saying, ‘Where is the promise of His coming?’ for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.” 609 Many who professed to love the Saviour, declared that they had no opposition to the doctrine of the second advent; they merely objected to the definite time. But God's all-seeing eye read their hearts. They did not wish to hear of Christ's coming to judge the world in righteousness. They had been unfaithful servants, their works would not bear the inspection of the heart-searching God, and they feared to meet their Lord. Like the Jews at the time of Christ's first advent, they were not prepared to welcome Jesus. They not only refused to listen to the plain arguments from the Bible, but ridiculed those who were looking for the Lord. Satan and his angels exulted, and flung the taunt in the face of Christ and holy angels, that His professed people had so little love for Him that they did not desire His appearing.

Holidays: Imagine if the great holidays and seasons of the Christian year were redesigned to emphasize love. Advent would be the season of preparing our hearts to receive God’s love. Epiphany would train us to keep our eyes open for expressions of compassion in our daily lives. Lent would be an honest self-examination of our maturity in love and a renewal of our commitment to grow in it. Instead of giving up chocolate or coffee for Lent, we would stop criticizing or gossiping about or interrupting others. Maundy Thursday would refocus us on the great and new commandment; Good Friday would present the suffering of crucifixion as the suffering of love; Holy Saturday would allow us to lament and grieve the lack of love in our lives and world; and Easter would celebrate the revolutionary power of death-defying love. Pentecost could be an “altar call” to be filled with the Spirit of love, and “ordinary time” could be “extraordinary time” if it involved challenges to celebrate and express love in new ways—to new people, to ourselves, to the earth, and to God—including time to tell stories about our experiences of doing so.

deep inside the smoldering stump of Israel, a remnant of life was rising to push back the darkness and break through the crust of the desolation of the people of God to find the light of day. Though they struggled to see it, God loved them. He loved them with an everlasting, unfailing love. Salvation was coming, and when all was said and done, “He will dwell with them and they will be his people and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore. ” (Rev 21:3-4) “Behold,” he says, “I am making all things new.

Because what is at stake for Jesus is not the proclamation and realization of new ethical ideals, and thus also not his own goodness (Matt. 19:17), but solely his love for real human beings, he can enter into the communication of their guilt; he can be loaded down with their guilt…. It is his love alone that lets him become guilty. Out of his selfless love, out of his sinless nature, Jesus enters into the guilt of human beings; he takes it upon himself. A sinless nature and guilt bearing are bound together in him indissolubly. As the sinless one Jesus takes guilt upon himself, and under the burden of this guilt, he shows that he is the sinless one.

That … is the unrecognized mystery of this world: Jesus Christ. That this Jesus of Nazareth, the carpenter, was himself the Lord of glory: that was the mystery of God. It was a mystery because God became poor, low, lowly, and weak out of love for humankind, because God became a human being like us, so that we would become divine, and because he came to us so that we would come to him. God as the one who becomes low for our sakes, God in Jesus of Nazareth—that is the secret, hidden wisdom… that “no eye has seen nor ear heard nor the human heart conceived” (1 Cor. 2:9)…. That is the depth of the Deity, whom we worship as mystery and comprehend as mystery.3 Dietrich Bonhoeffer

JANUARY 3 A Necessary Daily Exercise Why is it that my thoughts wander so quickly from God’s word, and that in my hour of need the needed word is often not there? Do I forget to eat and drink and sleep? Then why do I forget God’s word? Because I still can’t say what the psalmist says: “I will delight in your statutes” (Ps. 119:16). I don’t forget the things in which I take delight. Forgetting or not forgetting is a matter not of the mind but of the whole person, of the heart. I never forget what body and soul depend upon. The more I begin to love the commandments of God in creation and word, the more present they will be for me in every hour. Only love protects against forgetting.

In an incomprehensible reversal of all righteous and pious thinking, God declares himself guilty to the world and thereby extinguishes the guilt of the world. God himself takes the humiliating path of reconciliation and thereby sets the world free. God wants to be guilty of our guilt and takes upon himself the punishment and suffering that this guilt brought to us. God stands in for godlessness, love stands in for hate, the Holy One for the sinner. Now there is no longer any godlessness, any hate, any sin that God has not taken upon himself, suffered, and atoned for. Now there is no more reality and no more world that is not reconciled with God and in peace. That is what God did in his beloved Son Jesus Christ. Ecce homo — see the incarnate God, the unfathomable mystery of the love of God for the world. God loves human beings. God loves the world—not ideal human beings but people as they are, not an ideal world but the real world.

The sexual liberation revolution of the 1960's set in motion a cascade effect: the reversal of the long-standing moral consensus around promiscuity (which separated sex from marriage) worked in tandem with the advent of birth control and the legalization of abortion (which separated sex from pro-creation), which moved to the legalization of no-fault divorce (which turned a covenant into a contract and separated sex from intimacy and fidelity), then to tinder and hookup culture (which separated sex from romance and turned it into a way to "get your needs met"), From there it's moved on to the LGBTQI+ revolution (which separated sex from the male-female binary), the current transgender wave (which is an attempt to separate gender from biological sex), and the nascent polyamory movement (an attempt to move beyond two-person relationships). Amid the revolution, the questions nobody seems to even be asking are, is this making us better people? More loving people? Or even happier people? Are we thriving in a way we weren't prior to "liberation"?

On this side of eternity, Christmas is still a promise. Yes, the Savior has come, and with him peace on earth, but the story is not finished. Yes, there is peace in our hearts, but we long for peace in our world. Every Christmas is still a “turning of the page” until Jesus returns. Every December 25 marks another year that draws us closer to the fulfillment of the ages, that draws us closer to . . . home. When we realize that Jesus is the answer to our deepest longing, even Christmas longings, each Advent brings us closer to his glorious return to earth. When we see him as he is, King of kings and Lord of lords, that will be “Christmas” indeed! Talk about giving Christmas gifts! Just think of this abundance . . . You do not lack any spiritual gift as you eagerly wait for our Lord Jesus Christ to be revealed. (1 Cor. 1:7) And carols? You’re about to hear singing like you’ve never heard before. Listen . . . Then I heard something like the voice of a great multitude and like the sound of many waters and like the sound of mighty peals of thunder, saying, “Hallelujah! For the Lord our God, the Almighty, reigns.” (Rev. 19:6, nasb) Christmas choirs? Never was there a choir like the one about to be assembled . . . They held harps given them by God and sang . . . the song of the Lamb: “Great and marvelous are your deeds, Lord God Almighty. Just and true are your ways, King of the ages.” (Rev. 15:2–3) True, Main Street in your town may be beautifully decorated for the season, but picture this . . . The twelve gates [of the city] were twelve pearls, each gate made of a single pearl. The great street of the city was of pure gold, like transparent glass. (Rev. 21:21) Oh, and yes, we love the glow of candles on a cold winter’s night and the twinkling of Christmas lights in the dark, but can you imagine this? There will be no more night. They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light. And they will reign for ever and ever. (Rev. 22:5) Heaven is about to happen. The celebration is about to burst on the scene. We stand tiptoe at the edge of eternity, ready to step into the new heaven and the new earth. And I can hardly wait.

No man should ever make anything except in the spirit in which a woman bears a child, in the spirit in which Christ was formed in Mary's womb, in the love with which God created the world. The integral goodness and fittingness of the work of a man's hands or mind is sacred. He must have it in his heart to make it. His imagination must see it, and its purpose, before it exists in material. His whole life must be disciplined to gain and keep the skill to make it. He must, having conceived it, allow it to grow within him, until at last it flows from him and is woven of his life and is the visible proof that he has uttered his fiat: “Be it done unto me according to thy word!” Yes, according to the will of God, as an expression of the love of God. So that it is possible to whisper in wonder and awe, and without irreverence, on seeing the finished work: “The Word is made flesh.” Every work that we do should be a part of the Christ forming in us which is the meaning of our life, to it we must bring the patience, the self-giving, the time of secrecy, the gradual growth of Advent. This Advent in work applies to all work, not only that which produces something permanent in time but equally to the making of a carving in wood or

Jesus does not want to be the only perfect human being at the expense of humankind. He does not want, as the only guiltless one, to ignore a humanity that is being destroyed by its guilt; he does not want some kind of human ideal to triumph over the ruins of a wrecked humanity. Love for real people leads into the fellowship of human guilt. Jesus does not want to exonerate himself from the guilt in which the people he loves are living. A love that left people alone in their guilt would not have real people as its object. So, in vicarious responsibility for people and in his love for real human beings, Jesus becomes the one burdened by guilt—indeed, the one upon whom all human guilt ultimately falls and the one who does not turn it away but bears it humbly and in eternal love. As the one who acts responsibly in the historical existence of humankind, as the human being who has entered reality, Jesus becomes guilty. But because his historical existence, his incarnation, has its sole basis in God’s love for human beings, it is the love of God that makes Jesus become guilty. Out of selfless love for human beings, Jesus leaves his state as the one without sin and enters into the guilt of human beings. He takes it upon himself.

If you had to summarize the Christmas story with one word, what word would you choose? Now, your word would have to capture what this story points to as the core of human need and the way God would meet that need. Do you have a word in mind? Maybe you’re thinking that it’s just not possible to summarize the greatest story ever with one word. But I think you can. Let’s consider one lovely, amazing, history-changing, and eternally significant word. It doesn’t take paragraph after paragraph, written on page after page, filling volume after volume to communicate how God chose to respond to the outrageous rebellion of Adam and Eve and the subtle and not-so-subtle rebellion of everyone since. God’s response to the sin of people against his rightful and holy rule can be captured in a single word. I wonder if you thought, “I know the word: grace.” But the single word that captures God’s response to sin even better than the word grace is not a theological word; it is a name. That name is Jesus. God’s response wasn’t a thing. It wasn’t the establishment of an institution. It wasn’t a process of intervention. It wasn’t some new divine program. In his infinite wisdom God knew that the only thing that could rescue us from ourselves and repair the horrendous damage that sin had done to the world was not a thing at all. It was a person, his Son, the Lord Jesus.

Autumnal Leaves & The One Who Greaves! Leaves, few green, and many pale leaves, Nature greaves, as Autumn their life steals, And casts them into the lap of gravity, As it leaps at them like a predator that is remorseless and beastly, One by one, all pale leaves with red veins lie striven on different surfaces, Of parks, gardens, pedestrians and that long promenade where summer still exists in traces, In those pine needles still hanging on the tree of life, Piercing deeper and deeper in the true spirit of life’s endless strife, And the aching branches sigh a little louder with every new piercing, But they sustain the pain in hope of adventing Spring, And the river that still flows merrily through the fringes of the town, Looks at the falling, pale leaves and aching pine trees, with an ever deepening frown., The cold cast iron benches on the promenade lie empty, Where just a few months ago lovers kissed in an absolute feeling of felicity, Now occupied occasionally by the regular joggers trying to understand why it rushes, this ever flowing river, Unaware and heedless towards the lovers’ loss and the naked branches with green leaves fewer, And nature, the true lover of us all, Yet thanks the seemingly melancholic season of fall! For to better preserve the heritage of beauty, Time and death too need to fulfil their duty’ For what exists in the form of beautiful memories, Resides in the sanctuary of immortality just like the sweet taste of last season’s red cherries!

Almost immediately after jazz musicians arrived in Paris, they began to gather in two of the city’s most important creative neighborhoods: Montmartre and Montparnasse, respectively the Right and Left Bank haunts of artists, intellectuals, poets, and musicians since the late nineteenth century. Performing in these high-profile and popular entertainment districts could give an advantage to jazz musicians because Parisians and tourists already knew to go there when they wanted to spend a night out on the town. As hubs of artistic imagination and experimentation, Montmartre and Montparnasse therefore attracted the kinds of audiences that might appreciate the new and thrilling sounds of jazz. For many listeners, these locations leant the music something of their own exciting aura, and the early success of jazz in Paris probably had at least as much to do with musicians playing there as did other factors. In spite of their similarities, however, by the 1920s these neighborhoods were on two very different paths, each representing competing visions of what France could become after the war. And the reactions to jazz in each place became important markers of the difference between the two areas and visions. Montmartre was legendary as the late-nineteenth-century capital of “bohemian Paris,” where French artists had gathered and cabaret songs had filled the air. In its heyday, Montmartre was one of the centers of popular entertainment, and its artists prided themselves on flying in the face of respectable middle-class values. But by the 1920s, Montmartre represented an established artistic tradition, not the challenge to bourgeois life that it had been at the fin de siècle. Entertainment culture was rapidly changing both in substance and style in the postwar era, and a desire for new sounds, including foreign music and exotic art, was quickly replacing the love for the cabarets’ French chansons. Jazz was not entirely to blame for such changes, of course. Commercial pressures, especially the rapidly growing tourist trade, eroded the popularity of old Montmartre cabarets, which were not always able to compete with the newer music halls and dance halls. Yet jazz bore much of the criticism from those who saw the changes in Montmartre as the death of French popular entertainment. Montparnasse, on the other hand, was the face of a modern Paris. It was the international crossroads where an ever changing mixture of people celebrated, rather than lamented, cosmopolitanism and exoticism in all its forms, especially in jazz bands. These different attitudes within the entertainment districts and their institutions reflected the impact of the broader trends at work in Paris—the influx of foreign populations, for example, or the advent of cars and electricity on city streets as indicators of modern technology—and the possible consequences for French culture. Jazz was at the confluence of these trends, and it became a convenient symbol for the struggle they represented.

Before the 1940’s, if one woman in an audience stood up and shrieked at the top of her lungs throughout an entire show she’d have been carted off to an asylum. By the mid-forties, however, entire audiences behaved like that, screaming, tearing at their clothes and hair, leaving their seats to board the stage. On December 30th, 1942, while Frank Sinatra sang at the Paramount Theater in New York, the behavior of the audience changed, and a part of our relationship to well-known people changed forever. Psychiatrists and psychologists of the day struggled to explain the phenomenon. They recalled medieval dance crazes, spoke of “mass frustrated love” and “mass hypnosis.” The media age did bring a type of mass hypnosis into American life. It affects all of us to some degree, and some of us to a great degree. Before the advent of mass-media, a young girl might have admired a performer from afar, and it would have been acceptable to have a passing crush. It would not have been acceptable if she pursued the performer to his home, or if she had to be restrained by police. It would not have been acceptable to skip school in order to wait for hours outside a hotel and then try to tear pieces of clothing from the passing star. Yet that unhealthy behavior became “normal” in the Sinatra days. In fact, audience behavior that surprised everyone in 1942 was expected two years later when Sinatra appeared again at the Paramount Theater. This time, the 30,000 screaming, bobby-soxed fans were joined by a troop of reporters. The media were learning to manipulate this new behavior to their advantage. Having predicted a commotion, 450 police officers were assigned to that one theater, and it appeared that society had learned to deal with this phenomenon. It had not. During the engagement, an 18-year old named Alexander Ivanovich Dorogokupetz stood up in the theater and threw an egg that hit Sinatra in the face. The show stopped, and for a moment, a brief moment, Sinatra was not the star. Now it was Dorogokupetz mobbed by audience members and Dorogokupetz who had to be escorted out by police. Society had not learned to deal with this, and still hasn’t. Dorogokupetz told police: “I vowed to put an end to this monotony of two years of consecutive swooning. It felt good.” Saddled with the least American of names, he had tried to make one for himself in the most American way, and but for his choice of a weapon, he would probably be as famous today as Frank Sinatra. Elements in society were pioneering the skills of manipulating emotion and behavior in ways that had never been possible before: electronic ways. The media were institutionalizing idolatry.

Before the 1940’s, if one woman in an audience stood up and shrieked at the top of her lungs throughout an entire show she’d have been carted off to an asylum. By the mid-forties, however, entire audiences behaved like that, screaming, tearing at their clothes and hair, leaving their seats to board the stage. On December 30th, 1942, while Frank Sinatra sang at the Paramount Theater in New York, the behavior of the audience changed, and a part of our relationship to well-known people changed forever. Psychiatrists and psychologists of the day struggled to explain the phenomenon. They recalled medieval dance crazes, spoke of “mass frustrated love” and “mass hypnosis.” The media age did bring a type of mass hypnosis into American life. It affects all of us to some degree, and some of us to a great degree. Before the advent of mass-media, a young girl might have admired a performer from afar, and it would have been acceptable to have a passing crush. It would not have been acceptable if she pursued the performer to his home, or if she had to be restrained by police. It would not have been acceptable to skip school in order to wait for hours outside a hotel and then try to tear pieces of clothing from the passing star. Yet that unhealthy behavior became “normal” in the Sinatra days. In fact, audience behavior that surprised everyone in 1942 was expected two years later when Sinatra appeared again at the Paramount Theater. This time, the 30,000 screaming, bobby-soxed fans were joined by a troop of reporters. The media were learning to manipulate this new behavior to their advantage. Having predicted a commotion, 450 police officers were assigned to that one theater, and it appeared that society had learned to deal with this phenomenon. It had not. During the engagement, an 18-year old named Alexander Ivanovich Dorogokupetz stood up in the theater and threw an egg that hit Sinatra in the face. The show stopped, and for a moment, a brief moment, Sinatra was not the star. Now it was Dorogokupetz mobbed by audience members and Dorogokupetz who had to be escorted out by police. Society had not learned to deal with this, and still hasn’t. Dorogokupetz told police: “I vowed to put an end to this monotony of two years of consecutive swooning. It felt good.” Saddled with the least American of names, he had tried to make one for himself in the most American way, and but for his choice of a weapon, he would probably be as famous today as Frank Sinatra. Elements in society were pioneering the skills of manipulating emotion and behavior in ways that had never been possible before: electronic ways. The media were institutionalizing idolatry. Around

I used to think that the fear we have of dying was tied to the fear of being forgotten. But now, I think that what we're really afraid of is the ones we love being forgotten. The ones we have both lost and carry with us.

The world’s experience of Christianity has been like a great love, the love of a lifetime ... No new voice ... will have any appeal for us, if it does not bring us back to the stable at Bethlehem – there to humble our pride, and enlarge our charity, and deepen our sense of reverence with the sight of a dazzling purity.[323]

As we celebrate the birth of Jesus, we also need to reflect on the violence of grace. What do I mean? Jesus came to decimate our self-oriented kingdoms of one so that he could welcome us to his glorious kingdom of wisdom, grace, and love. Grace destroys so that it can rescue. Grace destroys so that it can bless us with something much, much better. Grace destroys what has held us in bondage and frees us to live, love, and serve One greater than ourselves. Jesus came to endure a violent death so that in the violence of grace he could free us from the kingdom of self and transport us to his kingdom of life and light that will never, ever end. Now that’s a story worth celebrating!

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WITH THE ADVENT of the computer and the dawn of the space race, the sixties brought futuristic visions of life to the mainstream consciousness. The Soviet satellite Sputnik had led to the formation of NASA to oversee America’s space program. In prime time on ABC, Americans could tune in to catch the animated cartoon The Jetsons, about a space-age family who lived with their housekeeping robot, Rosie, and dog, Astro. A couple of years later, Desilu, I Love Lucy’s production company, premiered Star Trek on CBS. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey had a near-omniscient computer named Hal manipulating its astronauts. By the midsixties, the concepts of artificial intelligence and self-driving cars were no longer in the realm of magic or science fiction—they were seen as the logical, inevitable outcome of the American trajectory.

We replaced material presents with the gift of presence. We learned to give our time, our talents, our love, and ourselves to one another.

Imagine a whole company of believers rethinking their lives, redeploying their energy, reassessing their purposes. The path is to love God, not party, not ideology, not pet project, but God’s will for steadfast love that is not deterred by fear and anxiety.

spirits, sent forth to minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation?" Hebrews 1:14 Angels are the unseen attendants of the saints of God; they bear us up in their hands, lest we dash our foot against a stone. Loyalty to their Lord leads them to take a deep interest in the children of his love; they rejoice over the return of the prodigal to his father's house below, and they welcome the advent of the believer to the King's palace above. In olden times the sons of God were favoured with their visible appearance, and at this day, although unseen by us, heaven is still opened, and the angels of God ascend and descend upon the Son of man, that they may visit the heirs of salvation. Seraphim still fly with live coals from off the altar to touch the lips of men greatly beloved. If our eyes could be opened, we should see horses of fire and chariots of fire about the servants of the Lord; for we have come to an innumerable company of angels, who are all watchers and protectors of the seed-royal. Spenser's line is no poetic fiction, where he sings-- "How oft do they with golden pinions cleave The flitting skies, like flying pursuivant Against foul fiends to aid us militant!" To what dignity are the chosen elevated when the brilliant courtiers of heaven become their willing servitors! Into what communion are we raised since we have intercourse with spotless celestials! How well are we defended since all the twenty- thousand chariots of God are armed for our deliverance! To whom do we owe all this? Let the Lord Jesus Christ be forever endeared to us, for through him we are made to sit in heavenly places far above principalities and powers.

Do not treat this as a time of introspective penitence. To the extent you must clean up, do it with the attitude of someone showering and changing clothes, getting ready for the best banquet you have ever been to. This does not include three weeks of meditating on how you are not worthy to go to banquets. Of course you are not. Haven’t you heard of grace? Celebrate the stuff. Use fudge and eggnog and wine and roast beef. Use presents and wrapping paper. Embedded in many of the common complaints you hear about the holidays (consumerism, shopping, gluttony, etc.) are false assumptions about the point of the celebration. You do not prepare for a real celebration of the Incarnation through thirty days of Advent Gnosticism. At the same time, remembering your Puritan fathers, you must hate the sin while loving the stuff. Sin is not resident in the stuff. Sin is found in the human heart—in the hearts of both true gluttons and true scrooges—both those who drink much wine and those who drink much prune juice. If you are called up to the front of the class, and you get the problem all wrong, it would be bad form to blame the blackboard. That is just where you registered your error. In the same way, we register our sin on the stuff. But—because Jesus was born in this material world, that is where we register our piety as well. If your godliness won’t imprint on fudge, then it is not true godliness. Some may be disturbed by this. It seems a little out of control, as though I am urging you to “go overboard.” But of course I am urging you to go overboard. Think about it—when this world was “in sin and error pining,” did God give us a teaspoon of grace to make our dungeon a tad more pleasant? No. He went overboard.

All of the mercy God is capable of showing, all of the redeeming grace that He could pour from His heart, all of the love and pity that God is capable of feeling--all of these are at least suggested here in the message that He came!

He felt his chest swelling. His chest was a sensitive instrument, worthy of Stradivarius's workshop. From time to time he would feel the aforementioned swelling, and each time was certain that this swelling had the inevitability of soothsaying through which is announced the advent of something great and unprecedented, something exceeding all his dreams.

The inference is that consciousness develops or evolves “to remedy defect of brain.”9 Most important, the advent of consciousness (James is still thinking in evolutionary terms) means the end of the reign of chance and the beginning of the reign of intelligence.10 Accepting consciousness as an active, choosing, comparing process also means abandoning pure materialism and pure determinism. “I for one,” James concluded his sixth and last lecture, “as a scientific man and practical man alike, deny utterly that Science compels me to believe that my conscience is an ignis fatuus or outcast, and I trust that you too after the evidence of this evening will go away strengthened in the natural faith that your delights and sorrows, your loves and hates, your aspirations and efforts are real combatants in life’s arena, and not impotent, paralytic spectators of the game.”11

Advent prayer Lord, may Jesus be more real to me this season than he ever has been. Open my eyes wider than ever to the beauty of his coming. Give me ears to hear the whispers of your voice. May your restoration continue and your Kingdom come—in my life, in my family, in my workplace, in my church, in my community, in my world—just as it is in heaven. May I live with excited anticipation throughout this season and beyond. Grant that I would enter into the story and the blessing of the Christ child more fully each day. Amen.

My masters at Melk had often told me that it is very difficult for a Northerner to form any clear idea of the religious and political vicissitudes of Italy. The peninsula, where more than in any other country the clergy made a display of power and wealth, for at least two centuries had generated movements of men bent on a poorer life, in protest against the corrupt priests, from whom they even refused the sacraments. They gathered in independent communities, hated equally by the feudal lords, the empire, and the city magistrates. Finally Saint Francis had appeared, spreading a love of poverty that did not contradict the precepts of the church; and after his efforts the church had accepted the summons to severe behavior of those older movements and had purified them of the elements of disruption that lurked in them. There should have followed a period of meekness and holiness, but as the Franciscan order grew and attracted the finest men, it became too powerful, too bound to earthly matters, and many Franciscans wanted to restore it to its early purity. A very difficult matter for an order that at the time when I was at the abbey already numbered more than thirty thousand members scattered throughout the whole world. But so it was, and many of those monks of Saint Francis were opposed to the Rule that the order had established, and they said the order had by now assumed the character of those ecclesiastical institutions it had come into the world to reform. And this, they said, had already happened in the days when Saint Francis was alive, and his words and his aims had been betrayed. Many of them rediscovered then a book written at the beginning of the twelfth century of our era, by a Cistercian monk named Joachim, to whom the spirit of prophecy was attributed. He had foreseen the advent of a new age, in which the spirit of Christ, long corrupted through the actions of his false apostles, would again be achieved on earth. And it had seemed clear to all that, unawares, he was speaking of the Franciscan order.

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Diana Adams is more interested in seeing increased social protections for alternative families. While same-sex marriage was an important victory for gay rights and opened up a cultural conversation about the definition of marriage and love, she says, we shouldn't forget that the movement was also "a queer critique of the nuclear family and traditional monogamous sexuality." The same is true of monogamy's insurgents. Rather than "cram people into the institution of marriage," she says, "we ultimately want to get the government out of the business of deciding whether you get tax benefits, health insurance, and immigration status based on whom you're having sex with." Her thoughts remind me of the late psychologist and gay activist Michael Shernoff, who reflected critically on the shift "from gay men radically transforming American society" to gay men "assimilating into it in conservative and hetero-normative ways." He lauded consensual nonmonogamy as a "vibrant, normative, healthy part" of the gay community, and expressed concern that the advent of gay marriage might consign this "venerable, multigenerational tradition" to the category of adultery. "Couples who succesfully negotiate sexual nonexclusivity," he wrote, "are, whether or not they are conscious of it, being genuinely subversive, in one of the most constructive ways possible...by challenging the patriarchial notion that there is only one "proper" and "legitimate" (hetero-normative) way that loving relationships should and need to be conducted" Monogamy was once a subject that was never even discussed in the therapist's office, but today as a matter of course I ask every couple, What is your monogamy agreement? Marriage without virginity was once inconceivable. So, too, sex without marriage.

The great force! Few of us relate it with the dark, Many with the world unknown, A realm that erases every mark, Of every seed that in the farm of life was sown, Life fears it and hides at a place called nowhere, Yet it chases it and seeks it, Because its domain is everywhere, And life ultimately before it does submit, It rules over priests, emperors and paupers alike, A force that expects complete submission, It is not a feeling visceral that you may like, Because it enters every domain without any permission, Some say it even rules over time and its every moment, And it is not vindictive at all, Because even without the Sun its shadow is permanent, It has existed since the world witnessed the great fall, Its appearance is not due to serendipity, Because it is the final destiny of everything, It is an experience, felt just for a brevity, It appears from nothing and disappears into nothing, A force before which all kneel, Many incriminate it because it robs them entirely, Throughout one's life it seems unreal and in a moment becomes real, It leaves all sentimental and teary, It is death, the force all living shall experience one day, I wonder why flowers and butterflies do not dread it, I saw it capture and wilt a beautiful flower today, Yet the drooping and dead flower smiled as the hope of next Summer in its fading petals lit, Because death can wilt a summer flower, but it can't keep the Summer from returning again, It can kill a man and a woman, but it can never kill life’s spirit, Without life what shall it kill again and again, So you may despise it, but without it who shall renew life, if not it? There maybe no foreboding feeling about its arrival, But then it is the same about Summer’s advent too, Maybe life and death travel together for life’s continuous revival, And whose act is it who knows, because when a newly married couple says “We do!” We shower them with dead flowers, beautiful flowers, Who killed them, who hurled them, who ended their lives? Just for the sake of prolonging the romance of two lovers, I guess that is how death in mysterious ways strives, Killing all eventually but never taking the blame, So let me too pluck a beautiful rose and gift it to my beautiful lady, All for the sake of love and in the love’s name, Let me love her today and love her everyday, Because who knows when the dark force might strike, A rose too feels happier in her hands, Because it knows it makes her smile and in this act they are alike, Spreading happiness even in death forsaken lands, That is where all beautiful flowers go when they wilt here, To the land where there is everlasting Summer, And every form of beauty always looks the same everywhere, They go there to impart it colours and shades warmer, So when the flower fades and falls, Let us not blame death and curse it, Because it is the only way to climb and cross few walls, For it too ultimately before the mighty will of the Universe does submit!

..as in all housework, there is something inherently redemptive in the process, and therefore something truly good. To rend usefulness and order from the soiled and dejected is always a holy work, howsoever trivial it might seem on the surface. But we do not live in the surface of things, not really, no matter how we might skim along the glassy crust above the deeper meaning of our days. The place where we really live, where the humblest things serve the highest ends and the most menial tasks are quickened by love, is down amid the unseen ordinary where sacred significance thrums through the practicalities of daily life.

The deepest lie I believed was that God is either all-loving or all-powerful, but he cannot be both. I now cling to the idea that he displays his absolute, all-loving power, not in a continual rescue, but in a constant suffering. In these days between Jesus’s first advent and his second coming, God suffers with us to accomplish his purposes.

He Dwells Among Us He was not the light, but came to testify to the light. John 1:8 John the Baptist knew his place. He recognized how insignificant he was in comparison to the One whom he announced. At the same time, John also valued his own significance. He accepted the tremendous calling that was his, to be trusted as a messenger of the Light. And isn’t that true for each of us? We, too, are not the Christ, but we are filled with his love and light. Like John, we are also entrusted with announcing Christ’s coming among us. Each thought, word and deed of ours that contains love becomes a messenger announcing the presence of the Holy One. Thus it is that all through Advent we can proclaim, without any egotistical fanfare, that the Promised One is among us. Our patience, generosity, understanding, forgiveness, all these—and other choices we make to be persons of love—quietly declare the Word who became flesh is dwelling among us. Sr. Joyce Rupp, O.S.M. Isaiah 61:1-2, 10-11 • Luke 1:46-50, 53-54 • 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24 • John 1:6-8, 19-28

It was a very costly love. A very powerful love. A very rugged, painful love. The meaning of Christmas is the celebration of this love. “God so loved . . .” And wonder of wonders, God gives this costly love to an undeserving world of sinners, like us.

DECEMBER 6 First Saturday of Advent Cure Every Disease Saint Nicholas, also known as Nicholas the Wonderworker, was a fourth-century Greek bishop. Legend has it that he saved the people of Myra from famine, protected the wrongly accused, and practiced secret gift-giving—putting coins, for example, in the shoes townsfolk would leave on their doorsteps. A friend once told a story from his childhood of Christmas morning. For weeks, he’d anticipated the opening of the presents. He’d seen the gifts under the tree, picked them up, hefted them to gauge the weight, held them up to his ear and shook, trying to guess. Finally, Christmas dawned; the family gathered; one by one he opened all kinds of beautiful gifts. He can’t now remember what the gifts were; what he remembers is that by afternoon he felt downcast, fretful. “What is it?” his mother finally asked. “What’s the matter?” “I didn’t get what I wanted,” he replied. “What did you want?” “I don’t know—I just know I didn’t get it.” Saint Nicholas reminds us that the Christmas practice of exchanging gifts is based on the greatest gift of all: Christ himself. To be a laborer for the harvest is to realize that we can never, ever get enough. It’s in giving that our demons are cast out. It’s in loving that we are healed.

If there is any truth in Scripture at all, this is true—that those who stubbornly refuse to submit to the gospel, and to love and obey Jesus Christ, incur at the Last Advent an infinite and irreparable loss. They will pass into a night on which no morning dawns.

In these moments during Christmas Mass when we breathe the air of liturgy, the true colors of Christmas come out. This is what liturgy is meant to do. These songs we are singing, these symbols all around us, these prayers we say, these believing people we are with, all express the heart of Christmas . . . That God would love us so, that God would want to be loved so by us (for who could not love this baby), that God would rescue us from our worst, or the worst that others have done to us . . .’ – Bishop Ken Untener

The Church, though dispersed through our the whole world, even to the ends of the earth, has received from the apostles and their disciples this faith: [She believes] in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven, and earth, and the sea, and all things that are in them; and in one Christ Jesus, the Son of God, who became incarnate for our salvation; and in the Holy Spirit, who proclaimed through the prophets the dispensations of God, and the advents, and the birth from a virgin, and the passion, and the resurrection from the dead, and the ascension into heaven in the flesh of the beloved Christ Jesus, our Lord, and His [future] manifestation from heaven in the glory of the Father “to gather all things in one,” and to raise up anew all flesh of the whole human race, in order that to Christ Jesus, our Lord, and God, and Saviour, and King, according to the will of the invisible Father, “every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth, and that every tongue should confess” to Him, and that He should execute just judgment towards all; that He may send “spiritual wickednesses,” and the angels who transgressed and became apostates, together with the ungodly, and unrighteous, and wicked, and profane among men, into everlasting fire; but may, in the exercise of His grace, confer immortality on the righteous, and holy, and those who have kept His commandments, and have persevered in His love, some from the beginning [of their Christian course], and others from [the date of] their repentance, and may surround them with everlasting glory.

Hesiod’s comments, though certainly a product of a mindset that stretches back millennia, are undoubtedly misogynistic since he says that Philotes and Apate belong to Aphrodite and all women. This point of view is hardly surprising; after all, it was Hesiod who first documented the myth of Pandora, she who unleashed all evil on the world. In fact, prior to the creation of “woman”, humans did not know death. So, on the advent of woman’s entrance into the world, Hesiod writes that deceitful words and death accompanied her too.[49]

the death of advertising. Certainly, conventional advertising—ads that seek to persuade people to think differently about product benefits—are becoming less effective as media get more fragmented and as audiences become more cynical about marketer’s claims. But cultural branding is different. Iconic brands perform ads that people love to watch. With the advent of the Web, customers search out these

All who put their ultimate trust and allegiance in God (Ex. 20: 3-11) and are truly committed to loving and serving their fellow human beings (Ex. 20: 12-17), particularly the poor and the victims of injustice (Ex. 22: 21-25), enter into the Everlasting Covenant (Matt. 22: 36-40). All the other covenants with Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, etc. have been restatements of the Everlasting Covenant which human beings have continually distorted. The most significant restatement came through Jesus Christ (Heb. 12: 24; 13: 20). In Scripture, the Everlasting Covenant is synonymous with salvation. Those who enter into this Covenant with God are saved.[

Those who profess to be the most religious are not necessarily the most loving, merciful, tolerant, affirming, and emotionally healthy human beings. In fact, a number of scientific studies[46] conducted in the last three decades indicate that there is a significant correlation between certain forms of strict religious orthodoxy and increased tendencies towards bigotry, sexism, intolerance, rigidity, racism, and deficiency of healthy self-esteem. These studies demonstrate that false or unhealthy religion is worse than no religion at all.

Why would God come in such a helpless form? Can you picture holding the child Jesus? What does it mean to love God as we do a baby?

The Lord, however, calls us to be people of deep moral sensibility. He is less concerned about our getting every jot and tittle of theology correct than He is about how we relate to moral issues. He tells us that what He expects of us is “to act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8, NIV). Jesus echoed this passage as He condemned the teachers of the law and the Pharisees. “You have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness,” He said (Matthew 23:23, NIV).

God uses even the smallest of gifts, the least of ideas, the smallest of tokens, to reflect glory and love.

The question isn’t one or the other - grace or victory - but rather where shall we put the emphasis? Having observed the struggle in my own experience as well as in the church, I have firm convictions as to the answer of the Bible and Ellen White’s writings. “In the beginning God…” - God first, last, and in between, Christ the Alpha and the Omega also. Victory, yes, but not first - grace first, and out of the life overwhelmed with divine favor and overflowing with love and gratitude, then victory. Grace is extraordinary, totally unlike our experience of the world. We soon learn that in the world we get what we deserve. But grace reverses the human order: the divine order teaches us that we get what we don’t deserve. God is a profligate Lover and Giver. He welcomes into His kingdom a multitude of unworthy wretches.

Church is about people - people saved by a loving Lord who treat others as God has treated them, who look not only on their own interests but on the interests of others, who do nothing out of selfish ambition but who have the attitude of Jesus.

asks for faith in his person, for the complete trust that opens our hearts to his saving and transforming power. Thus, asking for something with faith really means entrusting my needs and my hopes confidently to the One who loves me.

By putting our focus on giving to others and meeting their very real needs, we can battle the greed in our hearts. Christmas is a season not of getting, but of giving, because at Christmas we are celebrating that God is the most generous and outrageous Giver in the universe. After all, he gave us his Son. Proverbs says, “Some people are always greedy for more, but the godly love to give!” (Proverbs 21:26). To pour ourselves into becoming outrageous givers is to pursue becoming more like God. God turns greedy, grasping, fearful hoarders into generous, honest, cheerful givers.

It is not an accident of history that this one man separates all men into two groups, one that anxiously awaits his coming, and one that denies his personhood. I do not think it an accident that we celebrate two Christmases each year—one that celebrates the advent of the Christ-child being sent to man, and the other who celebrates the good works of a funny man in a red suit. Some of us see him as he is, while others only seek to deny that which should be obvious to all. God has brought us to new life. And that life is in no one else except his Son. If you haven’t considered the claims of Christ, perhaps now would be a good time. What a wonder that God should come as a man, and be rejected by those whom he loves!

Everyone loves differently. Every love is unique.

The Genesis account of the advent of mankind (Adam-man) is far more eloquent and significant than a casual reading of the passage in English might suggest. In this majestic “Poem of the Dawn” or “Hymn of Creation” (cf. H. Orton Wiley, Christian Theology, Vol. I, Nazarene Publishing House, Kansas City, Mo., pp. 450 ff.), the metaphorical use of the terms “dust,” “image,” “likeness,” “create,” “made,” “breath of life,” and others, contributes much to biblical understanding of man, sin, redemption, holiness, and all the implications of “grace” in relation to man. The writer of the Genesis story chose his words carefully. In 1:26 he tells us that God said, “Let us make man in our image after our likeness,” and (1:27) then, “God created man in his own image … male and female created he them.” Strangely, the second account (Genesis 2) introduces a most mundane and earthy note to the almost too idealistic and incredible first description. “The Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life [‘lives, ’ Hebrew plural, here]; and man became a living being” (Gen. 2:7; RSV). Note the progress; formed, breathed into, and then the process of becoming. There will be no attempt made here to formulate any theory of man's appearance on earth. These terms are noted to suggest that the wording gives room for more than one interpretation. However, no attempt to interpret these passages from the standpoint of modern science should be permitted to obscure the main ideas proposed in Genesis 1—2. This is not a scientific account nor was it in any sense intended to be. The role of science is to unpack all the facts possible which are built into man and his history and world. But the meaning of man and his universe must be derived from another source. And it is this meaning that the biblical story seeks to impart. This starkly beautiful, unembroidered introduction to man as made in his Creator's image establishes the fundamental religious meaning of man as he stands in relationship to God and to nature. This noble concept must precede and throw light upon all that the Hebraic-Christian teaching will assume about man—a sinful creature as of now, yet created in the Imago Dei.

April 13 MORNING “A bundle of myrrh is my well-beloved unto me.” — Song of Solomon 1:13 MYRRH may well be chosen as the type of Jesus on account of its preciousness, its perfume, its pleasantness, its healing, preserving, disinfecting qualities, and its connection with sacrifice. But why is He compared to “a bundle of myrrh”? First, for plenty. He is not a drop of it, He is a casket full. He is not a sprig or flower of it, but a whole bundle. There is enough in Christ for all my necessities; let me not be slow to avail myself of Him. Our well-beloved is compared to a “bundle” again, for variety: for there is in Christ not only the one thing needful, but in “Him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily,” everything needful is in Him. Take Jesus in His different characters, and you will see a marvellous variety — Prophet, Priest, King, Husband, Friend, Shepherd. Consider Him in His life, death, resurrection, ascension, second advent; view Him in His virtue, gentleness, courage, self-denial, love, faithfulness, truth, righteousness — everywhere He is a bundle of preciousness. He is a “bundle of myrrh” for preservation — not loose myrrh tied up, myrrh to be stored in a casket. We must value Him as our best treasure; we must prize His words and His ordinances; and we must keep our thoughts of Him and knowledge of Him as under lock and key, lest the devil should steal anything from us. Moreover, Jesus is a “bundle of myrrh” for speciality. The emblem suggests the idea of distinguishing, discriminating grace. From before the foundation of the world, He was set apart for His people; and He gives forth His perfume only to those who understand how to enter into communion with Him, to have close dealings with Him. Oh! blessed people whom the Lord hath admitted into His secrets, and for whom He sets Himself apart. Oh! choice and happy who are thus made to say, “A bundle of myrrh is my wellbeloved unto me.

Give yourself time and quietness in this Advent season and seek this experience. Pray for yourself the prayer of Paul in Ephesians 3:14–19—“that you may be filled with all the fullness of God”—that you may have power “to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge.

The baby who will be born in Bethlehem is the only begotten Son of God, consubstantial with the Father, eternal, having his own divine nature and also the human nature which he has assumed in Mary’s virginal womb. When we look at him this Christmas and see him helpless in the arms of his mother, we must not forget that this is God, made man for love of us, every single one of us. During these days when we read with profound wonder the words of the Gospel and dwelt among us, or when we say the Angelus, we shall have a good opportunity for making a deep and grateful act of faith, and for adoring the sacred Humanity of Our Lord.

That’s the kind of love the Father has. It is a giving love. It gives his most precious treasure—his Son. Meditate on that this Advent. It was a very costly love. A very powerful love. A very rugged, painful love. The meaning of Christmas is the celebration of this love. “God so loved . . .” And wonder of wonders, God gives this costly love to an undeserving world of sinners, like us.

The Law of the Lord is a love story.

What does matter is that you understand this one great truth I have learned in my life: having knowledge, even at the expense of leaving the Garden, has been worth it. For it is through this great gift of knowledge that I have understood something of the Creator's power - yes, even the Creator's love. Out of what seemed punishment, came a great good; out of physical pain, all of you have emerged. The pain has been forgotten while the pleasure of your presence endures. Adam and I have known joy - how would we have tasted it had we not known its opposite, sorrow? And we have seen how darkness is dispelled when light arrives, night and day, after night and day. We never tire of it.

Humanity began in a precarious world where tiny bands foraged and scrimped for food by day, huddled together for warmth by night. With the advent of agriculture came mass aggregation in towns and cities. The industrial revolution took work out of the home, making the populace “a mass of undifferentiated equals, working in a factory or scattered between the factories, the mines, and the offices, bereft forever of the feeling that work was a family affair, done within the household.” Economies prospered as families dissipated. In pursuit of further riches, the information age demands a more thoroughgoing surrender—less time for relationships, less time for children, more time for impersonal everything. Before our lives wither away into dust, we might ponder how much more prosperity human beings can possibly survive.

Somehow one feels unfettered by any of the harsh, restricting influences of human existence as we live it these days. There are no buildings, no roads, no street lights, no artificial or even natural noises, no hustle and bustle, no need for anyone to shout or to have money or to pretend about anything; those human beings who are with you are probably fairly well known to you, and are there for the same reason that you are—they know the dangers and delights of solitude just the same as you do, and they will react to the unblemished and staggering loveliness of a huge expanse of desert sky, deep blue by day and of a marvellous purple at night sprinkled haphazardly with hundreds and thousands of stars silently lighting up that great canopy of night-time that drifts down with the close of day. I personally think I know of nothing more restorative than lying on the soft sand—cool now after the retirement of the day’s sun— and just staring at the miracle of such a sky. And then you fall asleep, rolled up in a sleeping bag against the considerable fall in temperature as the night goes on, perhaps waking an hour or two before dawn for just long enough to notice that those little stars are still there—as bright as ever—and do not even look as though they are getting ready to be extinguished by the advent of another day. It is a lovely, comforting feeling when the world around you is quite still; and there is no sound anywhere to penetrate the delightful peace that surrounds you. When the dawn comes, and the stars have all gone away, there is something sharp and exhilarating about the smell in the air. It is fresh and clean and tantalisingly different to the atmosphere which will pervade the day once the sun has come up over the distant horizon. Then there will be no escape from its merciless and desiccating heat, which drains you of energy and leaves you burned and incapable of any prolonged activity. And the bright reflection of the sun off the light-coloured sand can be piercing and painful to the eyes. There is probably not even a tiny breeze to move that sullen, sultry air, and there can be no relief from its effects until once more, and inevitably, the great ball of fire that is the sun will slide slowly below the land and allow it to grow cool. It would be foolish to pretend that all of those who served with the LRDG saw the desert in the way that I have described it, all or even much of the time. But I am quite sure that when their minds were not diverted by rather more pressing considerations concerning the enemy, there were few who were not moved by the beauty of the sky at night. They all spent quite a number of hours on sentry duty, when, alone with his thoughts and in such surroundings, no man can be oblivious of such a miraculous revelation.

Let the warmth of expectation kindle in your heart the desire to welcome His love into your daily life.

Advent is all about waiting. It is about patience, expectation, and longing. We wait in hope for the arrival of something better than what we have now. This is a joyful hope. But Advent is about ache too, because longing and waiting are also painful experiences. For our exiled friends in prison longing for freedom, for our oppressed brothers and sisters waiting for justice, for our loved ones on the streets dreaming of a warm home, waiting is agony.

That’s my prayer for you today, friend. That you would hear His heart of love in the Christmas story. That you would be left in wonder and awe again of the radical, never-ending, relentless, unconditional love of God that He came to earth

Whether or not there is snow on the ground where you are, whether or not your days have gotten shorter, the questions still remain. How will you make it through the winter? Through a difficult season of life? Through until the end? You can and will make it through by holding fast to the one who can illuminate the path for you. In this light, you can look backwards and see that his goodness and love have been pursuing you all the way. In this light, you can known that you are not alone. In this light, you can find purpose and joy in helping others along the road. And in this light, one day, the darkness — whatever form your particular darkness takes — will be forever banished.

A religion based on trying to earn love inevitably fails, because works can never truly heal the fear of being left alone because of your real.

Horizontal comparisons tend to stimulate self-righteousness. Think of the contrast between the words of the Pharisee and the tax collector in Jesus’s parable in Luke 18. He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and treated others with contempt: “Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.’ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ I tell you, this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.” (Luke 18:9–14) In comparing himself to other people who are obviously more sinful than he is, the Pharisee essentially tells God that he doesn’t need him, and he surely doesn’t need his forgiveness. How ironic it is to tell the One to whom you are praying that you don’t need him. How strange is it to turn prayer into an argument for your independence rather than a humble confession of personal need. The argument of the Pharisee has two parts. First, he compares himself to others, and then he offers evidence that he is really quite righteous. Sadly, in this man’s prayer, he is participating in his own deception—​​​a deception that will be his doom. The tax collector does just the opposite. Why is he so quick to cry out for God’s mercy? He’s quick to do so because he’s looked into the mirror of God’s Word. You cannot read God’s Word without becoming deeply aware that you are a person in desperate need. You cannot read God’s Word without being confronted with the sin that lives in your heart. You cannot read your Bible without facing the fact that you constantly fall beneath God’s wise and holy standard. You cannot properly celebrate the Christmas story without also being willing to receive its clear and loving rebuke.

You see, the real historical events of the incarnation of Jesus are our guarantee that God will continue to deliver to us everything we need. We need divine rescue, we need forgiveness, we need to be transformed, and we need to be delivered. We need God’s faithfulness, we need his patience, we need his wisdom, we need his power, we need his mercy, we need his rule, and we need his love. None of these things are at stake. None of these things will wear out. None of these things will quit working. God will never get tired of blessing us with these things. God will never get impatient and decide to quit. He will never get so irritated with the things we say and do that he’ll turn his back on us and walk away. He will not get distracted or become weary.

You see, the Christmas story is the world’s best love story. It’s about a God of love sending the Son of his love to live a life of love and die a death of love, so that all who believe in him would be welcomed into the arms of his love forever and ever. Embedded in the Christmas story is a promise of unbroken love for the children of God. You can do the dumbest thing, and God will still love you. You can have a day when you ignore his existence, and God will still love you. You can fail to do what he’s called you to do, and he will still love you. I am not arguing that sin is okay or that you should not take it seriously. I’m arguing that the security of our relationship with God has never depended on the faithfulness of our obedience. If God withdrew his love every time we failed, there would be no hope for any of us. The unbreakable faithfulness of God’s love for us is such a huge comfort precisely because we are unfaithful. The unstained perfection of God’s love gives such hope to us because we aren’t perfect.

Your chances of being overconfident or under educated are the least today that they have ever been because of the advent of 500 people on Facebook telling you what a dumbass you might be, and how good Google information is.

If we refuse to update our knowledge, then we have refused to know and thereby refused to love.

A prison cell, in which one waits, hopes . . . and is completely dependent on the fact that the door of freedom has to be opened from the outside, is not a bad picture of Advent. DIETRICH BONHOEFFER

God came down in Jesus not to prepare us for the next world but to set us free to live in this world the way Jesus lived, which was the costly way of reconciling love, relentless hope, reverberating joy.

THURSDAY 1 Thessalonians 3:9–13 REFLECTION On the First Sunday of Advent many congregations light the hope candle. A vision of “the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints” can encourage hope, regardless of how or when it occurs, whether the hearer conceives of this coming literally in history or metaphorically in the experiences of individuals and communities. To be ready for the “coming of our Lord Jesus” is a faithful way of living not dependent on predictions as to when. Endings and beginnings abound. Personal tragedy or world calamity can intrude at any time. Faithful preparation and expectant living can help us face whatever comes. Paul’s words of assurance that were intended to “restore whatever is lacking” in the faith of the Thessalonians can bolster the faith of contemporary hearers as well and can be the impetus for all to “increase and abound in love.” PHILIP E. CAMPBELL RESPONSE What is lacking in your faith that needs to be restored in this Advent season of waiting and preparation? PRAYER God of hope, I wait with hope for your advent in my life. Amen.

Opening Prayer God our Father, out of loving obedience to you, and out of love for all that you created through him, your Only Begotten Son became human and dwelt among us. He was born as a baby, just like us. He went through the joys and sufferings of living, just like us. He suffered and died and rose again, just for us. Give us hearts of repentance, so that we may weep for the one who was pierced for our sins, and rejoice as our sins and impurities are washed away. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.

Examination of Conscience    Come, Lord Jesus!   For the times when I forget that I need a Savior, and arrogantly conceive of myself as sufficient to myself,   For the times when I do not believe Jesus and instead give in to the lie of perceiving God the Father as being indifferent or hostile to my well-being,   For the times when I trust my self-pitying accusations more than the Father’s love,   For the times when I desecrate the presence of Christ by making my own opinions, my own criteria, or my own likes and dislikes the measure for measuring the circumstances of life and other people,   For the times when I have shunned the presence of Christ, whether it be his sacramental presence or his presence through the people he puts in my life,   For the times when I have blasphemed the presence of Christ through using other human beings as things that I can manipulate or use for my own selfish ends,   For the times when I have disregarded the will of Christ through abuse of those things he has given to me for the building up of his kingdom,   For the times when I justify my sinfulness and thus treat God’s mercy with disdain,

You know it with startling clarity in that moment—how there’s only a singular cord in this knotted mess of a world worth reaching for. It’s dangling right there from our impossible tangle, and it’s the one hope you need to reach for this Advent. That scarlet lifeline of Christ.

Ye Christian heralds, go proclaim Salvation through Emmanuel’s name; To distant climes the tidings bear, And plant the Rose of Sharon there.

In this day, this season, miracles will grow within, unfurl, bear fruit. And the heart that makes time and space for Him to come will be a glorious place. A place of sheer, radiant defiance in the face of a world careening mad and stressed. Because each day of Advent, we will actively wait. We will wait knowing that the remaking of everything has already begun.

Once again we mark the arrival of Advent. This holy season trumpets God’s extravagant love for us, a love beyond reckoning. Into our beautiful yet wounded world comes Emmanuel, God-with-us, carrying the promise of fresh hope to enliven our hearts. No matter how broken or seemingly hopeless our world may sometimes seem, the Advent messages are rich with joyous expectation and longing, insisting that God can and does bring forth life where none seems possible.

From one people, faithful to the Torah, come the messages, “You must love your neighbor as yourself,” and “Any immigrant who lives with you must be treated as if they were one of your citizens” (Leviticus 19:18, 34). When these commandments are kept, by all who hold the text as sacred, the hungry are fed.

I know now that Christmas is a time to be together as a family, and a time to reaffirm our unconditional love for each other. It doesn’t have to be with the family you are born into. I have learned you create your family anew and by choice along the way on life’s journey. I still see Christmas through the eyes of that little girl who was bedazzled by the Advent calendar. But now I give her permission to walk through each and every door and to celebrate each day fully and completely. After all, it is a time to dream and believe in the unbelievable.

Lord of all light and love, help me see Christ in every human being, no exceptions. Open my heart to what you would have me do next in Love’s name. Be my guidepost when I wake in the morning and when I lie down at night, and help me, help me, help me, Lord, to slow down, be quiet, and watch for Christ’s light in the world.

hyperaware, socially righteous, crusading life. The call of Advent is to practice putting down our desperate, human need for approval and fall in love with Jesus all over again, and to remember that nothing short of God’s love claims us. We are children of God, and that is enough.

May Almighty God, by whose Providence our Savior Christ came among us in great humility, sanctify you with the light of his blessing and set you free from all sin. Amen. May he whose second coming in power and great glory we await, make you steadfast in faith, joyful in hope, and constant in love. Amen. May you who rejoice in the first advent of our Redeemer, at his second advent be rewarded with eternal life. Amen. And the blessing of God Almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, be upon you and remain with you for ever. Amen.

Oh God, we thank you for the love that we receive from you. We pray that our love would move to the margins so that those whom our love finds there may transform us and increase in us the margin to love. Amen.

Christ the teacher, Christ the listener, when you were a child, the temple leaders listened to you. And you told us we must be like children to really understand what you taught. May we slow down and pay attention to the children around us and be open to what they have to teach. May we embody their curiosity and wonder, their play, their songs and friendships, their ability to stop and rest when they are tired, and their humility to be held by someone who loves them when they fall. Amen.

Meet us here, O God of winter and waiting, O God who struggles with us and kindles our hope. Come in all your splendor and suffering. Comfort all who mourn. Let all who are crushed rise into the blooming of a new and better world. Teach us to channel our collective lament, longing, and love into a force that can raise the devastations and rebuild the ruined cities. Show us that the darkness around us and within us is a door. It is soil and we are seed. Show us that we are wick and your spirit is flame. Alone, we flicker. Together, we blaze. Amen.

Most folks aren’t actively racist. But you are passively participating in the spiritual and economic enslavement of every person of color in this church. You have handed the keys to our executioners unknowingly. Systemic racism is embedded in nearly every fiber of church life—from liturgical colors to the way we discuss Advent. And the same is true for the fiber of the broader culture. You don’t have to look much further than the shows and music we consume for entertainment to see this is true. Black people are plot devices, criminals, sassy aunts, or hip-hop culture for you to emulate at home while clutching your purse when you pass us on the streets.

Jesus of Bethlehem, your journey began in the womb, like ours. On this day, we remember how your teenage mother birthed the Prince of Peace. May we be more like your mother, birthing into the world more peace, justice, and love. Because if our pain can bring new life, it may be worth it. Amen.

Mother, Father, Creator God, Thank you for the words of our mothers in righteousness—those who bring the feminine energy of love and care and justice. May we nurture the seeds planted in us during our times of growth and waiting so that we might allow them to nourish us when the time comes to be born in a new way.

Recent archaeology finds suggest there may have been even earlier, unknown inhabitants who disappeared before the Portuguese arrived, raising the question of how people got to the middle of the ocean before the known advent of sailing ships.

We have to act in such a way that others will be able to say, when they meet us: This man is a Christian, because he does not hate, because he is willing to understand, because he is not a fanatic, because he is willing to make sacrifices, because he shows that he is a man of peace, because he knows how to love.[140]

Service and love are always weapons we can use to battle depression and evil.

You write: ‘To pray is to talk with God, but about what?’ About what? About Him, about yourself; joys, sorrows, successes and failures, noble ambitions, daily worries, weaknesses! And acts of thanksgiving and petitions: and Love and reparation. In a word: to get to know him and to get to know yourself: to get acquainted.[

Whoever does things for love of God and for His Glory never fails. Convince yourself of this truth: your success – this time, in this matter – was to fail. Give thanks to our Lord ... and try again![311]You haven’t failed; you have gained experience. On you go![312]

Though we are keenly aware of the abuses that have grown up around the holiday season, we are still not willing to surrender this ancient and loved Christmas Day to the enemy.

Kaya likes mine best so far. Plenty of fire.” Kaya nodded in support of this. “Good fire.” Did I really want to put something in my mouth that was spicy enough for a dragon—a dragon that loved eating actual fire—to approve of?

What a great opportunity to rediscover this ancient use of the "Twelve Days of Christmas"! We know about the "partridge in a pear tree;' but the deeper spiritual meaning of these days is lost to most people. To illustrate, the third day represents the three theological virtues of faith, hope, and love. Rather than "five golden rings;' the traditional reference is to the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. Seven symbolizes the gifts of the Holy Spirit in Romans 12; eight represents the Beatitudes of Matthew 5; ten-can you guess?-stands for the Ten Commandments.

During Advent, we spend an entire season struggling through the darkness looking toward the coming light. The primary symbol and image we use for the season is the anticipation of an emergence from darkness to light. We could focus more broadly on Holy Anticipation. Or the God Child being born into a world where empire will try to lay waste to him. Or a God who throws God’s own self upon the world, clothed in vulnerability and dependency. Or the place of unwed teenage mothers in our world. Or the slaughter of innocents by a leader grasping  for  power.  We  don’t  tend  to  focus  on  the  theme of refugees fleeing radical evil. Or preparing the way of the  Lord by  creating  conditions  more  conducive  to grace.  Nope.  We  have  reduced  the  Advent  season  to “from darkness to light,” a theme reinforced by repetition and tradition. And darkness is just another way of saying blackness—another symbol that equates blackness with evil and light (whiteness) with good.

We can queer Advent by talking about how Jesus had two mothers, one being an unwed teenager and the other being Sophia, the Holy Spirit. We can create an anti-racist Advent by describing the slaughter of the innocents as exactly what it was: ethnic cleansing by a leader who wanted to ensure his genetic line continued to rule.

But if we stick to the idea that Advent is a time of darkness, midnight, blackness when we await the dawn, light, and whiteness, we are conflating whiteness with holiness—a powerful symbol whose ill effects on our community we have yet to really explore.

A raging river gushes past a mansion of ghosts, made of black onyx, hiding a minacious plot. The kelp of secrets buried under the sea will breeze in like the amber advent in Verdin.

WITH the advent of night a fantastic city all of fire suddenly rises from the ocean into the sky. Thousands of ruddy sparks glimmer in the darkness, limning in fine, sensitive outline on the black background of the sky, shapely towers of miraculous castles, palaces, and temples. Golden gossamer threads tremble in the air. They intertwine in transparent, flaming patterns, which flutter and melt away in love with their own beauty mirrored in the waters. Fabulous and beyond conceiving, ineffably beautiful, is this fiery scintillation. It burns but does not consume. Its palpitations are scarce visible. In the wilderness of sky and ocean rises the magic picture of a flaming city. Over it quiver the reddening heavens, and below the water reflects its contours, blending them into a whimsical blotch of molten gold.

Advent is the time when we look forward to the day when we shall see Christ’s ‘full-ey’d love’.

You’d probably love to see Santa sneaking up on a kid with a blood-soaked bag and a sharpened candy cane.

But love is always patient

O huge and most unspeakeable impression Of Love’s deep wound

The word “advent” essentially means “arrival” or “coming.” Christians have traditionally observed it during the four weeks leading up to Christmas. It is considered a time to celebrate Jesus’ first coming and anticipate His second coming. Advent is also an invitation to pause and reflect on why Jesus came… and why He is coming again.

As leaders, we sometimes overlook what feels small or insignificant. At times, we may even feel overlooked ourselves. Advent reminds us that God is faithfully working in places we don’t see and in people we might not expect.

Even though God’s methods of speaking to them were different, Mary and Joseph’s response was the same. They both responded with obedience.