Advent Devotion for Friday, December 22
Based on Luke 1: 46-56 (read it here: http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=33806471 )
This precious prayer is preserved for us as the Magnificat, or Mary’s Song of Prayer. It is beautiful because it points to Jesus as the culmination of all the promises made to Israel. “He has helped his servant Israel,” Mary sings, “in remembrance of his mercy, according to the promises he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and his children forever.”
Who’d have thought it? God showed his mercy through a baby boy. People thought that all those promises God had made to Israel were about restoring their earthly power, making them a great nation. Instead, they turned out to be about a baby boy–no ordinary baby boy, but one who would offer life freely to the whole world, to anyone who would receive it.
God delivers on promises in funny ways, doesn’t He? God has a wisdom all His own. When I was starting seminary 8½ years ago, I was doing all I could to be on the fast-track to a Ph.D. in New Testament studies. I wanted to be a person who would hole up in a library with arcane texts in ancient languages, seeking to better parse and understand Scripture.
I wanted to be that person because I so keenly felt the call of God in my life, and in my limited experience, that’s the only way I could imagine it being carried out. I didn’t understand that my calling was different because I didn’t understand it could be different. Yet what I found is that the call on my life was no less real but so different from what I could understand. I didn’t know that I had spiritual leadership qualities, I didn’t know I had a pastoral soul, and I didn’t even know the field of Liturgical Studies (the study of Christian worship, in which I am pursuing my Ph.D.) even existed! I was right that God had a call on my life, a promise to use me, but I couldn’t even imagine what that call meant. Now I think I know–but who knows what I will see in another 8½ years?
God answers promises in ways we never expect–when people expect a general, he sends a baby; when people expect one kind of calling, he delivers another.
No doubt you are waiting on God to deliver a promise today. We all are. We all live with
the pain, sometimes dull, sometimes acute, of waiting on God. And we have expectations for God. We expect God to heal our sick husband, to help patch up a broken relationship, to end the war, to restore our family. And certainly God has all of these situations close to His heart. Yet we must realize that God may not (and likely will not) answer those concerns in ways we expect. There is a deeper logic than we can process at work here, a mysterious heart of God that has created us from eternity for eternity. And we will not understand right away why God sends death instead of life, why God allows relationships to stay broken and wars to proceed, why God allows our families to stay estranged.
All we can say is that God is surprising, and God is good, and God never ever forgets us, even when he sends us what we do not expect.
This precious prayer is preserved for us as the Magnificat, or Mary’s Song of Prayer. It is beautiful because it points to Jesus as the culmination of all the promises made to Israel. “He has helped his servant Israel,” Mary sings, “in remembrance of his mercy, according to the promises he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and his children forever.”
Who’d have thought it? God showed his mercy through a baby boy. People thought that all those promises God had made to Israel were about restoring their earthly power, making them a great nation. Instead, they turned out to be about a baby boy–no ordinary baby boy, but one who would offer life freely to the whole world, to anyone who would receive it.
God delivers on promises in funny ways, doesn’t He? God has a wisdom all His own. When I was starting seminary 8½ years ago, I was doing all I could to be on the fast-track to a Ph.D. in New Testament studies. I wanted to be a person who would hole up in a library with arcane texts in ancient languages, seeking to better parse and understand Scripture.
I wanted to be that person because I so keenly felt the call of God in my life, and in my limited experience, that’s the only way I could imagine it being carried out. I didn’t understand that my calling was different because I didn’t understand it could be different. Yet what I found is that the call on my life was no less real but so different from what I could understand. I didn’t know that I had spiritual leadership qualities, I didn’t know I had a pastoral soul, and I didn’t even know the field of Liturgical Studies (the study of Christian worship, in which I am pursuing my Ph.D.) even existed! I was right that God had a call on my life, a promise to use me, but I couldn’t even imagine what that call meant. Now I think I know–but who knows what I will see in another 8½ years?
God answers promises in ways we never expect–when people expect a general, he sends a baby; when people expect one kind of calling, he delivers another.
No doubt you are waiting on God to deliver a promise today. We all are. We all live with
the pain, sometimes dull, sometimes acute, of waiting on God. And we have expectations for God. We expect God to heal our sick husband, to help patch up a broken relationship, to end the war, to restore our family. And certainly God has all of these situations close to His heart. Yet we must realize that God may not (and likely will not) answer those concerns in ways we expect. There is a deeper logic than we can process at work here, a mysterious heart of God that has created us from eternity for eternity. And we will not understand right away why God sends death instead of life, why God allows relationships to stay broken and wars to proceed, why God allows our families to stay estranged.
All we can say is that God is surprising, and God is good, and God never ever forgets us, even when he sends us what we do not expect.
posted by Rev. Michael Jordan at 11:53 AM
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