Advent Devotional for Sunday, December 3: Luke 7:28-35
HI all! For the next few weeks, through the season of Advent, I'll be posting here devotions I wrote for our church in Exton. I'd really like to get folks commenting, because I feel like we can learn better from each other than we can on our own. So, please--if you have a thought on the devotion of the day, please leave a comment and share it with us!
As we sit here in the beginning of Advent, we’re aware that preparing our hearts is a counter-cultural activity. Christmas displays have been in the stores now for at least a month, as long as six weeks in some instances. You may already be getting tired of some Christmas songs, and there are still three weeks and a day until Christmas actually arrives. To celebrate Advent, though, is to acknowledge that to “get” Christmas, we need more than store displays, and even more than the Christmas story itself. We need to prepare our hearts–even though our culture generally is a little bit confused by this idea.
The result is that we often are being called to do a holy and godly work of preparation at the same time as our “secular selves” are already celebrating. We are called to say, on one hand, “I must do a work of preparation before Christmas;” while on the other hand, we make the customary rounds of Christmas concerts, Christmas parties, Christmas songs, etc. In a sense, to be a Christian on Earth means having a foot in two different worlds.
Today’s passage perfectly illustrates this point. John the Baptist was quite ascetic–this means that he understood the calling of God in self-denial. He lived on his own; he ate locusts instead of bread; he forsook wine completely, an oddball in his culture. Jesus, however, had no such concerns: he ate and drank freely, and was unafraid of mixing with other people, even notorious sinners. Yet the Scriptures make perfectly clear that both–despite their differences–were important characters in the work that God did in the world at that time.
Jesus points out that the people of his generation, the people that didn’t accept him, ironically also rejected John. They looked at John’s asceticism and said, “He must be like this because he has a demon.” But then they looked at Jesus’ feasting and drinking and they found fault with that too, saying he was a “glutton and a drunkard.” You would think that if they didn’t like the fasting of John, they would like the feasting of Jesus! But no–they managed to find fault with both John and Jesus. Rather than accepting both of them and realizing how the tension between the two could point right to God, they did the exact opposite–rejecting both of them.
For those of us who must prepare and celebrate at the same time, perhaps we can see something in these differences of Jesus and John. Jesus calls both celebrating and preparation good, and important, and wise. They are quite different tasks, but at the same time, each is rewarding. So celebrate with the gusto of Jesus, and prepare your hearts with the intensity of John.
As we sit here in the beginning of Advent, we’re aware that preparing our hearts is a counter-cultural activity. Christmas displays have been in the stores now for at least a month, as long as six weeks in some instances. You may already be getting tired of some Christmas songs, and there are still three weeks and a day until Christmas actually arrives. To celebrate Advent, though, is to acknowledge that to “get” Christmas, we need more than store displays, and even more than the Christmas story itself. We need to prepare our hearts–even though our culture generally is a little bit confused by this idea.
The result is that we often are being called to do a holy and godly work of preparation at the same time as our “secular selves” are already celebrating. We are called to say, on one hand, “I must do a work of preparation before Christmas;” while on the other hand, we make the customary rounds of Christmas concerts, Christmas parties, Christmas songs, etc. In a sense, to be a Christian on Earth means having a foot in two different worlds.
Today’s passage perfectly illustrates this point. John the Baptist was quite ascetic–this means that he understood the calling of God in self-denial. He lived on his own; he ate locusts instead of bread; he forsook wine completely, an oddball in his culture. Jesus, however, had no such concerns: he ate and drank freely, and was unafraid of mixing with other people, even notorious sinners. Yet the Scriptures make perfectly clear that both–despite their differences–were important characters in the work that God did in the world at that time.
Jesus points out that the people of his generation, the people that didn’t accept him, ironically also rejected John. They looked at John’s asceticism and said, “He must be like this because he has a demon.” But then they looked at Jesus’ feasting and drinking and they found fault with that too, saying he was a “glutton and a drunkard.” You would think that if they didn’t like the fasting of John, they would like the feasting of Jesus! But no–they managed to find fault with both John and Jesus. Rather than accepting both of them and realizing how the tension between the two could point right to God, they did the exact opposite–rejecting both of them.
For those of us who must prepare and celebrate at the same time, perhaps we can see something in these differences of Jesus and John. Jesus calls both celebrating and preparation good, and important, and wise. They are quite different tasks, but at the same time, each is rewarding. So celebrate with the gusto of Jesus, and prepare your hearts with the intensity of John.
posted by Rev. Michael Jordan at 1:53 PM
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