God of faithfulness, before whom we stand exposed in our complacency and complicity, we thank you for this season in which we may make amendment of life. Give us resolve that we may not waste the season. In his name, Amen.
Psalm 148
Amos 6
2 Thessalonians 1:5-12
Luke 1:57-68
We do well to ponder this newly arrived character, John, who creates a pause in the narrative before the birth of Jesus. The work of interpretation is to be sure that John is not elided into Jesus so that the sharp and stern word of John is not overwhelmed by the graciousness embodied in Jesus. John's work is very different; it is to "make ready a people prepared for the Lord" (Luke 1:17). The preparatory work requires hard truth-telling that exhibits the ways in which the world, as presently practiced, is completely out of sync with the purposes of God.
We are led to ponder how it is that the world is out of sync in concrete ways with God's will for justice, righteousness, mercy and compassion that are continually thwarted by policy and by practice. That thwarting of God's intent is evident in the systemic practice of greed, the readiness for violence against the vulnerable, and the complacent acceptance of economic injustice. This out-of-sync quality is voiced by Amos with his double utterance of "woe" that anticipates trouble to come. The sharp rhetoric of the epistle, moreover, shares the urgency of facing up to the deep failure of present practice. Unlike the trivia of commercial Christmas, serious Advent is a time to consider how being out of sync with God has become conventional and "normal" among us. It is also a time to consider the (inevitable?) outcome of such a way of life. Christmas comes abruptly in the wake of Advent; we cannot slide from one to the other.
Walter Brueggemann: Gift and Task
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