Daily Advent Devotional

Week Two

December 9, 2021

Faith Leads Us to Peace

Isaiah 12:2-6

Yes, indeed— God is my salvation. I trust, I won’t be afraid. God- yes God!— is my strength and song, best of all, my salvation! Isaiah 12:2 (The Message)

At first glance, you feel the peace presented in this joyful song, but the prophet Isaiah shared these words in a world full of doom and gloom. The people of Judah had struggles, fears, divisiveness, and uncertainty. This passage is a much-needed bright spot sharing of the future day when we draw together to give thanks and praise.

Today’s struggles, fears, inequalities, and other crises echo Isaiah’s time. We also experience personal strife, worry, illness, accidents, and loss. We feel frail and very human. It seems too much to join in or repeat this beautiful song; to trust, and not be afraid.

When we are fearful though, it helps us to understand that God is always faithful. The Spirit reaches to us from the pages and across the centuries to let us know that God is with us, is our strength, stands beside us, and even carries us through painful moments or worrying times. Grace and love are gifts bestowed upon us; compassion and comfort are blessings that sustain us, enabling us to withstand what overwhelms us. This verse is a promise that can help us get through troubles and personal challenges. 

During this season of Advent, as nights seem so dark and the relentlessness of this world keeps us worried, we wait, just like the people of Isaiah’s time, for “the future day” when God’s salvation will come to us in all its fullness, we won’t be afraid. We are drawn toward that, ready to “sing praise-songs to God. Let the whole earth know what’s been done!” (Isaiah 12:6). We celebrate with the whole people of God. Can we get any more peace than that?

Leslie LeSieur

Senior Director of the Center for Ministry and Lay Training

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Week Two

December 8, 2021

A Hope Filled Longing for Joy

Isaiah 35: 3-7

Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy. For waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert; the burning sand shall become a pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water; the haunt of jackals shall become a swamp, the grass shall become reeds and rushes. Isaiah 35:5-7

Alienation is one of the conditions of living in exile. In Isaiah’s writings, we encounter people living under chaotic, disorienting experiences of oppression where there is a scarcity of hope.

For many living in the middle of an ongoing pandemic and the heightened racial and political tensions of the last five years, there is a profound sense of estrangement. One consequence of isolation and ongoing tensions is the struggle to maintain a sense of hope. The reminder that joy is more than a possibility it is a promise of abundant justice and healing.

In the wilderness of separation parched by feelings of loneliness and uncertainty about the future, the memory of connection and wholeness lingers in the distance like a mirage. The longing for refreshing springs of renewed health and relief from the suffering of Creation and her Peoples.

Isaiah reminds us there is still hope and the potential for joy as we remind one another and bear each other up while navigating the desert. God’s promise bubbles forth and the thirst abates and gives way to song. Even in precarious surroundings, we are not alone in our sojourn. Together, we can participate in compassion in such a way that a place of communion is created.

Dr. Lisa A. Dellinger

Visiting Assistant Professor of Constructive Theologies

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Week Two

December 7, 2021

Someday At Christmas

Isaiah 19:18-25

In that day there will be a highway from Egypt to Assyria. The Assyrians will go to Egypt and the Egyptians to Assyria. The Egyptians and Assyrians will worship together…The LORD Almighty will bless them, saying, “Blessed be Egypt my people, Assyria my handiwork, and Israel, my inheritance.” Isaiah 19:23, 25 (NIV)

Someday at Christmas, men won’t be boys,

Playing with bombs like kids play with toys.

One warm December, our hearts will see

A world where men are free.

—Stevie Wonder, “Someday at Christmas” (1967)

When I was a child, we put up decorations while listening to this holiday classic every Christmas. As a child, the music moved me. But now, as an adult, I value the lyrics equally. The song’s message is just as important now as it was in 1967. In my view, it is such a fitting song for Advent.

I often wonder if Stevie knows how his song dovetails nicely with the prophetic and eschatological themes of Advent. Like the prophet Isaiah, he penned a vision of the future where joy, peace, hope, and love will be the order of the day. However, what’s important to note is that no one will be left out of this vision. In the oracles from Isaiah, we read that although God will hold Egypt and Assyria accountable for their oppression of God’s people, yet still God includes them in this reconciling work.

This Advent, may we consider how anticipating Christ’s coming into the world involves drawing the circle of grace wider. We embrace those already in the fold, those pushed to the margins, and yes, even our enemies. In Advent, we anticipate restorative justice not through building walls but through paving highways that all may enter the ever-inclusive Kin-dom of God. The fruit of our faithful labor may not be immediately apparent. But as Stevie would put it, the fulfilment will come “maybe not in time for you and me, but someday at Christmastime.”

Keith Anthony Bethell

Student Senate Member and Master of Theological Studies Student

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Week Two

December 6, 2021

A Word of Comfort

Isaiah 40:1-11

The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand forever. Isaiah 40:8

I used to work at a summer camp. During training, we would rehearse a list of values and principles that would guide our work together. Most of them have faded from my memory but one embedded itself in my life: When confronted with changes big and small, the twinge (or wave) of anxiety I feel is met with the phrase, “I am flexible and adapt to change.” 

It helps us all to be flexible and adapt to change because change is inevitable. Viruses mutate. People get sick. People die. People grow. People move. New jobs start. Families grow. Families divide. Seasons pass. Grass withers. Flowers fall. Grass grows. Flowers bloom. The list could go on and on and on. 

But, as Bon Jovi sings, “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” It often seems like a lot of the troubles in our world endure as steadfastly as God’s love. Global warming continues to progress at a terrifying pace. Police brutality and the killing of oppressed peoples persists. The pandemic rages on. Again, the list could go on and on and on.

Hear a word of comfort and call this advent season: in the midst of it all, God is steadfast and sure. We are flexible and adapt to change! We work with God, responding to the needs of the world, ushering in change that brings relief to the suffering and liberates the oppressed. 

Dr. Allie Utley 

Assistant Professor Liturgy and Practical Theology 

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Week Two

December 5, 2021

Work in Progress

Philippians 1:3-11

I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ. Philippians 1:6

My mother is an artist. All my life I have been in an artistic environment, within a family of artists. I spent most of those early years around my mother’s art and watching her paint.

Artists see differently. Where I might see a tree or a person, my mother sees a leaf or a pair of hands. Upon a blank canvas she would begin using broad and sweeping strokes as she sketched the shapes. Then, these vague sketches would begin to take form, becoming clear and distinct.

As she prepared her palette with different colors of paint, I would imagine how those colors might be applied. I would be baffled as she began to apply the paint: mixing, combining, creating texture and leading the colors to follow her vision.

Soon, I was able to see these forms as a landscape, portrait or still life. Gradually, the painting would be revealed. I could see it. Then, my eyes saw what she had seen all along.

In this season of preparation, waiting and arrival we gather around the Artist once more. We have lived within a sketch of the world, jumbled and indistinct, plain and without color, empty of the form we long to see, to now stand in awe before the promised masterpiece of forgiveness and compassion, spoken of across our generations. Our eyes have been sharpened and grown accustomed, by faith, as we peer over the Artist’s shoulder, once more.

May this season of Advent become the living gallery in which our wandering sight opens wide and we fall upon our knees before a work of sprawling majesty, in which, we too are portrayed.

Dr. Terry Ewing

Vice President of Advancement

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Week One

December 4, 2021

Too Big To Fail, Too Small To Matter?

Malachi 4:1-6

See, the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble; the day that comes shall burn them up, says the Lord of hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch. But for you who revere my name the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings. You shall go out leaping like calves from the stall. Malachi 4:1-2

“Too big to fail.” The phrase littered public discourse during the 2007-2008 global financial crisis. The theory, though, had been postulated decades earlier: that certain corporations are so complex, massive, and interconnected that their failure would bring ruin to the entire worldwide economic system. As a result, they simply cannot be allowed to fail, even if failure is the natural result of their incompetence and corruption.

It doesn’t take a genius to see how this leads to abuse and injustice. If an organization or individual is seen as so essential to a system’s survival that they cannot be allowed to fail, then that organization or individual may commit any abuse they like in service of their success. Those with less power may suffer, but what other options have they got? The disempowered depend upon the system’s survival for their own survival, but the system only depends on the one deemed too big to fail.

Which is why the “sun of righteousness” image in this passage from Malachi is so audacious. Every living creature is at the mercy of the sun for its survival. What sort of sunshine is simultaneously hot enough to burn evildoers to stubble, yet gentle enough to coax tender grass out of the ground so that young cows may be set to graze on it? When have the cosmos ever shown themselves to be partial to righteousness? Can God, the maker of the cosmos, intervene on behalf of the dispossessed? Has it ever been so? Will it ever be so? 

Dr. Sarah Morice Brubaker

Associate Professor of Christian Systematic Theology

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Week One

December 3, 2021

Meeting People Where We/They Are

Philippians 1:18b-26

Yes, and I will continue to rejoice, for I know that through your prayers and the help of the Spirit of Jesus Christ this will turn out for my deliverance. It is my eager expectation and hope that I will not be put to shame in any way, but that by my speaking with all boldness, Christ will be exalted now as always in my body, whether by life or by death. For to me, living is Christ and dying is gain. Philippians 18b-21

Sometimes circumstances can leave us feeling stuck. These days we don’t have to look far to experience fear, dismay, anger, sorrow. In our communities, across the nation, on the far side of the globe, and perhaps in our own homes, opportunities for distress abound. Our present realities press in on us, and we can be left feeling numb, and without focus.

Under house arrest and chained to a guard for the better part of two years, the Apostle Paul faced trying circumstances. Circumstances that most of us, fortunately, will never experience. I can hardly imagine a less inspiring environment from which to proclaim the message of Christ. It would have been easy for Paul to give up and accept his confinement as the end of his ministry. After all, he didn’t even know if he would live or die.

Instead, Paul was consumed by passion and a determination to continue to boldly proclaim the gospel no matter his personal outcome. You’ve heard of meeting people where they are? Paul took the phrase to the extreme and continued to build up and to reassure and rejoice with the believers in Philippi from his place of incarceration. He went as far as to say that whether he lived or died, he couldn’t lose. Wow.

Holy One, help us to meet people where they are no matter where we happen to be. Remind us that in times of virtual distancing and limited face-to-face interaction, your desires for our lives remain steady. Give us the courage to face all circumstances, even those that produce suffering, as opportunities to make a difference in the world each day.

Sharon Russ

Executive Assistant to Advancement and Donor Relations Specialist

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Week One

December 2, 2021

Light is Coming

Luke 1:68-79

By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace. Luke 1:78-79

To be at all cognizant of one’s location in history is to know the moments when blessings have flowed. Or, rather, faithful existence requires that we practice some degree of even-keeled honesty over trying seasons before us, when grief takes the form of future stories lost.

What perhaps makes this honesty most challenging is that it demands as much sobriety in the face of God’s gifts as it does for times when God feels absent. For faith practitioners of a progressive persuasion, the problem often is not our ability to sustain faith during seasons of drought; it is instead the audacity to consider that God actually remembered us. Self-worth is a theological issue prone to overcorrection.

In the opening chapter of Luke’s Gospel, we witness Elizabeth and Zechariah navigate this tension over God’s providence in a disarming fashion. Their hope for a child had long vanished by the time the angel of the Lord visits Zechariah, revealing that Elizabeth would soon give birth to a son named John. To the delight of those of us who resent perfect believers, Zechariah is not without his doubts. Before praising the Lord God of Israel in verse 68, he interrogates the angel of the Lord in verse 18, inquiring into how it is possible for God to remember him in the eleventh hour. 

For those of us prone to despair in the darker and colder months of Advent, the closing words of Zechariah’s prophecy in Luke 1 pose a possibility that may take time to accept: “By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.”

Dr. Peter Capretto

Assistant Professor of Pastoral Care in Religion and Culture

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Week One

December 1, 2021

This Too Shall Pass?

Psalm 90

For a thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it is past, or like a watch in the night. Psalm 90:4

Psalm 90 points out that time is experienced differently for God than it is for us. What we experience is just a blip in time, “a thousand years…are like yesterday.” We run the risk of allowing this time-perception difference to minimize what is happening right now in our lives. 

In the middle of a pandemic (third wave, fourth wave, who knows anymore), fires destroying land and forests, and weather destroying cities and people destroying each other—this time seems like an eternity, a never-ending horror movie. We can’t run fast enough. We just seem to keep falling down and making things worse. Will we ever be able to leave this phase of peril and destruction? This isn’t just a blink of the eye to us; it is our all-consuming existence. 

Enter Jesus. The celebration of the birth of Jesus offers us moments of peace, hope, joy and love in the middle of what feels like death, chaos and destruction. A friend recently gave birth. I sat and held the sleeping newborn. The only reminder of the world circumstances I had was the mask on my face.

Nothing else mattered in that moment. Time slowed down. The contentment and peace the baby had as she slept transferred to me. This magical transference is mystical, divine, the peace and love and joy and hope that we all need. 

All the chaos around them had to completely disappear when Mary and Joseph held Jesus. That is what Jesus brings us now. The hope and joy and peace and love that we all need. During this Advent season may we steal those moments in the midst of the current chaos.

Malisa Pierce

Senior Director of Stewardship and Alumnae/i Relations

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Week One

November 30, 2021

Our Responsibility

2 Samuel 7:18-29

…for you, O Lord God, have spoken, and with your blessing shall the house of your servant be blessed forever. 2 Samuel 7:29b

In our reading from 2 Samuel, David is sitting before the Lord, confidently spinning out a theology of conquest, celebrating the way God has chosen Israel, and seen fit to use Israel’s military success to establish his, God’s (or might David mean his own) reputation. David’s humility is eloquent, deferring to God’s power and righteousness, but celebrating too—and just a few chapters away from his own fall in the seizing of Bathsheba—how God will establish the house of Israel “forever.” 

It is a very human longing—the promise, the guarantee, of forever, of eternal rewards—a longing for divine power, for love that doesn’t end, for certainty, for abundant fullness—that is the longing for a protective God—for a transcendence untouched by pain that protects us and rewards us for our obedience. The problem, perhaps, is not simply with David’s pride going before a fall, but with this vision of God itself—a God whose power protects us in exchange for our right belief, our worship and faithful obedience.

This advent, I wonder afresh at the vulnerability of the child born to Mary and Joseph, the painful ambiguity of her pregnancy, the courage of her yes to the angel, and the courage of Joseph’s yes as well, and I grieve for all the “innocents” slaughtered by Herod, without angels to protect them. What if this Advent we take seriously the presence of immigrant children, separated from families, lost in bureaucracies, pawns of ideological struggles, as figures of Jesus in need of a place of rest, and needing the courage of our response? What if, in seeing all of nature itself in climate travail, we trust not in God’s power to heal the world, but the call to our own responsibility to love and care for the world?

Dr. Joe Bessler

Robert Travis Peake Professor of Theology

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