Luke 1:1-25

"Before Advent is a word, it is a sigh. A voice crying. A mood. And never more deeply felt than in these troubled months. Advent marks both the exhaustion and the hope of God’s people, when the meaning of our lives is expressed in a weary exhalation of ordinary breath and then a sharp intake of something greater." - Richard Lischer, "Advent is a season of sighs, especially this year," (posted on The Christian Century, December 16, 2020).

Rev 22:1-21

That God should play the tyrant over man is a dismal story of unrelieved oppression; that man should play the tyrant over man is the usual dreary record of human futility; but that man should play the tyrant over God and find him a better man than himself is an astonishing drama indeed. Any journalist, hearing of it for the first time, would recognize it as news; those who did hear it for the first time actually called it news, and good news at that; though we are likely to forget that the word Gospel ever meant anything so sensational. - Dorothy Sayers, "The Greatest Drama Ever Staged"

Rev 21:1-27

"[I]t is the very transcendence of God - in the ascension of the Son who now reigns from heaven, and in the futurity of the coming kingdom for which we pray - that disciplines and disrupts and haunts our tendency to settle for 'this world.' It is the call of the Son from heaven, and the vision of the new Jerusalem descending from heaven, that pushes back on our illusions that we could figure this all out, that we could bring this about." - James K. A. Smith, Awaiting the King

Rev 20:1-15

"For believers, the last judgment is not so much a process by which the moral quality of human deeds is made unmistakably manifest and appropriate rewards and punishments apportioned, but rather, and above all, an event in which sinners are forgiven and justified. Christ the final judge is none other than Christ the merciful savior." - Miroslav Volf, Against the Tide: Love in a Time of Petty Dreams and Persisting Enmities

Rev 19:1-10

Am I a paragon of faith? (The honest answer is no.) While I once thought that I should labor to look and act and believe just like the other "successful" Christians in my life, I've been freed up by something Thomas Merton once wrote: "For me to be a saint means to be myself." Noth that godly person I greatly admire, but myself. I see now that I'm engaged in a creative, enlivening, one-of-a-kind work of God in me, redeemed by Christ for good things. Who knows what kind of saint I, as myself, am becoming? - Karen Wright Marsh, Vintage Saints & Sinners

Rev 18:1-20

The kingdom of God is an alternative political fact that stands in tension with the empires, all of which are falling away. If this is true, then the hostile and belligerent partisanship among American Christians might be compared to a fistfight over table manners on the sinking Titanic. - Lee Camp, Scandalous Witness

Rev 13:1-18

To trust in the strength of God in our weakness; to say, "I am weak: so let me be: God is strong;" to seek from him who is our life, as the natural, simple cure of all that is amiss with us, power to do, and be, and live, even when we are weary, - this is the victory that overcometh the world. - George MacDonald, "Life," in Unspoken Sermons

Rev 12:1-17

Jesus and other early Christians were not executed because they were spiritual. They were executed because their politic was a threat to the powers that be. - Lee Camp, Scandalous Witness

Rev 7:9-17

"Imagination is one of the essential ministries in nurturing the life of faith. For faith is not a leap out of the everyday but a plunge into its depths." - Eugene Peterson, Run With the Horses | The church in eternity will appear more lovely, but it will not be more loved. - Megan Hill, A Place to Belong

Rev 5:1-14

The gaze of God is both what we fear and what we can't do without. Scripture makes it clear that apart from God's coming to us and opening our eyes, we cannot know him truly. Talk about epistemic difficulties! For us to know him, he must know us first. Our knowing is warped, especially when it comes to knowing God, because of human rebellion against God. There is something inside us that doesn't want to know him, even as another part of us does. Our blindness thus requires the terror of his meeting us. - Esther Meek, Longing to Know