2020 Devo.Indd
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Do Not Grow Weary Advent 2020 Devotional 1 This Page: The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Saint John the Baptist by Leonardo da Vinci Cover Photo by Johny Goerend on Unsplash 2 Contents INTRODUCTION 5 WEEK 1 30 The End / Fr. Michael Novotny 6 1 How Long? / Renada Thompson 7 2 Waiting & Spiritual Pilgrimage / Grant Henley 8 3 Stay Awake / Travis Coblentz 9 4 O Come, O Come, Emmanuel 11 WEEK 2 7 Comfort Ye My People / Dcn. Chase Edgar 12 8 Awaiting Restoration / Chrissy Coblentz 13 9 Patience, Presence & Promise / Dcn. Zack Clemmons 14 10 A Lesson for Us from John the Baptist / Karen Covington 15 11 O Come, O Come, Emmanuel 17 WEEK 3 14 He Has Done Great Things for Us / Janie Williams 18 15 Is It Worth It? / Dcn. Ben Williams 19 16 The Taste of Decreasing / Charlie Ritch 20 17 Pointing to Jesus / Fr. Daniel Logan 21 18 O Come, O Come, Emmanuel 22 WEEK 4 21 Believing Is Seeing / Fr. David Tew 23 22 An Earthly Dwelling / Sarah Scherf 24 23 From Fear to Peace / Fr. Brad Acton 25 24 O Come, O Come, Emmanuel 27 3 O Come, O Come, Emmanuel 4 Advent he word “advent” means “coming” or “approach” in Latin. For more than thirteen centuries the universal Church has started the new church year Twith this season. Many Christians are surprised to learn that Advent directs us first to the approach of the End of all things and the great Day of the Lord, and only second to Christmas. Advent calls us to be prepared for the Second Coming of Christ: “Keep awake . for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour” (Mt 24:42, 44). Since Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153) Chris- tians have talked about three comings of Christ: the first in the flesh, the second in our hearts, and the third at the end of the world. The beginning of the church year at Advent reminds us that in the great liturgies of the Church ordinary distinctions are collapsed. Past, present, and future become one, just as they are for God in his eternal present. When the dea- con proceeds to the center aisle and reads the Gospel, we stand because Christ himself is speaking to us. Our time becomes contemporary with the time of the Gospel reading, and we can see the Gospel miracles happening before our eyes. While the theme of Advent is waiting, waiting for God. We wait with grow- ing im- patience, deepening frustration, and frequent disappointment. But we wait and hope and look with expectation. Our goal is for the Church to enter into the Kingdom of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. We seek for ourselves unending union with Jesus Christ. The central prayer of Advent is the last one in the Bible: “Maranatha: Come, Lord Jesus.” The four Sundays of Advent have distinct themes: the final coming of the Son of Man (first Sunday), the ministry of the prophets (second), the ministry of John the Baptist (third), and the approach of the Incarnation through the Virgin Mary (fourth). The corresponding candles of the Advent wreath are lit each Sunday of Advent. The third candle is pink, which represents our rejoic- ing (this Sunday is known as Gaudete Sunday, which is Latin for “rejoice”) at the imminence of Christ’s arrival. Advent, 2020 5 November ISAIAH30 64:1-9A The End By Father Michael Novotny he season of Advent begins at the end. When I write “the end,” I mean The End of All Things when Our LORD returns to judge the living and Tthe dead. During this season we work our way backwards. Where do we start? We start at The End of All Things as we look forward in expectation of Jesus’ parousia. Where do we end? Advent ends at the beginning. Pointing us back to the Incarnation of Jesus. All this “back and forth” or really “forth and back” in Advent is a microcosm of the Christian life. Our future hope is directed at The End of All Things but is grounded in the Incarnation of Jesus the Messiah. For him to come again he must first have arrived. Our hope in the future is firmly grounded in God’s action in the past. God’s people have often called for the Day of the Lord. The major and minor prophets of the Old Testament pleaded with YHWH to bring judgment on the wicked both inside and outside of Israel. Throughout these prophets you find a cycle: 1. Calling for the Day of the LORD 2. Calling Israel to confess sin 3. Pleading for mercy In Isaiah 64, the prophet imagines a day when The LORD would “rend the heavens and come down ... that the nations might tremble at your presence.” That YHWH might enact judgment on sin. Isaiah desires the Day of the Lord. He confesses the sins of Israel: “Behold, you were angry, and we sinned; in our sins we have been a long time, and shall we be saved?” He then pleads for mercy: “Be not so terribly angry, O Lord, and remember not iniquity forever.” There is the three-fold pattern. But how are they to survive the Day of the LORD? How are we to stand at The End? It is because God is our father and we are his children. “But now, O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand.” We are his children because we participate with his son through faith and baptism. At The End justice will be executed for sin. But 6 praise be to God that when Our LORD returns to judge the living and the dead we are spared. Our cry for the future in this unjust and fallen world is “O’ Come LORD Jesus! Bring about the just End as we live between your two Advents.” December PSALM1 80:1-7 How Long? By Renada Thompson ow long until things go back to the way they were? That has been the question on many hearts in 2020, and we’ve found ourselves asking H“How long?” in new ways. How long does the virus live on surfaces? How long before symptoms appear? How long should I quarantine? How long do I have to say goodbye to my loved one in the hospital? Amid these questions, we really desire what we used to call normal. Please, just give us back the life we had in 2019! Restore us to what was familiar. That was the cry of the children of Israel when they hungered in the wilderness: Let us go back to slavery in Egypt; at least we had plenty to eat there! With them, we may cry, “The old problems were better!” In Psalm 80, the people ask “How long?” and plea for God to “let your face shine.” This echoes the Aaronic blessing in Numbers 6: “The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you.” In this psalm we see not just the longing for restoration, but for the Person who restores. Turn your face toward us. We want to see you looking at us. Be angry no longer. The children of Israel didn’t realize just how fully God would answer them. “When the days drew near for [ Jesus] to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem” (Luke 9:51). Jesus didn’t just turn God’s face toward His people; He became his people by suffering the very evils mourned in Psalm 80: “You make us an object of contention for our neighbors, and our enemies laugh among themselves.” The long-awaited Restorer came, and the people turned their own faces away. This Advent, we may ask for restoration and mean “the way things used to be.” God answers: “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I 7 am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland” (Isaiah 43:18-19). There is nothing wrong with crying “How long?” when the way is hard. But let us not seek merely to return. Let us turn rather to the face of Jesus, who is both the Way and the Bread that sustains us on it. December 1 CORINTHIANS2 1:1-9 Waiting & Spiritual Pilgrimage By Grant Henley s the bus carrying our church leadership group reached the Isthmus of Corinth and crossed over the narrow Corinthian Canal on the APeloponnesian Peninsula my excitement and eager anticipation at the prospect of actually seeing and experiencing the ancient city of Corinth for the first time where the Apostle Paul had preached and taught for over eighteen months only grew stronger. In the spring of 2001 my wife, Amy, and I had been invited to Athens, Greece to take part in a three-day ministry training seminar for pastors and spouses affiliated with our home church congregation where we had both served together in pastoral ministry for several years in the 1990s. Just the day before the group had walked together up the Acropolis in Athens to see the temple ruins of the Parthenon and visit the traditional location of the Areopagus where Saint Paul had preached to members of Athenian Council (Acts 17:16- 34). So, now, following the next step in Saint Paul’s missionary journey in Greece we had planned to visit ancient Corinth.