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Morning Devotion for the Season of Advent

November 28, 2022

Feast of Kamehameha and Emma



Invitatory

In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son: and to the Holy Ghost;

As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be: world without end. Amen.

Reading: Acts 17:22-31

Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, “Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us. For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we too are his offspring.’

Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals. While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”

Meditation – Peter Vanderveen

Here’s an essential question for anyone who espouses some belief in God: is God more a threat or a promise? It’s a serious question to which we give too little attention. Are we required to assuage God’s wrath: is this the point of religion? Do we owe God something? Or is God simply generous beyond our ability to thank in adequate measure? In either case, belief in God has existential implications. We’re in God’s sights, for ill or for good.

Or – Paul raises a third possibility – God may be dead to us, existing merely as an idea. We may or may not represent God images, but God has no power to act or, more importantly, to intrude into our lives. This is the broad conceit of secularism, even deep within the church itself. God has no liveliness of his own. He’s merely the (increasingly less interesting) figment of our imagination. 

In his famous address at the Areopagus, Paul first challenges the staid religion of the Athenians by his insistence that God is more intimate to us than we can imagine. God is not an object that we set out for contemplation, who we can comfortably critique at arm’s length. We must “grope” after him (think of approaching worship some Sunday morning in this particular mode). And God proves elusive, precisely because God is not constrained by our own meager expectations and demands.

But this still leaves open the matter of God’s intentions? Are we at risk before him?

Everything in Paul’s address points towards God’s expansive benefactions, in light of which we should be humbled and thrilled. But Paul then interjects two highly charged religious terms: repentance and judgment. God’s judgment of us, Paul claims, will be God’s definitive and culminating act, which should immediately turn us to repentance. And this singular instruction seemingly calls into question all that preceded it. Suddenly, the scales are tipped toward threat.

That Paul might be interpreted in this way reveals a telling reflex on our part. Our fear or anxiety before God reflects our understanding of judgment, not God’s. Judgment, for us, is the exercise of power. But, as Paul frames it, judgment for God is just the opposite; it’s an act of grace. It’s the decree stemming from God’s righteousness, which is the imposition of his forgiveness and reconciliation over against the full scope of our wrongdoing. And similarly, to repent is not to draw a focus on our guilt, sorrowfully. It is to allow God the possibility of granting us redemption, especially when we ourselves can’t see why or how this should be. Precisely when this seems unconscionable, the promise of God shines through.

If God is a threat, then God is as good as dead – a mere rule, coldly enforced. If, however, God is alive, then the promise of God is limitless, beyond our understanding. And Paul, correspondingly, wants us to rejoice in this, always.

The Lord's Prayer

Our Father, who art in heaven,

    hallowed be thy Name,

    thy kingdom come,

    thy will be done,

        on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread.

And forgive us our trespasses,

    as we forgive those

        who trespass against us.

And lead us not into temptation,

    but deliver us from evil.

For thine is the kingdom,

    and the power, and the glory

   for ever and ever. Amen.