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Morning Devotion for the Season of Advent

December 4, 2023

Invitatory

The glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.

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:

“To believe in Jesus means to understand him as that person through whom and in whom God has become definitively accessible. Our access to God is thus really understood as God bringing us to himself.” Eberhard Jüngel

“O come, O come Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel.”

Meditation – Peter Vanderveen

This week someone said to me that there are many paths, but they all lead to the same god. I’ve heard this said many times. It’s meant with good intentions. Religious differences already cause or exacerbate too much violence. We fight about enough, with the preset convictions that we are unquestionably in the right. God shouldn’t be dragged into these disputes.

Nonetheless, this comment too breezily passes over substantial and irreconcilable differences that shouldn’t be ignored. If god is to be found at the end of the paths we fashion, then god becomes no more than an entity we’ve dreamed up. If, then, we create god in our image, then we have the right and the opportunity to change god in any way we see fit. And we can bend our god to our own purposes and try to make peace by reducing god to the lowest common denominator. It’s frequently done. But is this true to our faith? Is god no more than the best that we can imagine? If so, such a god has no real power to change anything and certainly no ability to redeem us. We would, ultimately, be left only to ourselves.

Advent announces something striking. It is the declaration that it is God who comes to us. It is God who is continually coming to us. This is where we begin in faith. God breaks in to our world like a thief, unexpectedly, surprisingly, upending our suppositions. The directionality of this is key. We do not make our way to God; God makes his way to us. And if we are on a path it is not one that leads to God. The paths we chart may lead to our betterment. They may describe our advancement in understanding or even our maturation in spirituality. They may show our greatest aspirations. But God is not someone we discover or find at the end of our wanderings. God finds us. God seeks us out.

This is the constant refrain of the whole of Scripture. And, in Christ, God chose to be with us so intimately that he experienced us wholly, through and through, including the worst that we could be and do. In this way, I’d like to say – definitively – that there’s only one path, which is not ours, which is God’s descent to us all. This is, of course, a distinctively Christian perspective, but it puts us in communion with all people, regardless of any differences and distinctions we can conjure. And this is the whole thrust of the Gospel.

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.