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Morning Devotion for the Season of Advent
December 9, 2024
Reading: I Thessalonians 5:1-11
Now concerning the times and the seasons, brothers and sisters, you do not need to have anything written to you. For you yourselves know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. When they say, “There is peace and security,” then sudden destruction will come upon them, as labor pains come upon a pregnant woman, and there will be no escape! But you, brothers and sisters, are not in darkness, for that day to surprise you like a thief; for you are all children of light and children of the day; we are not of the night or of darkness. So, then, let us not fall asleep as others do, but let us keep awake and be sober, for those who sleep sleep at night, and those who are drunk get drunk at night. But since we belong to the day, let us be sober and put on the breastplate of faith and love and for a helmet the hope of salvation. For God has destined us not for wrath but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, so that whether we are awake or asleep we may live with him. Therefore encourage one another and build up each other, as indeed you are doing.
Meditation - Peter Vanderveen
Anxiety rarely has a single source. And one anxiety tends to quickly spawn many others. It’s an emotion that has a way of sprawling. Thus, if someone were to simply state that you shouldn’t worry, such advice probably wouldn’t be very effective. You’d want to know why this is the case; and, even if you were given a substantial response, it might take some extensive work to disentangle yourself from all of anxiety’s ensnaring tendrils.
One of the principle messages of the New Testament, oft-repeated, is that we “should not be afraid.” That’s something easily said; but it’s exceptionally difficult to actually realize. Fear remains a restless, furtive, and resilient foe. But the Biblical text doesn’t just leave us with this instruction. For it is itself an extensive exercise in locating and extracting from us the things that we most fear.
Paul’s First letter to the Thessalonians is the earliest missive of his that has been preserved. It includes the recitation of some common religious themes: namely, as in the above text, the need for us to be awake and watchful, for God’s wrath will come and sweep us up when we least expect it. Such an idea would surprise no one. It’s a warning regularly revisited throughout the church year. But I think it’s wrong to take this simply as stated. This is not the threat we face from God. It’s the threat we ourselves imagine, an anxiety that we, quite on our own, can’t fully uproot. This includes Paul as well.
It’s worthy to note that in Paul’s later letters this fear of the sudden unleashing of God’s judgment doesn’t have the same prominence. Instead, Paul’s emphasis is on a grace that can’t be earned, not by any of us. It is, rather, a grace wholly given to us, apart from any measure of our own readiness. In place of the need for our religious diligence, Paul progressively focuses, instead, on the magisterial and mystical primacy of God’s act in Jesus Christ. Paul’s witness to what Christ has accomplished for us serves, then, as a kind of therapy, where he, often torturously, dismantles the elements of faith that had for so long led to the fear of God and the fear of God’s wrath. This makes reading Thessalonians like looking back at where Paul started; it’s most useful as a reminder of that from which he was, slowly and arduously, liberated. And we can follow him in his progression.
Faith becomes dull when we think of it as mere assent to a static vision of God, something duly recited in church. It’s a much different experience when what we see played out within the Biblical texts themselves is the continual dismantling of ideas deeply embedded within us so that, step by step, the glory of God becomes evermore evident in grace abounding.
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 from evil.
For thine is the kingdom, and the power,
and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen
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