First Tuesday of Advent
Scripture Reading for Today:
2 Samuel 7:18-29
18 Then King David went in and sat before the Lord, and he said: “Who am I, Sovereign Lord, and what is my family, that you have brought me this far? 19 And as if this were not enough in your sight, Sovereign Lord, you have also spoken about the future of the house of your servant—and this decree, Sovereign Lord, is for a mere human! 20 “What more can David say to you? For you know your servant, Sovereign Lord. 21 For the sake of your word and according to your will, you have done this great thing and made it known to your servant. 22 “How great you are, Sovereign Lord! There is no one like you, and there is no God but you, as we have heard with our own ears. 23 And who is like your people Israel—the one nation on earth that God went out to redeem as a people for himself, and to make a name for himself, and to perform great and awesome wonders by driving out nations and their gods from before your people, whom you redeemed from Egypt? 24 You have established your people Israel as your very own forever, and you, Lord, have become their God. 25 “And now, Lord God, keep forever the promise you have made concerning your servant and his house. Do as you promised, 26 so that your name will be great forever. Then people will say, ‘The Lord Almighty is God over Israel!’ And the house of your servant David will be established in your sight. 27 “Lord Almighty, God of Israel, you have revealed this to your servant, saying, ‘I will build a house for you.’ So your servant has found courage to pray this prayer to you. 28 Sovereign Lord, you are God! Your covenant is trustworthy, and you have promised these good things to your servant. 29 Now be pleased to bless the house of your servant, that it may continue forever in your sight; for you, Sovereign Lord, have spoken, and with your blessing the house of your servant will be blessed forever.”
Psalm 90
A prayer of Moses the man of God1 Lord, you have been our dwelling place throughout all generations. 2 Before the mountains were born or you brought forth the whole world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God. 3 You turn people back to dust, saying, “Return to dust, you mortals.” 4 A thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night. 5 Yet you sweep people away in the sleep of death— they are like the new grass of the morning: 6 In the morning it springs up new, but by evening it is dry and withered. 7 We are consumed by your anger and terrified by your indignation. 8 You have set our iniquities before you, our secret sins in the light of your presence. 9 All our days pass away under your wrath; we finish our years with a moan. 10 Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty, if our strength endures; yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away. 11 If only we knew the power of your anger! Your wrath is as great as the fear that is your due. 12 Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom. 13 Relent, Lord! How long will it be? Have compassion on your servants. 14 Satisfy us in the morning with your unfailing love, that we may sing for joy and be glad all our days. 15 Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us, for as many years as we have seen trouble. 16 May your deeds be shown to your servants, your splendor to their children. 17 May the favor of the Lord our God rest on us; establish the work of our hands for us— yes, establish the work of our hands.
Revelation 22:12-16
12 “Look, I am coming soon! My reward is with me, and I will give to each person according to what they have done. 13 I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End. 14 “Blessed are those who wash their robes, that they may have the right to the tree of life and may go through the gates into the city. 15 Outside are the dogs, those who practice magic arts, the sexually immoral, the murderers, the idolaters and everyone who loves and practices falsehood. 16 “I, Jesus, have sent my angel to give you this testimony for the churches. I am the Root and the Offspring of David, and the bright Morning Star.”
NIV
Sugar and Torture
by Kate Bowler
Kate Bowler, PhD, is an associate professor of the history of Christianity in North America at Duke Divinity School. She completed her undergraduate degree at Macalester College, received a Masters of Religion from Yale Divinity School, and a PhD at Duke University. She is the author of Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel (Oxford University Press, 2013) which received widespread media attention and academic praise as the first history of the movement based on divine promises of health, wealth, and happiness. She wrote the New York Times bestselling memoir, Everything Happens for a Reason (and other lies I’ve loved) (Random House, 2018) after being unexpectedly diagnosed with Stage IV cancer at age 35—a book Bill Gates lauds as “belonging on the shelf alongside other terrific books about mortality” and includes on his must-read list. Dr. Bowler subsequently staged a national conversation around why it felt so difficult to speak frankly about suffering through her popular podcast, Everything Happens. Her book The Preacher’s Wife: The Precarious Power of Evangelical Women Celebrities (Princeton, 2019) follows the rise of celebrity Christian women in American evangelicalism. She has appeared on NPR, The TODAY Show, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and TIME Magazine. Her latest book, No Cure For Being Human (and Other Truths I Need to Hear), grapples with her diagnosis, her ambition, and her faith as she tries to come to terms with limitations in a culture that says anything is possible. Originally from Manitoba, Canada, she now lives in Durham, North Carolina, with her husband, Toban, and son, Zach.
This reflection originally published by Kate Bowler in 2020.
***
The season of joy runs on two things: sugar and torture.
Growing up, my sisters and I built gingerbread houses and decorated them so thoroughly that the powdered sugar dust lingered in the curtains for weeks. We built palaces of icing and cookie sheets. But then the horrible reality set in almost immediately as we recalled The Great Law of Advent.
1 Candy = 1 Day
We could only eat our houses one...piece...at...a...time...one...day... at...a...time.
It was torture.
Family rules (like English Common Law) were developed over time to legislate our concerns.
New rules included:
Gingerbread houses must have structural integrity. Icing is glue, not its own wall.
No eating your sibling’s candy.
No licking other people’s candy.
You are not permitted to immediately devour walls that “cave in.” Too many walls had caved in for too many dubious reasons.
On glorious Christmas morning, we would gorge ourselves on stale gingerbread sheets. One year, we built our houses in November—so early that we had to blow all the dust off the roofs of the houses. Then we ate it anyway, of course.
For most of my young life, I counted every day of Advent in gumdrops. Then I became an adult and I forgot how good it can feel to wait.
Advent is technically a time of waiting and preparation for the baby Jesus. The church waits in anxious expectation, repenting of distractions in order to focus on the miracle of a prophecy fulfilled. Advent and Lent share the same liturgical colour: purple. Christians wait in the dark, just for a little while, because we know there is new life, resurrected life, at the end. We wait patiently in the purple time.
When you are in the season of terrible, time is heavily weighted. You experience waiting differently. Sometimes the waiting is torture, but oftentimes it isn’t. I feel attuned to every emotional and sensory facet of each kaleidoscopic day. I don’t want the Christmas rush. I want the Advent anticipation to go on forever.
A still, dark house is one of the best places to be in Advent. When I can’t sleep, I creep out to the living room to be alone with our Christmas tree. I sit in the stillness of my Lego-strewn living room, lit by the twinkly lights, and breathe in the lengthened seconds. Zach will be stumbling out of bed any moment, dressed in dinosaur pajamas, ready to start another gumdrop day.
May your Advent be as sweet and completely absurd.
Bonus Activity: Gingerbread megachurches
The first year after my diagnosis, my mom bought me a gingerbread kit with firm instructions to “Make a megachurch, sweetie.” And so I did. So every year, I make a glorious candy congregation for a charismatic man (or WOMAN). She knows how to run an empire. Everyone is welcome as long as the marshmallows don’t crash through the ceiling. (Toban does NOT let me spray paint indoors, otherwise, the roof would always be gold. THANKS A LOT TOBAN.)
Pull out some gingerbread supplies and make your own mega-church. But please, please, please tag me in any photos so I can see. I hope this tradition brings you as much absurd joy as it brings me.
Thank you for reading the New Leaf Advent Reader, a collection of reflections from writers across Canada. If you are enjoying the reader, sign up to receive the readings in your inbox each day here: SIGN UP
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Read previous Advent Reader posts:
As the scene opens, in Luke 2, there are no indications that tonight would be unlike any other night. The ones keeping watch are not an elite military unit or a secretive spy agency. Just an ordinary group of shepherds pulling another night shift.
I cannot remember a time in my life where I have heard the word peace more often than I have in the last few years. It seems everyone everywhere is longing and calling for peace.
Maybe you've heard it in the cries of Canadian protestors who took to the streets over police brutality, racism, and the uncovering of the unmarked graves of Indigenous children. "No justice, no peace"…
As I write this Advent devotional, my heart is heavy. Heavy with the weight and tension of 2021. Heavy with pandemic tensions, the tensions of racial unrest, family tensions, health concerns. This year, my roads have been barricaded, my finances eroded, my relationships damaged, and my children hurt…
Christmas 1914—it was only five months into the First World War. Cultural memory remembers this war as senseless and wasteful, ending an era of stability for the West. I was taught in school that this was the war that disabused the West of their own civility in war—with the introduction of chemical warfare, machine guns, and far more powerful artillery than the world had seen up to this point…
I am not sure when I first became aware of the way my subconscious converses with my conscious self through song. But in the same way you begin to see the same car you just purchased, around every corner, I notice it happening all the time now…
We live in a world that can easily consume us with its catastrophes, commercials and cacophonies. These come at us from our larger world, or our smaller worlds; there is noise from every side vying for our attention, trying to prop up some image of what an ideal world or life should be…
“Mary was a total bada**!” she blurted out, and then almost immediately covered her mouth. This spontaneous (and hilarious) outburst happened one Sunday morning while our community was walking through Mary’s Song, the Magnificat (Luke 1:46-53)…
Growing up, Christmas was a relatively quiet experience. My mom often worked through the holidays, and living on a hobby farm meant we weren’t going far if we were to go anyway. The one day I’d look forward to was the one day my aunt, uncle and cousin would come to visit…
The past few months have been a particular season of stillness and readiness in Advent for my wife Bonnie and I. This has been one of the hardest years I can remember, encompassing family losses, pandemic social collapse and isolation, health failures, and surgery…
I have found that seasons of waiting tend to come and go in intensity and I’m coming out of one of the tougher ones for me right now. During this past June and July, the time from Monday to Friday seemed to take extra long…
A little over a year ago, I sat in a park, bundled up with a small group of people trying to safely do church in the midst of a global pandemic. Beside me sat a man about my age, whom I hadn’t seen since well before the start of the pandemic…
Today’s text from Isaiah brings to mind the many tree stumps dotting the perimeter of our home. When we moved here our single acre of land was ringed with overgrown box elder, or Manitoba maple. These trees grow like weeds but have a short lifespan. Wind storms have felled a number of them; the stumps are what remain after we clean up the fallen trees…
I’m gonna just say this flat out: I felt a leetle bit of excitement when I read the first reading from Numbers today.
I know that doesn’t make me look good. I know that this is one of those stories that we are supposed to struggle with in Scripture, and I promise that I do…
I grew up singing and have always loved to sing. We sang together as a family during evening devotions. My first memories of singing are from when I was 4 years old and my sister was 3….
“If you aren’t angry, you aren’t paying attention.” That’s been my favorite bumper sticker, and I just found it on a t-shirt for sale this Christmas.There’s a lot in this world and in myself to be outraged about this year; anger has been a great fuel to get out there, right some wrongs and feel a little more self-righteous along the way…
I went to bible school way back in the 1990s. This was before the fancy technology of today. My computer was a word processer with a 4-inch screen. We made calls on the communal dorm payphone shared by thirty students. Cellphones were not around quite yet, so people communicated by writing notes to each other instead of texting…
In mid-September, I started a 100-Day Dress Challenge, which means I have worn the very same dress every day for two and a half months. Sounds a little crazy, doesn’t it? Maybe it is, but it has also been freeing; decision fatigue is a real thing, and I experience less of it when I have fewer decisions in the morning related to what I wear…
For most (all?) of us, the past year and a half has shifted our understanding and experiences of time. I can no longer remember whether the pandemic started in 2020 or 2019. If you ask me when I last went to a sports game or a concert, it simultaneously feels like six months and six years ago…
For what do you most deeply long?
For the people to whom Isaiah spoke,
the people who were in exile,
their longing was clear:
a safe way through the wilderness,
and a path home again.
Here’s the Infinitum Christmas Plan take on the old discipline of ‘divine reading’.
First Movement: Peruse. Peruse means ‘read (something), typically in a thorough or careful way. Before you start, ask the Lord to open the eyes of your heart for this exercise and then read slowly, curiously, and aggressively…
Some things in life cannot be rushed.
Hasn’t our experience with COVID and all its associated uncertainties taught us that? We’ve been tentatively trudging our way out of isolations, shut-downs, and cancellations for a while now, and we still don’t know if COVID is over.
Because some things in life cannot be rushed…
When I first saw this painting, I was struck by the contrast between the image’s cold setting and its warm colour tones. I could feel heat radiating from the crowd on the left and the chilled air being breathed in by the workers in the field and by children at play…
“An evil generation demands a sign,” Jesus says.
I’m always looking for signs. A running transcript of my prayers might read something like this:
God, please show me what to do.
God, should I speak up? Should I stay quiet?
Is it time to start something new? Is it time to call it quits? To press pause?
Should I give that person a call, God? A text maybe? Or let them have some space?
Is now the time? Or, God, are you saying to wait?
God, please just show me what to do…
Growing up, my sisters and I built gingerbread houses and decorated them so thoroughly that the powdered sugar dust lingered in the curtains for weeks. We built palaces of icing and cookie sheets. But then the horrible reality set in almost immediately as we recalled The Great Law of Advent…
Advent is a season of expectation. We look back to the birth of Jesus and contemplate all that this event means for our lives. However, is it possible to gain a similar perspective from an event that has not yet occurred…
Thank you for joining us for the 2021 New Leaf Advent Reader. I am excited to share this collection of reflections from writers across Canada during the Advent Season. The authors are pastors and poets; historians and theologians; laypeople and church leaders. And they all come together to wrestle with the tensions of the Advent season…
Explore last year’s Advent Reader:
Joy to the world!
It might be a cold and broken hallelujah, but it's a hallelujah nonetheless.
We made it.
Despite the backdrop of injustice, the broken, decay, unlikely and at times discouraging spaces the people find themselves in, the prophets echo the sentiment of Isaiah 9 more often than we may recall: “The people who walk in darkness will see a great light. For those who live in a land of deep darkness a light will shine.”
A pandemic is an interesting time to have health care workers in your life, as I do. In normal times, I expect to hear stories of sick people and families struggling with loved ones’ illnesses. But what I did not expect during this time are the constant stories of stress and anxiety. Working in health care is always stressful. But this year’s pandemic has accentuated many of these stresses..
Sometimes the most profound truths come to us from humble teachers. A few years ago, after a particularly difficult day at work, I bought myself a small potted plant as a pick-me-up (I know, I know - emotional spending, but never mind that now)..
Two thousand years of patriarchy have undoubtedly diminished the powerful words of the two women in our readings. Today we will centre one, a voice that comes to us in the form of a song…
When I hear the word home, I find myself flooded with memory and meaning. I see the familiarity of shoes scattered over mats in the garage of my childhood, smell buns baking on busy Saturday mornings, feel the pulls and aches of being misunderstood and simultaneously cherished…
When people talk about “biblical manhood” I think of Samson, the manly man. There he is, rolling out from under a Camaro, wrench in his teeth, sweat on his brow, oil stain on his bicep and, of course, glistens of divine approval on his mullet of biblical proportions. He is awesome…
For the past few months, I’ve had the privilege of being a part of the New Leaf Network Design Shop, the online edition. While moving the event online had some limitations, it did allow us to have English-to-French translation provided in realtime for our Francophone participants. It was a sight to behold watching our skilled translators work so hard to keep up, and by all accounts, they did an excellent job…
Advent. Waiting for God to come close. Our passages today remind us that our God is an intimate God. He likes close proximity to us…
Three hundred hand-folded origami butterflies, tenderly wrapped in torn sheet cocoons, threaded onto fishing line and hung across our sanctuary. An art installation to kick off lent, a reminder that in the darkness, in our proverbial piles of goo, in the waiting, God cocoons us in his hands, transforming us with her grace. The big reveal was to come Easter Sunday morning. Our church family would enter the sanctuary and be met with the bright colourfulness of 300 butterflies soaring above them. The waiting over, the tattered cocoons lying at their feet, the transformation complete. But that day has yet to come.
“Out of the depths I cry to you, O LORD. Lord hear my voice…”
The psalmist pens a cry universal to our experience. Perhaps, the deep longing strikes a more poignant and universal chord during this year of pandemic disruption and, often unwelcome, change…
I am a neighbourhood pastor. Some days I am not sure what that means. Pastors who see their pulpit as their home base have a focus for their week. They know what to get on about. Other pastors who see their programs and leadership as their passion have their work before them…
When the news of the national security bill had indeed been passed in Hong Kong, my stomach dropped through the floor. The last few months had already had me on tenterhooks, a low thrum of tension and scraped nerves—through the protests and the violence and the thought of home in such utter crisis…
Not long ago, I was asked to do a devotional for a group of young people just coming off a year-long intensive mission program. What to say? I remember that kind of transition in my own life as a student, and how hard it was to switch from mission life to “normal” life. And my mind went to a conversation I once had with my wife about Lord of the Rings…
“YHWH, do something!” Habakkuk does not mince his words when he presents his complaints before God. As he watches Judah implode from injustice and immorality, he cries out to God with urgency and desperation…
I was standing in a church basement on a cold winter day in Edmonton when I received one of the most honest compliments of my life. “Overall, you’re not an a**hole." I mean, does it get any better than that?
The subtle invitation of the readings for this second Tuesday of Advent is to “listen.” But, to listen on a Tuesday? Tuesday is a day of the week that finds us in full activity. It is not Monday when we start the week and plan for the days to come. It is not a Wednesday or Thursday when we are in the middle of the week to see how we are doing. Finally, it is not a Saturday or a Sunday where we evaluate the week, we give thanks, and we recover. It is simply a Tuesday. In any event, today's readings invite us to “listen.”
Over the summer, my wife and I decided to have our kitchen renovated. The old kitchen had been around for over 3 decades (which actually meant it was older than my wife!) and it was in huge need of a makeover…
Twice a year, spring and fall, in most parts of our country, we change our clocks one hour either ahead or back depending on the time of year. Sometimes regardless of the reminders from friends, the media, we forget. Several years ago, when I had just moved to Fort Frances I was on the schedule to lead the early worship service at 9:00 am…
In the Advent season, we remember that Jesus came from Heaven to live on earth, and we anticipate his imminent return. But what we should also do is reflect on what Jesus’ coming has to do with our lives today. Do we know who Jesus is and what He is doing among us? How can we faithfully participate in His work on earth?
When the news of the national security bill had indeed been passed in Hong Kong, my stomach dropped through the floor. The last few months had already had me on tenterhooks, a low thrum of tension and scraped nerves—through the protests and the violence and the thought of home in such utter crisis…
As I write this we have a big appointment for someone in my house tomorrow. It’s a medical appointment that we’ve been waiting on for more than a year and a half. There’s a lot riding on it, and there’s no way to know whether it will be helpful or unhelpful….
Last year I burned out. Before the world hit a pandemic pause, my own world halted. Looking back, I can see now that disruption was a gift to me. But at the time I only felt exhausted.
I’ve always been a little afraid of the second coming of Christ. There’s a lot of good things in the world and there were so many things I wanted to experience before we were all “whisked away to that spirit in the sky.”
As I approach Christmas this year it is with a certain resignation. I want to plan. I want to be scrolling through advent liturgies for the kids to read Sunday mornings as our tiny church family joins to light the candles on the advent wreath.
Isaiah's very powerful and poignant plea to God to split the sky, shake the earth, and settle the score is such an earthy and familiar request.
I’ve been there. Often.
Welcome to the third annual New Leaf Advent Reader. We are so glad you are here with us to journey through Advent while reflecting on change and disruption.