First Friday of Advent
Scripture Reading for Today:
Psalm 72:1-7
Of Solomon1 Endow the king with your justice, O God, the royal son with your righteousness. 2 May he judge your people in righteousness, your afflicted ones with justice. 3 May the mountains bring prosperity to the people, the hills the fruit of righteousness. 4 May he defend the afflicted among the people and save the children of the needy; may he crush the oppressor. 5 May he endure as long as the sun, as long as the moon, through all generations. 6 May he be like rain falling on a mown field, like showers watering the earth. 7 In his days may the righteous flourish and prosperity abound till the moon is no more.
Psalm 72:18-19
18 Praise be to the Lord God, the God of Israel, who alone does marvelous deeds. 19 Praise be to his glorious name forever; may the whole earth be filled with his glory. Amen and Amen.
Psalm 72:18-19
18 Praise be to the Lord God, the God of Israel, who alone does marvelous deeds. 19 Praise be to his glorious name forever; may the whole earth be filled with his glory. Amen and Amen.
Isaiah 30:19-26
19 People of Zion, who live in Jerusalem, you will weep no more. How gracious he will be when you cry for help! As soon as he hears, he will answer you. 20 Although the Lord gives you the bread of adversity and the water of affliction, your teachers will be hidden no more; with your own eyes you will see them. 21 Whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying, “This is the way; walk in it.” 22 Then you will desecrate your idols overlaid with silver and your images covered with gold; you will throw them away like a menstrual cloth and say to them, “Away with you!” 23 He will also send you rain for the seed you sow in the ground, and the food that comes from the land will be rich and plentiful. In that day your cattle will graze in broad meadows. 24 The oxen and donkeys that work the soil will eat fodder and mash, spread out with fork and shovel. 25 In the day of great slaughter, when the towers fall, streams of water will flow on every high mountain and every lofty hill. 26 The moon will shine like the sun, and the sunlight will be seven times brighter, like the light of seven full days, when the Lord binds up the bruises of his people and heals the wounds he inflicted.
Acts 13:16-25
16 Standing up, Paul motioned with his hand and said: “Fellow Israelites and you Gentiles who worship God, listen to me! 17 The God of the people of Israel chose our ancestors; he made the people prosper during their stay in Egypt; with mighty power he led them out of that country; 18 for about forty years he endured their conduct in the wilderness; 19 and he overthrew seven nations in Canaan, giving their land to his people as their inheritance. 20 All this took about 450 years. “After this, God gave them judges until the time of Samuel the prophet. 21 Then the people asked for a king, and he gave them Saul son of Kish, of the tribe of Benjamin, who ruled forty years. 22 After removing Saul, he made David their king. God testified concerning him: ‘I have found David son of Jesse, a man after my own heart; he will do everything I want him to do.’ 23 “From this man’s descendants God has brought to Israel the Savior Jesus, as he promised. 24 Before the coming of Jesus, John preached repentance and baptism to all the people of Israel. 25 As John was completing his work, he said: ‘Who do you suppose I am? I am not the one you are looking for. But there is one coming after me whose sandals I am not worthy to untie.’
No one waits alone
by Lea Wilkening
Lea Wilkening works with the Canadian Thriving Multivocational Ministry Project (CTMMP), a partnership of New Leaf Network and Briarcrest Seminary. She is also pastor of The Cottage, a church plant in Oakville, Ontario. Some of her "sacred side hustles" involve performing and teaching improv, serving on charity boards, and parenting her two teens with her husband, John. Mutli-vocational ministry is a great fit for her and she loves supporting and learning from other multi-vocational leaders.
I’m not a natural waiter.
I don’t mean the waiter that tends restaurant tables. I’ve spent plenty of time working those jobs to be proficient. I’m not great as someone waiting for their longings to be answered. Perhaps I’m a product of my instant-gratification generation. Whether it’s watching water boil to make it go faster or eating the little chocolates in the advent calendar long before Christmas, I’m uncomfortable waiting.
As a teen, I took a city bus to school, and the worst part of my day was standing at the bus stop alone in the morning. I waited in silence, except for the occasional nod from a passerby who managed to catch my attention as I stared down at my shoes. The few minutes of waiting alone seemed like a time warp, swallowing up most of my day.
In the afternoon, waiting for the bus was an altogether different experience.
Nearly a hundred students filed out of school to make their way en masse to the nearest stop. My tedious morning commute was replaced with a celebratory end-of-day parade of sorts. I can only imagine it was not as celebratory for the surrounding neighbourhood as teen angst echoed through the alleyways in shouts and rolling laughter.
Along the route to the bus stop, subgroups would form and disperse like oil in water, coming together to make plans for the weekend. Someone would separate to work up the courage to ask a date to the dance, only to merge again to debate whether the math teacher smelled more like coffee or cigarettes. Once the caravan got to the corner stop, the mele continued.
No one was silent and no one stared at their feet.
The waits were often longer to accommodate so many riders at once, but the time shared with friends warped into what felt like mere moments. Our closing-day rhythm was nothing short of a mysterious liturgy of youthful possibility.
Everything was right in our world, and as the school day closed, we looked forward to the wait together.
The text for today, Isaiah 30:19-26, speaks of Israel’s waiting. An entire nation is waiting for God to keep his promises. They wait for liberation, provision, and wholeness for the land. It turns out, they don’t make great waiters either. The uncertainty feels daunting. They can’t see a way out of their troubles, so the nation’s leaders look to form alliances with Egypt. It seems impossible that the parched earth would begin to produce and that their worn-out hearts would be replenished. So, they choose not to live the way that would bring restoration, the way of God.
Instead of grounding themselves in the slow, steady covering of God, they set their sights elsewhere. Giving themselves up to the oppressive state that enslaved them and subjecting themselves to a plethora of gods who were never fully pleased by their striving religiosity was better than the alternative.
At least then they wouldn’t have to wait for an unseen God to keep his astonishing promises. At least then, they were no longer waiting.
Every Advent, we remember the human condition of waiting. There are some seasons when the wait feels like we are drenched in the suffering of this world, like being exposed to a cold rain at a stop without shelter. So many feel the burden of waiting in this season. Some of us wait for a cure, others wait for relief. Some wait for change. Others wait for the return to better days.
All of creation waits.
In Romans 8:18-21, Paul reminds us that creation waits in eager expectation. The whole creation groans. The earth waits for healing. The birds and the animals wait for compassion. Nations wait for peace. At our very core, we wait for the day when God’s promises will be fully realized, when all things will be made new (Rev. 21:5).
What are you waiting for? When I was 3 years old, my grandfather took his life. He spent years in and out of prison. His blanket from the Michigan City Penitentiary, still with his prisoner numbers written in permanent marker, was the security blanket I carried throughout my childhood. His life was a product of generational trauma. I think I’ve been waiting my whole life for the day when there is no more pain and the suffering has ceased. When there’s no need for thieving or prisons because all will be well.
We wait for the risen Christ to come and sit at the table with us again. We wait for the time we will dwell together with our Creator face-to-face in the garden, the place where our soul belongs, our bodies and the earth as they are created to be.
One of the mysteries of this season is that we wait with all those with whom we share this planet. We also wait with all those who have come before us and those that will follow. Like a mysteriously too-quick end-of-day parade, time warps when we recognize our companionship. We share this planet with other waiters who are longing for something more.
We are caravanning with the Israelites in celebration of the birth of God’s promised Messiah, the Christ child. Their story reminds us on our way that the Creator of all times will be gracious to us in our time of need and, as soon as he hears, he will answer (v19).
Even if we are waiting alone on a frosty morning, staring down at our shoes without a friend to pass the time, God’s promises throughout Isaiah assure us that we are never alone. We have the voice of his Spirit behind us, saying, “This is the way; walk in it” (v. 21).
In his study of the Bible’s wisdom literature, William P. Brown writes, “Joy is never guaranteed, but it remains ever a possibility. Enjoyment thus is a wonder, a paradox in which the human encounters the Divine in mysterious interaction, a testimony both to the ‘hand of God’ and to the human will. Joy is both a gift and task.”[1]
May your joy this Advent season be this: no one waits alone. Let’s pass the time together, in expectant hope.
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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I’m not a natural waiter.
I don’t mean the waiter that tends restaurant tables. I’ve spent plenty of time working those jobs to be proficient. I’m not great as someone waiting for their longings to be answered…
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Explore last year’s Advent Reader:
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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…