First Tuesday of Advent
Scripture Reading for Today:
Genesis 9:1-17
Then God blessed Noah and his sons, saying to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth. 2 The fear and dread of you will fall on all the beasts of the earth, and on all the birds in the sky, on every creature that moves along the ground, and on all the fish in the sea; they are given into your hands. 3 Everything that lives and moves about will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything. 4 “But you must not eat meat that has its lifeblood still in it. 5 And for your lifeblood I will surely demand an accounting. I will demand an accounting from every animal. And from each human being, too, I will demand an accounting for the life of another human being. 6 “Whoever sheds human blood, by humans shall their blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made mankind. 7 As for you, be fruitful and increase in number; multiply on the earth and increase upon it.” 8 Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him: 9 “I now establish my covenant with you and with your descendants after you 10 and with every living creature that was with you—the birds, the livestock and all the wild animals, all those that came out of the ark with you—every living creature on earth. 11 I establish my covenant with you: Never again will all life be destroyed by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth.” 12 And God said, “This is the sign of the covenant I am making between me and you and every living creature with you, a covenant for all generations to come: 13 I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth. 14 Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds, 15 I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life. 16 Whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures of every kind on the earth.” 17 So God said to Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant I have established between me and all life on the earth.”
Psalm 124
A song of ascents. Of David.1 If the Lord had not been on our side— let Israel say— 2 if the Lord had not been on our side when people attacked us, 3 they would have swallowed us alive when their anger flared against us; 4 the flood would have engulfed us, the torrent would have swept over us, 5 the raging waters would have swept us away. 6 Praise be to the Lord, who has not let us be torn by their teeth. 7 We have escaped like a bird from the fowler’s snare; the snare has been broken, and we have escaped. 8 Our help is in the name of the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth.
Hebrews 11:32-40
And what more shall I say? I do not have time to tell about Gideon, Barak, Samson and Jephthah, about David and Samuel and the prophets, 33 who through faith conquered kingdoms, administered justice, and gained what was promised; who shut the mouths of lions, 34 quenched the fury of the flames, and escaped the edge of the sword; whose weakness was turned to strength; and who became powerful in battle and routed foreign armies. 35 Women received back their dead, raised to life again. There were others who were tortured, refusing to be released so that they might gain an even better resurrection. 36 Some faced jeers and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. 37 They were put to death by stoning; they were sawed in two; they were killed by the sword. They went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, persecuted and mistreated— 38 the world was not worthy of them. They wandered in deserts and mountains, living in caves and in holes in the ground. 39 These were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised, 40 since God had planned something better for us so that only together with us would they be made perfect.
The Mysterious Blessings of Remembrance and Nostalgia
by Chantal Huinink
Chantal Huinink is a motivational speaker, author and social justice advocate who serves as the Coordinator of Organizational and Spiritual Life for Christian Horizons and recently founded Faith and Wheelpower Ministries. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from the University of Guelph and her Masters of Divinity and Social Work from Martin Luther University College. Chantal is a Christian Reformed Chaplain and a Waterloo Regional Counsellor. Her education and experience as a woman with a physical disability has made her keenly aware of the need for holistic care including consideration of physical, emotional, psychological and spiritual needs.
This week marks the start of the Advent season, to which I say, “Bring on the Christmas carols, cards, and gifts; twinkle lights, sugar cookies, and peppermint hot chocolate; put on your fuzzy pyjamas; play festive movies; and put up your Christmas tree with me!” To some, this might not seem like a sincere, faithful response anticipating Christ’s birth. However, these rituals prepare my house and my heart to celebrate the coming of Jesus our Messiah.
Advent is a mysterious season of waiting. The first Advent consisted of hundreds of years of anticipating the coming Messiah. God’s people were not comfortable; they waited for a Saviour to rescue them, perhaps even bringing peace by the sword. Instead, peace, hope, joy, and love arrived in the form of a baby born in a manger. Now we wait for that same Saviour, Jesus Christ, to return in all His glory and splendor, so that peace, hope, joy, and love can be fully realized. The earth and all of God’s people will be restored to the flourishing that God intended for us–no more death, mourning, crying or pain! (see Revelation 21:4).
I’m grateful for the comforts of life that I have been blessed with so far. If you are comfortable in your current circumstances, consider giving thanks to God for them now. If you are in the midst of discomfort or distress, consider saying a prayer about what you are waiting for Jesus to do on behalf of you or someone you love now.
It is a mystery to me that no matter how positive the current year may or may not seem, for me the season of Advent is filled with the warmest of memories and feelings of nostalgia for Christmases past, rather than Christmas present. Each time I dig out, unwrap, and rearrange past Christmas decorations, I am filled with great joy. I experience the blessings of my current moment and the promise that new Christmas ornaments will be enfolded into the warm and nostalgic memories of the future. There is also promise in the upcoming fresh start of the new year.
Each of our Scripture readings for today contain both a call to remembrance and promise fulfilment.
God’s covenant with Noah reminds us that every living thing is valuable to God, especially human beings such as you and me. This passage holds the mysterious and majestic rainbow, which symbolizes the promise for God to remember God’s covenant and never again flood the whole earth.
Psalm 24 serves as a reminder of the many ways that God has rescued faithful people in the past. It contains the promise that we need not face adversity on our own: the Lord is with us.
Likewise, Hebrews 11 reminds us of the miraculous achievements and faithfulness of the prophets and Christ-followers. They endured hardships like yours and mine or worse. They lived in view of the promise of something better, which we too eagerly anticipate.
Remembering can be hard for people whose past experiences were painful or whose memories are no longer intact. If remembering is hard for you or for someone you love, scriptural reminders of God’s past faithfulness and future promises may be especially helpful. If you have ever felt bad that you cannot remember well, consider that even God uses rainbows as a reminder! When a rainbow appears, “I [God] will remember my covenant” to never again flood the whole earth (Gen. 9:15, NIV). From time to time, we all benefit from reminders of God’s goodness.
Those of us who have participated in advent rituals for many years may be tempted to write them off as repetitive or redundant. However, frequent reminders of God’s promises to us also help us to celebrate God’s faithfulness in the past. These promises encourage us to entrust our future to God with confidence that God has been, is now, and will continue to be faithful to us. Similarly, reminders of the promises that we have made to God and/or to one another help us to be faithful as well.
If you can celebrate the blessings of peace, hope, joy and love this season, thanks be to God! If these blessings still seem mysterious or elusive to you, you are not alone. The Saviour of the world was born into a time and place where people experienced limited peace, joy, hope and love because of oppression at the hands of the Roman rulers. Sadly, oppression and other hardships are still the reality for many. This is precisely why Jesus came. It is also why Jesus is still with us through the power of the Holy Spirit.
I take immense joy in Christmas rituals throughout the season of Advent, in part because I have physical limitations that mean activities like decorating my house and putting up the Christmas lights are always and necessarily communal. They are tangible reminders that I am not alone. Throughout this Advent season and beyond, remember that you are not alone either. No one is. Over 2000 years ago, Emmanuel (“God with us”) appeared as a helpless infant. He brought a small but powerful light to a dark world and promised that He would never leave us nor forsake us (see Matthew 28:20).
Jesus brought with Him the promise of everlasting peace, everlasting hope, everlasting joy, and everlasting love. The challenge of living in this time is that these promises have not yet been fully realized. On the glorious day that Christ returns, they will be. Meanwhile, let us remember Mary’s response to the challenging circumstances and adversity she faced, “let it be as you say,” (see Luke 1:38). Whenever we face challenges or adversity, let us take a page out of Mary’s script and respond in the same way. Let us have the confidence that God will provide everything we need, helping us to remember and remain faithful to the promises that He invited us into..
Prayer: Dear Lord,
Thank you for ongoing reminders of your faithfulness, and especially for the promise of everlasting peace, hope, joy, and love. As I wait for your promise to be realized in all its glory and splendor, may I remember to be faithful to the promises that I have made, serving as a conduit of Your peace, hope, joy, and love everywhere I go. Amen.
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Explore last year’s Advent Reader:
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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…