Second Friday of Advent
Scripture Reading for Today:
Ruth 4:13-17
13 So Boaz took Ruth and she became his wife. When he made love to her, the Lord enabled her to conceive, and she gave birth to a son. 14 The women said to Naomi: “Praise be to the Lord, who this day has not left you without a guardian-redeemer. May he become famous throughout Israel! 15 He will renew your life and sustain you in your old age. For your daughter-in-law, who loves you and who is better to you than seven sons, has given him birth.” 16 Then Naomi took the child in her arms and cared for him. 17 The women living there said, “Naomi has a son!” And they named him Obed. He was the father of Jesse, the father of David.
Psalm 146:5-10
5 Blessed are those whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord their God. 6 He is the Maker of heaven and earth, the sea, and everything in them— he remains faithful forever. 7 He upholds the cause of the oppressed and gives food to the hungry. The Lord sets prisoners free, 8 the Lord gives sight to the blind, the Lord lifts up those who are bowed down, the Lord loves the righteous. 9 The Lord watches over the foreigner and sustains the fatherless and the widow, but he frustrates the ways of the wicked. 10 The Lord reigns forever, your God, O Zion, for all generations. Praise the Lord.
2 Peter 3:11-18
11 Since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind of people ought you to be? You ought to live holy and godly lives 12 as you look forward to the day of God and speed its coming. That day will bring about the destruction of the heavens by fire, and the elements will melt in the heat. 13 But in keeping with his promise we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness dwells. 14 So then, dear friends, since you are looking forward to this, make every effort to be found spotless, blameless and at peace with him. 15 Bear in mind that our Lord’s patience means salvation, just as our dear brother Paul also wrote you with the wisdom that God gave him. 16 He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction. 17 Therefore, dear friends, since you have been forewarned, be on your guard so that you may not be carried away by the error of the lawless and fall from your secure position. 18 But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be glory both now and forever! Amen.
Jesus’ Great-Grandmothers
by Jacqui Mignault
Jacqui Mignault is a campus chaplain, spiritual director, former pastor in the reformed tradition and is currently training to be a Spiritual Health Practitioner in Calgary, AB. You can find her writing at theabbey.substack.com or follow her adventures in the forests and prairies of Alberta on Instagram @jacquimignault.
Richard Wagamese, in his novel A Quality of Light, has a white father say to his adopted Indigenous son, “You’ve got all the chapters and verses. The only thing you don’t understand is the begats. And believe me, son, no one ever reads the begats.” But that’s not true. Wagamese’s story reveals that the son did need to understand his “begats.” He needed to know the stories and details about where he came from.
There are begats at the beginning of our Christmas story, too. Even though hardly anyone reads them, the genealogies included in the gospels are not inconsequential. They tell us something about who this Christ Child is, and by extension, they tell us something about who we are by telling us who he came from. Luke’s gospel, glaringly and daringly, included four women’s names in its genealogy. The inclusion of these women says a bold word within the Christmas stories that have been sentimentalized too heavily for too long.
Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba are all named as Jesus’ great-grandmothers.
All of them were outsiders to the story of Israel in one way or another.
All of them were bound within stories of sex and family that rendered them suspect, tainted, and discounted.
All these women made choices, born from their own desires to live, that led the Israelitese deeper into the story God was telling.
Tamar, out of her need, took her sexuality into her own hands, subverted convention, and put the patriarch Judah to shame for reneging on his responsibility to her (Genesis 38).
Rahab, living at the margins as a prostitute, threw her lot in with Israel’s spies, hiding them, saving them, and eventually finding her home with them (Joshua 2).
Ruth had few options for life when her husband died. But she chose solidarity with her aging mother-in-law, Naomi. She was bold in asserting her needs and reminding her kin of their responsibilities (The Book of Ruth).
And Bathsheba. Triply wronged when she was taken by David, widowed by David, and whose child, born from this unlawful union, was killed because of David’s arrogance. Then in later years, far past her prime, she risked her life to remind King David of his promise to her next son (2 Samuel 11, 12 and 1 Kings 1).
These are Jesus’ grandmothers, all participating in the lineage of Christ. These women at the margins could have been forgotten or left out, like so many others in so many generations. Yet their inclusion in our advent journey reveals that their lives are woven inextricably together in a bigger story that reverberates through time, all the way to us who trust this story even now.
To those trying to cope in a discontented world during this season, attending to the “begats” could feel unnecessary. But the truth of living as if Advent mattered is that the lineage made up of genetics, histories, and meaning is exactly what God had in mind when he asked to be born of a woman. He did not grudgingly become a human with all its attendant generational traumas, choices, wounds, and wins. God said a wholehearted yes to those things, allowing the human stories to become the I AM’s own story.
We, the ones who steward this story now, are meant to know this lineage and to reckon with it as we are meant to know and reckon with our own.
In our own lives, we will all have to reckon with both the gifts and wounds we receive in our families as well as from our church-within-empire traditions. As a nation, we have been thrust into a reckoning of our history of exclusionary policies and the stories of colonial erasure that have benefited some and wounded others. Our “begats” are showing. And as participants in the mystery of faith, our “begats” need to be woven into our story with God.
The gift of Advent is that we spend time making room for this sort of weaving by using practices that can reshape our imagination. We wait. We are silent. We light candles in the dark. We tell old stories. The mystery of Advent is that it is about God choosing to come, not from above but from within. This story is about making new—from the inside—the “begats” we all are bound to—the choices, the people, the personalities, the political, social, and physical realities that are so...human.
The grace of reading the stories of Jesus’ grandmothers is not that everything mysteriously works out in the end, like a Hallmark movie suggests. The grace is known when our long-tangled stories are seen, tended to, and drawn into the web of God-With-Us and God-For-Us. It is there that our long stories, some of which we would rather gloss over, are healed and wisdom can take root. When we finally acknowledge that what we get in our Christmas story is not a “how-to” but a “welcome home,” we enter grace. Advent grace is a mystery that we will not solve, but only participate in.
At the end of his novel, Wagamese has the son say these words: “Perhaps we need to remind each other that we have these old fires in common...That each of us possesses the memory of drums, prayer songs and offerings to the great and tremendous mystery around us...We cannot change history. We do not seek to. We only seek to use its woundings, its poisons, its pains and its failings to strengthen us for the march forward.”
Advent is a story of God’s work. Of redemption, of solidarity within the web of wounds, and of giving us back to ourselves. Not by removing us from the world, but by delving deeper into its most human of stories and revealing God’s very self has been present the whole time. And so we attend to “the begats” and let them be rewoven, by grace and mystery, into something beautiful.
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Explore last year’s Advent Reader:
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“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….
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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…
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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…