Second Thursday of Advent
Scripture Reading for Today:
Ruth 1:6-18
6 When Naomi heard in Moab that the Lord had come to the aid of his people by providing food for them, she and her daughters-in-law prepared to return home from there. 7 With her two daughters-in-law she left the place where she had been living and set out on the road that would take them back to the land of Judah. 8 Then Naomi said to her two daughters-in-law, “Go back, each of you, to your mother’s home. May the Lord show you kindness, as you have shown kindness to your dead husbands and to me. 9 May the Lord grant that each of you will find rest in the home of another husband.” Then she kissed them goodbye and they wept aloud 10 and said to her, “We will go back with you to your people.” 11 But Naomi said, “Return home, my daughters. Why would you come with me? Am I going to have any more sons, who could become your husbands? 12 Return home, my daughters; I am too old to have another husband. Even if I thought there was still hope for me—even if I had a husband tonight and then gave birth to sons— 13 would you wait until they grew up? Would you remain unmarried for them? No, my daughters. It is more bitter for me than for you, because the Lord’s hand has turned against me!” 14 At this they wept aloud again. Then Orpah kissed her mother-in-law goodbye, but Ruth clung to her. 15 “Look,” said Naomi, “your sister-in-law is going back to her people and her gods. Go back with her.” 16 But Ruth replied, “Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. 17 Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the Lord deal with me, be it ever so severely, if even death separates you and me.” 18 When Naomi realized that Ruth was determined to go with her, she stopped urging her.
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 3:1-10
Dear friends, this is now my second letter to you. I have written both of them as reminders to stimulate you to wholesome thinking. 2 I want you to recall the words spoken in the past by the holy prophets and the command given by our Lord and Savior through your apostles. 3 Above all, you must understand that in the last days scoffers will come, scoffing and following their own evil desires. 4 They will say, “Where is this ‘coming’ he promised? Ever since our ancestors died, everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation.” 5 But they deliberately forget that long ago by God’s word the heavens came into being and the earth was formed out of water and by water. 6 By these waters also the world of that time was deluged and destroyed. 7 By the same word the present heavens and earth are reserved for fire, being kept for the day of judgment and destruction of the ungodly. 8 But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. 9 The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance. 10 But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything done in it will be laid bare.
The long, slow mercy of Christian hope
by Keith Dow
Keith Dow serves as Manager of Organizational and Spiritual Life with Christian Horizons, where he tends to the theological roots of organizational culture and champions accessibility and belonging in the Body of Christ. Author of “Formed together: Mystery, narrative, and virtue in Christian caregiving,” Dr. Dow obtained his PhD with ethicist and theologian Hans Reinders through Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam in 2019.
“Blessed are those whose help is the God of Jacob,
whose hope is in the Lord their God.”
Slowly, hesitatingly, the bunny ears come together. With a look of intense concentration, one loop passes over the other and then under. We should have been out the door ten minutes ago, but in this moment only one thing matters – tying her own shoes. It has taken everything in me to keep from stepping in, quickly lacing the tiny sneakers, and whisking my youngest daughter out the door. Together, we have done it. I have restrained my impulse for efficiency, productivity, and speed; she has achieved what, in this instant, seems like the greatest accomplishment known to humankind. These shoes will come untied again in only a few moments, but victory has been shared for a brief time.
Perhaps you, too, are a parent who has experienced these moments of grace and practicing patience. Perhaps you have had to learn patience with your own body or memory or experience of embodied limitations. Perhaps, like me, you have accompanied a parent through the role-reversal of cognitive decline and caring for someone who spent so many years caring for you. Every one of these encounters and partnerships is infused with tensions, trepidation, and tiny triumphs along the way. Every one of these moments shares in the mysterious movement of mercy, finds its richness in the poised practice of grace. Hope and help share this in common: each waits for the moment when things are made right, and each trusts in Another for deliverance, unsure of when the fullness of time might come.
“But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead, he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.” (2 Peter 3:8-9, NIV)
Rewind several years from the days of shoe-tying and diaper-changing (now preserved as fond memories as my children enter their teen years). I find myself before a judge–of sorts. Across the table from me sits a professor-monk of the small Catholic university I attend as its resident Protestant. We have wrapped up a course on continental philosophy, and I’m here in its final moments, attempting to convey some semblance of understanding of Jacques Derrida’s opaque reasoning in this oral exam. With a final dramatic statement, my face flush as I deliver the resounding crescendo, I stop and wait. Nothing. Hesitatingly, after an awkward silence, I offer a different approach and see that I have,at last, hit upon what I should have said from the start. This professor has been clear: Whether after asking a question of us in class or in these fraught final moments of verbal confession, he waits so that we have time to climb out of whatever hole we have dug for ourselves. He blatantly ignores our rambling for the first minute or two of our response, for our benefit. This, too, is grace. This, too, is mercy.
While judgment is quick, Mercy is slow. So slow that in a world of injustice, climate disaster, hatred, and war, Mercy appears to be inept, incompetent, or invisible. Yet God’s grace simmers slowly while our arrogant wrath and quick judgment boil over into further injustice and injury. “How long, Oh Lord? How long will you wait?” too often echoes notes of “Save me now, all else be damned.”
“Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the Lord deal with me, be it ever so severely, if even death separates you and me.” (Ruth 1:16b-17, NIV)
As God waits, hoping, praying in the mirror that all might come to repentance, we too enter into the habit of this long faithfulness. Staying together. Praying together. Dying together. Amidst times of joy and celebration, times of grief and mourning, and times of mindless boredom and trivial pursuits, we hold space for each other’s faith and each other’s doubt. We suspend judgment even as the (insert name of latest social media app) timeline explodes in indignant outburst. We may not know where God is or where God is going, but we hold onto a shared hope that slowness is not surrender and silence is not absence. To “care” finds its origin in the German word for grief, and the two are seldom apart. Yet, in the care we hold for one another, we are swept up in a movement of Love so fierce that not even death can keep us apart.
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