Thought for the Week - 24.11.22

The season of Advent is around the corner.

 

One might say that Advent has three aspects to its keeping. The first is the most popular. It is preparing to celebrate the life-changing and world-tilting birth of Christ Jesus.

 

Many people continue to try to reach up and find God, but God turned things upside-down by coming to find us. And this advent of God is worth celebrating.

 

The second advent is centred in repenting as we turn toward letting Christ’s continued saving presence in our lives, our churches, our homes, our communities, and our world become more deeply rooted and pray that the light of Christ might shine more brightly in each of us.

 

The third advent is to give voice to our longing. We give voice to this longing whenever we pray, ‘Thy Kingdom Come. Thy will be done, on Earth as it is in heaven.’ We long for the day when the vision of Micah becomes fully known: ‘And God shall judge between many peoples, and shall arbitrate between strong nations far away; they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore; but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid…

 

As Leonard Sweet sums this up: ‘It is for this final or third Advent, the Maranatha Advent that we live according to the Second Advent in the knowledge of the reality of the First Advent.’

 

Reverend Tom Telfer, Kilchrenan and Dalavich l/w Muckairn