Good Morning,
Praise the Lord for the season of Advent. Praise the Lord for His Promise. Praise the Lord for His power with which He delivers what He promises. I love the season of Advent and Christmas. This is the season of great anticipation. This is the season of beauty and blessing.
This is our time when we celebrate the arrival, the coming, the advent, of Jesus, the Savior of the world, the Redeemer, the long-awaited Messiah. In Luke 23, Jesus tells his disciples that they must always be watching, wide-eyed, poised, ready for action. Jesus talks about paying close attention to the world around us. He says in verse 34, “Be careful, or your hearts will be weighed down with dissipation, drunkenness and the anxieties of life.”
Dissipation means wasting what you have, or using that which you have for silly things. God has given all of us so much.
Drunkenness: Jesus also warns his followers against getting drunk. The danger is that we can be so consumed with all our selfish desires that we cannot see the things going on around us. We become so inward-focused that the world around us becomes hazy and unfocused — we become drunk, consumed with ourselves.
Jesus wants us to pay attention, to be watchful. We cannot do that when we’re on the fast-track to success, when we have purchased our one-way, non-stop ticket to our dreams.
Anxieties of life: There are so many things to worry about. Many of these worries are, or seem to be, quite important. However, the trouble with anxiety is that it can become so consuming that it takes over our ability to pay attention to the present, to the world that’s happening all around us. The anxieties of life turn our eyes to the dreamy future, and close us off from what God is doing right now.
So, those are the three things Jesus warns his disciples against: dissipation, drunkenness, and the anxieties of life. If the point is that those things cloud our vision, that they are ways of distracting us from the present, then what is it that we are supposed to be looking for? If Jesus is so concerned about our vision, about our ability to watch and wait, the question I have is what are we waiting for? What are we waiting to see?
We are looking for Jesus, waiting to see Him in our lives. We are waiting for the second advent, the time when Jesus will come again. That is the point of our season of Advent, and it is why we read the New Testament Texts regarding the end of the world. We celebrate the first Advent, and anticipate the second when our Savior will come again.
Immanuel, God with us. As we wait for Jesus to return, I always come back to this title for Jesus. He is Immanuel, God with us. After the resurrection Jesus came to his followers and they did not recognize him. He came to two of his followers as a stranger on a road to Emmaus. He appeared as a gardener to Mary outside the tomb. He came to his disciples gathered in a room, and he appeared with wounds. You know the story. Thomas did not believe, so Jesus showed him that his body, his hands and his side, still bore the marks of his death.
Jesus appeared with wounds. Immanuel, God with us, is still among us, but He may not look like we expect Him to. We learn this from the stories of Jesus’ resurrection appearances. When we think of a resurrected Jesus, the last thing we would ever consider is that somehow his body would still bear the marks of death, the marks of suffering, open wounds. Yet that is the gospel story; that’s how he comes to us, with the wounds of suffering.
In a sermon to some of the most powerful people in the United States, including the president, Bono, the lead singer of U2, said this:
God is in the slums, in the cardboard boxes where the poor play house. God is in the silence of a mother who has infected her child with a virus that will end both their lives. God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war. God is in the debris of wasted opportunity and lives, and God is with us if we are with them.
Alice and I have been blessed beyond belief with four beautiful daughters who love Jesus . They have been blessed with hearts of compassion for the poor, for the lost, for the least, and for the last. They challenge me in my walk with Jesus. The Lord uses them to provoke me to love Him with great devotion , worship Him with passion, give to Him with extravagant generosity, witness for Him with grace and serve Him with gladness.
In an interview with Mother Theresa, a reporter asked her how she found the strength and hope to work day after day in the middle of so much suffering. Mother Theresa replied, "One day a long time ago I went to nurse a woman with leprosy. Her body was covered with sores. So, I began the slow work of tending to the sores, up and down her arms. And when I reached her hand, I saw a sore in the middle of her hand that looked like it went though. And I thought to myself, My Lord has holes in his hands. Then I prayed, “Lord, is this you?”
In Christ the wounded Healer,
Brown
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