Sunday, December 12, 2004
Week Three, Day One

In their new book, A Guide to Prayer for All Who Seek God, p. 20) Shawchuck and Job

say this about the message Advent proclaims to believers:  “We get another chance!  The Season of Advent gives the church the opportunity to begin again.   Once more the full story of God’s grace is awaiting our discovery.”

Thank God the church in its divinely inspired wisdom has given us a Season that surrounds us with songs, symbols, prayer practices and Scriptures that remind us  “we do get another chance!” For, a recurring fact of our lives is that “many dangers, toils, and snares” have come our way in the past year.  Sometimes we have faced these challenges with “amazing grace”, and sometimes we have gotten entangled in dangers and snares that pulled us into dark places in our hearts.

We come to the end of the calendar year hoping for another chance, and Advent, the beginning of the church year, proclaims that there is, there is… there always will be another chance.  Because of Christ’s birth, we are people who can claim the promise of new beginnings in our lives.

Where do we look to find God’s new beginning?  Isaiah invites us to look in the wilderness place of  our lives.  When he dared to seek God there, he found gladness, rejoicing, joy and singing.  He writes this after he and his nation have endured a barren, wilderness time.

I have a hunch that most of us know in our heads that the place for us to discover a new beginning is in the wilderness, the barren place in our lives.  So what is the rub?  If we know where to go to discover and claim the gift of God’s second chance for us, why does this promise of Advent elude us so often?

Speaking personally, I confess I am afraid to go there.  My hands feel weak.  My knees feel feeble.  Uncontrollable fear confronts me and immobilizes my steps.  I hesitate to venture from my comfort zone of half-living and half-truth of self.

Yet you and I -- celebrants of Christ’s birth  -- know something more convincing than our fear.  We have been shown in Christ Jesus:  “the light has come into (our) darkness and (our) darkness did not overcome it.”  (John 1:5 NRSV) That light creates faith in us to overcome our fears. When our hearts reclaim this truth and in faith we dare, led by Christ’s grace, to proceed into the dark places, we discover our hands slowly strengthen, our knees grow firm, and our fear melts. 

As we go deeper, hope dislodges despair, and we do meet in our wilderness place gladness, rejoicing, blossoming, joy and singing. 

We realize anew that God indeed has given us a second chance, a new beginning, and we know when the holy day of Christmas arrives that we have sound reason to sing “Joy to the world…He comes to make his blessings flow as far as the curse is found”!

Prayer:  God, thank you for this divine love that strengthens our hands and melts the fear in the dark places of our hearts.  Amen.