Advent Devotional — Wednesday, December 5

December 5, 2007, 9:30 am; posted by
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Wednesday, December 5, 2007
“Cease doing evil. Learn to do good, search for justice, discipline the violent, be just to the orphan, plead for the widow.” (Isaiah 1:16b-17, part of the Midday Reading in The Divine Hours)

Isaiah here gives us quite a difficult to-do list. In the context of a passage where God has grown tired of his people’s offering, what Isaiah is essentially asking us to do is to repent, to re-orient our lives — and this is done through active steps of discipleship.

Our Christian subculture assures us that the important thing is what we believe, not what we do. Check the bumper stickers at your local Christian book store: “Christians aren’t perfect, just forgiven.” “No Jesus-no peace. Know Jesus-know peace.” And these are true as far as they go. But here Isaiah makes the point that what makes our worship acceptable to God is also a matter of what we do. It is a matter of ceasing one way of life and beginning another. It is about knowing goodness and justice rather than self-aggrandizement. It is about caring for the weak in society (the widows and the orphans) and about the violent (notice the command to “discipline” rather than “punish” the violent).

John the Baptist took all this one step further: “Repent,” he said, “for the Kingdom of God is at hand.” God is coming and if you want to be able to stand in his presence — if you want this to be good news instead of bad news — you will need to purify your lives. You will need to take on certain practices, and you will need to let some dear things go.

During Advent, the call is the same: God is coming! And for much of the world this is a threatening truth. The story of Santa and the elves provides a non-threatening alternative to the story of the coming of God into the world. Santa doesn’t demand much except a passable week of good behavior close to Christmas; but God sees through our souls with the Creator’s eye and longs for us to live up to the capabilities with which he created us.

In order for the coming of the baby Jesus to be good news and not bad news for us, we too have to re-orient our lives. It will mean thinking of ourselves as owned by and submissive to God, as opposed to the freedom-loving autonomous moral agents most Americans conceive themselves to be. It will mean thinking of the world as a holy, flawed place, as opposed to the romantic ideas of nature harbored by some, and as opposed to the unimportance placed on the world by others.

But even more than thinking differently, it will mean acting differently. It will mean decisively leaving behind old practices and embracing new ones, knowing that if we can get our hands and feet to act differently, our hearts and minds will catch up.


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