Dear friend,
I hope you had a blessed Sunday with the beginning of the season of Advent. I pray that you will be able to keep a spiritual focus within the whirlwind of activities this month. To help keep us centered on the coming of Christ, Bethlehem holds three midweek Advent services on these Wednesdays leading to Christmas Eve. Along with our weekly meals of Community, we will take the time to attend to God’s Word, reflect on the good news of salvation, and join together in faithful prayer.
To get started on the journey, perhaps you will find this devotional thought as helpful as I did. It comes from Edmund Steimle (1907-1988) in From Death to Birth:
“Sometimes I feel that the whole world is alive with God’s comings—quite literally! A close call on the interstate highway and I’m grateful that he provided the lull; a bathrobe catches on a door knob and rips—and what’s God got against me this morning? This is frivolous, self-centered, verging on the superstitious—I know that! But I wonder if it isn’t better than assuming that God speaks to us only in crisis, or only in Scripture and in church. As if we could limit God so! So Bonhoeffer’s familiar lines, ‘God is the beyond in the midst of life, not simply where human powers give out at the border, but in the center of human achievement and joyous living.’
…Advent, with its strange opening number, the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem, is to open our eyes to the wonder that God keeps coming, entering into dialogue with us, to speak in love, and in judgment in love, where we least expect: in a man sitting on a donkey—God’s huge joke, if you will—always appearing to be less than he really is, so we can recognize him in his love, in the big, overbearing problems of a world in radical change, or in the simple delights of daily life. He’s literally all over the place hoping that we’ll have the eyes to see and the ears to listen to his coming.”
Come among us, Jesus, in the here and now!
Pastor Heckmann
