Passage for reflection: Habbukuk 2: 1 - 4
Whether it was on the top of the tallest mast of a ship or on the gate to the city, it was vital that the person on watch was always alert.
There could be icebergs ahead, there could be enemies on the horizon. It was only the alertness of the watcher that would save the ship, save the city, save the people. It must have been a demanding job to be always on the lookout.
‘If the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into.’
The season of Advent is such an important one because it’s all about being watchful people. That great Advent hymn, ‘Wachet auf’ sums it up so well with those words
Zion hears the watchmen shouting,
her heart leaps up with joy undoubting,
she stands and waits with eager eyes;
We are a people on the look-out, for the birth of Jesus at Christmas, of course, but also for the coming of the Son of Man, for the coming of the Kingdom of God, for the coming of the perfection of all things. We’re watching as the prophets have called on us to watch, for those glorious days when
‘they shall beat their swords into ploughshares,
and their spears into pruning-hooks.’
We’re watching as Paul reminds us, for the days when we will
‘lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armour of light.’
We don’t know when it will come, but we know and we believe that it will come and we watch and we wait with hearts eager for things to be different.
But we know that we don’t just wait and watch in some passive kind of way. The gospel always calls us to act, to be the people of the kingdom, now, here, to take up plough-shares and pruning hooks, to work in the light and not in the darkness, to help create the world as it should be, as God desires it to be, as God’s people need it to be, as this community longs for it to be.
People within our communities are hurting. There will be people who feel fearful, people who perhaps would rather be anywhere than here, others who just want life to be normal. We have to stand with them. We have to help bear their pain but also speak into that pain with words of hope.
We’re on the lookout for God, we’re watching for the one who will come, for God will always come. We’re watching for the one who will be our peace and our healing, who will bind up our wounds, who will ease our memories and calm our thoughts. We’re on the lookout for a kingdom that will transform lives and defeat the tyranny of darkness.
God will come, like child; God will come, like bread. The Lord knows that the call to alertness is demanding, that the call to action is exhausting and so he feeds us, he cares for us, cares for the world – by coming, by coming as child, by coming as bread. That is why we’re here if we are people of faith, watching for him alert to his presence, so that as the broken bread of vulnerability is held before us and placed in our empty hands (when we are safe enough to share communion again) we can say ‘My Lord and my God’ and know that it is true. The Lord will come and will not be slow. The Lord is here, his spirit is with us.
This week, keep watch. And maybe reflect on these words:
The lack of mystery in our modern life is our downfall and our poverty. A human life is worth as much as the respect it holds for the mystery. We retain the child in us to the extent that we honor the mystery. Therefore, children have open, wide-awake eyes, because they know that they are surrounded by the mystery. They are not yet finished with this world; they still don’t know how to struggle along and avoid the mystery, as we do. We destroy the mystery because we sense that here we reach the boundary of our being, because we want to be lord over everything and have it at our disposal, and that’s just what we cannot do with the mystery…. Living without mystery means knowing nothing of the mystery of our own life, nothing of the mystery of another person, nothing of the mystery of the world; it means passing over our own hidden qualities and those of others and the world. It means remaining on the surface, taking the world seriously only to the extent that it can be calculated and exploited, and not going beyond the world of calculation and exploitation. Living without mystery means not seeing the crucial processes of life at all and even denying them.
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