Advent Reflection | Wednesday, December 23

Today’s A Weary World Rejoices story comes from Pastor Chris Enstad:

Human beings are not built for waiting. All of the parts that God has knit together into our bodies speak of movement and searching and doing, doing, doing. It is little surprise, then, that God needs to remind us more often to “be still” then to “move along.”

This pandemic year I have struggled to reconcile my own discomfort with the unknown with what it must have been like all of those years ago when Mary, Joseph, the earth and the heavens were all waiting for God to “show up.”  I think of the politics of Jesus’ time and it makes ours look easy. I think of all of the worries and concerns that Mary and Joseph must have had, and they make mine look trivial.

And then I think of those in our church and our world that are waiting on a health diagnosis or a job. I think of those waiting to be allowed to see someone who is ill or to just see a parent or loved one for even just a moment.

I know that deep down all of us struggle with pain and brokenness in both large and small ways and I wait for that glorious reconciliation that only God can provide in the midst of worlds and relationships that all have taken for lost.

And then. Then, I am reminded in the sound of a hymn, the spoken Word or a glimpse of God at work in the world that the most amazing reconciliation has already happened in the birth of Jesus Christ!

So maybe, just maybe, what I’m really waiting for is to be re-minded, as only the Good News can do, that Jesus, that greatest gift, has already come to me, to you, to us.

2 Corinthians 5: 16 – 19

So from now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way.  So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.