Advent Devotional 2022

CONSIDER THIS

Noah is one of the most fascinating characters we find in the extended family of Jesus. Noah walks a journey with his family that is remarkable both in its radiant faithfulness and its inescapable difficulty. When we think of Noah, we think of obedience. With just a dream and a schematic from God, Noah builds a massive boat that will float the animals of the world to safety as the land is reclaimed by an ocean of water—and reborn.

God’s favor on Noah was a favor not built on talent, skill, or his parenting accomplishments. God’s favor on Noah’s life was built on Noah’s steadfast commitment to see a great rescue through to the end. And that he did. The stories around that deliverance, written and unwritten, are every bit as important as the end result. But we know that God’s goal was accomplished. An ark was built. Humanity and the created order of animals were saved. The rain came down, the waters rose, and Noah’s ark was lifted toward heaven on the very floods of the world’s judgment.

When Jesus entered the scene on that starry night in Bethlehem a few millennia ago, he did so as God’s great spiritual ark, his very life and teaching designed to carry us to safety—into the harbor of the heart of the Father. And what do we see in Jesus’ life that we see in Noah’s life?

Obedience. Raw, Creator-trusting, crowd-defying, life-saving obedience.

Jesus was born, like us, not to do his own will, nor to see his own vision or purpose or meaning fulfilled and accomplished. Jesus was born to do the will of his Father, to move through the world as a sign that God speaks and guides the willing spirit that is humbly open to serving others.

From the manger where Mary and Joseph’s obedience was put on display for all the world, Jesus would go on to learn the fullness of obedience through “what he suffered” (Heb. 5:8). So it is with us. We all have models of obedience in our lives, toward which we may look and remember each and every day. It is in the moments we face the choice between God’s will being accomplished or our own—as Jesus experienced in the garden of Gethsemane—that our “your will be done” prayer leads us toward full maturity as a disciple of our Master.

Jesus, like Noah before him, chose obedience, and made himself a servant (Phil. 2:6–7). This Advent, following in their footsteps, so can we.

THE PRAYER

Obedient Lord, who stepped onto the soil of the human experience with love in your heart and a willing spirit, make us like you. In all the moments this season when we are faced with the choice to do our own will or yours, let us choose yours. In Jesus’ Name we pray, Amen.

THE QUESTIONS

• Was there a time this past year when you faced just such a moment of obedience?
• Reading again about Noah’s example, and considering Mary, Joseph, and Jesus leading by that same example, is there a situation impacting your life at the present in which you are beginning to sense what the Father’s will is and the part you have to play? How will you respond?

Roots: Advent and the Family Story of Jesus by Dan Wilt

Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?”  Genesis 3:8–9

CONSIDER THIS

The roots of Jesus, and for all of us, are watered by Eden’s rain and fed by Eden’s sunshine. We began in the presence of God, without fear, without rebellion, without shame, and without hatred.

Then, the first expressions of humankind, adam (meaning “ground” or “humankind”), used their will to make a choice that cut us off at the source, from the source, of our meaning. In that moment, as the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was bitten into, bitten through—we became lost.

Lost. Lost is a term of meaning, of inner orientation, as well as being a term of location. When we are lost in our meaning, in orientation, we have lost our sense of purpose, our reference points, our context. In the garden, we lost our context—that we are all majestic creatures, rivaling anything in the celestial wonderland we call our universe, loved by the Creator who made us. We lost meaning. We welcomed in the chaos from which the world was formed, and it took residence in our disrupted, discontented hearts.

The Lord God called to the dust, to the ground, to the humans from the humus, “Where are you?” Our existential crisis, born from our sense of spiritual meaninglessness, had spun us around and left us wandering in the wasteland of our untamed desires.

When Jesus came into the world, he came as the answer to the Creator’s question in the garden.

“Where are you?”

“Here, Father” said Jesus, “Here we are, your humanity. Bring us back from exile; take us home.”

Jesus then became our Bridge and our Guide home, as one of us, and as the Lord of us, cutting paths through the thick weeds of pride and unforgiveness and self-hatred and self-sufficiency growing wild in our hearts. On the clear-cut ground our Leader has made before us, we learn to walk. Pulled to the left and the right again and again, “prone to wander,” Lord, we feel it, “prone to leave the God” we love (from the hymn, “Come, Thou Fount”), Jesus comes to us this Advent to keep us on the path to life (Ps. 16:11).

There is no other way not to be lost—no other way than to be found by Jesus—and guided safely home.

THE PRAYER

Jesus, the Way to Life, you are here with us right now as we sit in your presence and lift our hands to you for guidance. We don’t know the way home on our own; if you say “Where are you?” the best we can say in return is, “Here, Lord; find us, and take us home.” Jesus, take us home. In Jesus’ Name, Amen.

THE QUESTIONS

• We all wander in seasons of our lives. Can you think of a time in the past year when you were on the clear-cut path of life, but found yourself attracted back into the weeds once again? What reoriented you, reminded you, to stay on the path of life?

Roots: Advent and the Family Story of Jesus by Dan Wilt

Then God said, ‘Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.’ So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.  Genesis 1:26–27

CONSIDER THIS

Have you ever wished you could step back into a moment in time, in your history or the history of the world, to observe what actually took place? I have many of those moments on my list of “must visits,” but only a few stand out and eclipse all the rest. This moment in time, sketched for us in words by Genesis 1:26–27, is one of those for me.

Humankind comes to life from the mud, the ground, of the earth. Breathed into being by the breath of the Mighty God, we walked in the garden of Eden as the vice-regents of creation. And as vice-regents, we were made to rule, lead, guide, steward, shepherd, and curate that creation—as God’s emissaries on the earth.

When the Son of God comes into the world, he comes as one of us—as an image-bearer whose mandate is to steward the creation and shepherd it to its fruition—to become what we know as the new creation. Eden became both our imagined memory and our hopeful vision of the future; for Jesus, Eden was his actual memory (he was there at its creation) and his clear vision of the bright future of humankind.

And that memory, that vision, led him. It led him to serve. To give. To share. To teach. To clarify what being made of clay and divine breath actually means to a sojourner walking with God this side of heaven. To die as an offering for all, and to rise again as the firstborn of all creation, Jesus set the vision in full, vibrant motion.

At the coming of God into the world, to take us by the hand and show us how human be-ing and be-coming is to be done, Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection became the vehicle by which the Father took care of all manner of human business. As the “truly human” being, Jesus will show us the path to belovedness and to loving others through Jesus. He will show us the reason for our love of one another, our love of fruitful work, our love of children’s laughter, and the taste of homemade bread. Jesus will show us the way to be human.

The early church father Bishop Irenaeus of Lyons said, “The glory of God is a human being, fully alive.” Jesus will show us the way to live life to its very fullest, in the presence of the Father and in the presence of other image-bearers. Jesus will show us, in his Advent, the path from mud to glory. From him, we will learn to become who we were designed to be: God’s breath in our lungs and God’s light filling our hearts.

THE PRAYER

Emmanuel, today we are living in a story that did not begin with us, but sweeps us up in its narrative. We surrender again to being a beloved child who is here for a purpose, with a calling, with a destiny. Forgive us for seeing our lives as anything less than a mysterious miracle, and your life lived, given, and ushering in new creation life for us all as anything less than the story we now call our own. In Jesus’ Name, Amen.

THE QUESTION

• It is fair to say that most of us forget that we are miracles, and that we often forget that central to Jesus’ mission was to remind God’s children of that fact. Using the word “miracle” in your sentence, how would you describe who you are and what the Father loves about you?

Roots: Advent and the Family Story of Jesus by Dan Wilt

A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit. The Spirit of the Lord will rest on him—the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding, the Spirit of counsel and of might, the Spirit of the knowledge and fear of the Lord—and he will delight in the fear of the Lord.”  Isaiah 11:1–3a

CONSIDER THIS

We all come from someone, somewhere, and something—a people, a place, and a story. We come from someone in our family line—parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and so many others form extensions of the root system from which we each descend. We come from somewhere, in that people are always physically located—we live in times and places unique to us, and even as we move from place to place we carry bits of our previous location with us in our hearts and memories. We come from something, in that we come from a story that is uniquely, remarkably, our own—while that story is also uniquely tied to our family line throughout history, and is ultimately tied to God’s great love story with humanity.

It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that you are not only made up of the breath of God in you and your own genetic configuration, you are also truly from the root of your family line that has gone before you. You are special, a branch from that root, if you will, and have been delivered to all of us as a gift of God’s orchestration, the God who brings our paths to cross.

Entering into Advent, the season that inaugurates the Christian New Year, we open our spirits once again to the whole story of faith that Jesus came to reveal. Each Advent, we enter that story once again with deepened reverence, brimming worship, and expectant reflection on the person of Jesus. It is Jesus toward which the entirety of the biblical narrative points, from the Hebrew covenant to the new covenant, and in which we find the purposes of God acted out for our sake and for the sake of the world.

To understand Jesus, we would do well to discover the root of faith from which he springs. It is a spiritual root system, in fact, that both Isaiah 11:1–3 and Matthew 1:1–17 are eager to convey. The Son of God, it seems, the Lord’s Messiah and our Ascended Master, did not come to us in a vacuum. He didn’t descend from a strange, ethereal heaven in a mysterious cloud of divinity shimmering with an otherworldly glow. He came as a child, born naturally of a mother from a family line herself, and nurtured by a father who knew the names of his own kin many generations into the past. In Isaiah 11:1–3, that great prophetic passage that hails Christ’s birth, we see that Jesus, the Branch, comes from the family line of the great King David, the son of Jesse, and from a long line of the faithful to which we point today saying, “Lord, as they said yes to you, so may we.”

And it is here that we begin our Advent journey. The idea that has been traditionally known as a “Jesse Tree” will be our map. A Jesse Tree is an approach to the preparation season of Advent, leading us toward Christmas, that encourages us to revisit stories from the Hebrew Bible to help us understand the family line of Jesus and the spiritual mandate of the child born to save the world. We will draw from both Jesus’ genealogical ancestry and his faith heritage, as we walk together on a journey through the stories of saints and sinners woven into the family line of the Son of God.

From a root, comes a branch. In that Branch—Jesus—you and I learn to abide in and draw from his unending resources (John 15:1–5), and in so doing, we are born again to eternal life. Let’s begin.

THE PRAYER

Root of Jesse, the story you’ve woven together with our lives involves so many faithful men and women, people who lived and died, succeeded, stumbled, fell, got back up, and some who rose in faith to the call of their day. Open our hearts to learn from you as we step onto the path of your story, once again, this Advent season, a story into which you’ve woven us for your glory. We welcome you coming to us in a fresh and revelatory way this Advent. In Jesus’ Name, Amen.

THE QUESTIONS

• Consider your own family line as far back as you have records, and those who sought to walk faithfully as well as those who stumbled and fell. Where can you see the gifts of God leading you to today, potentially those that came to you through your family?

• Consider your natural gifts, your appearance, your ways of thinking, and your location. Can you name a few gifts that came to you through your own family line?

Roots: Advent and the Family Story of Jesus by Dan Wilt