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Advent Devotional for Sunday, December 21
Luke 1:26-38
As December approaches every year, my oldest son waits with indescribable anticipation for the 24-hour non-stop showing of “A Christmas Story.” We, his family, shake our heads because it is the same story every year ... Ralphie wants a Red Rider BB gun and his mother is worried he will shoot his eye out, his dad wins a leg lamp, the next door neighbors’ dogs eat the Christmas Day dinner. The plot doesn’t change from year to year.
And the same holds true for this passage. Here we are listening to the same story again. We know how it is going to come out. The plot doesn’t vary. Yet, no matter how predictable, we lean forward with anticipation because somehow, some way, the details of God’s story are about us. So what if the angel’s message to Mary, “Greetings, you who are highly favored,” is God’s message to us?
P.T. Forsyth wrote, “Faith is not something we possess, but something that possesses us.” It is easy for us to reduce Mary to a plastic figure gazing at a manger and taken out of a box of ornaments for a few days a year. It is this passage in Luke that lets Mary stand out as flesh and blood, life-size, and invites us, like Mary, to step out in faith as we discover for ourselves that we are favored and blessed by God. Only then do we begin to haltingly, trust in the One who created and loved us before we were even aware. Faith is not an act; faith is a process. It is committing all we know of ourselves to all we know of God in Jesus Christ. And as we grow more in who we are in Christ, there is more to invest in a God who comes to us and says, “Fear not.” May we have faith that God is with us as intimately and personally as he was with Mary long ago, and may we trust that God continues to come to life in our world today.
Loving God, grant us such courage and trust like Mary. May your favor and blessings remind us always just who we are. And as we know that as Christ first came to earth bringing peace and joy long ago, let us always wait with excited anticipation knowing that he will come again. We ask this in Jesus’ name, Amen.
Dawn Baird
Senior MDiv Student
For the glory of God and to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ, Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary is a seminary in the Presbyterian-Reformed tradition whose mission is to educate and equip individuals for the ordained Christian ministry and other forms of Christian service and leadership; to employ its resources in the service of the church; to promote and engage in critical theological thought and research; and to be a winsome and exemplary community of God's people.
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