Adv2C18.   Baruch 5:1-9.  The people of Israel were led into slavery by Babylonians, as a punishment for their gross unfaithfulness to God.  God, ever faithful despite the lack of loyalty of his people, gathers his own back to him.  “See your children gathered from the east and the west as the word of the Holy One, rejoicing that they are remembered by God.  Led away on foot by their enemies they left you: but God will bring then back to you.”  He has made their way back easy: lowering “every lofty mountain,” bringing the gorges up “to level ground,” cooling their way with “every kind of fragrant tree,” “for God is leading Israel in joy by the light of his glory.”

Luke 3:1-6.  Luke locates the work of John the Baptist in real time by listing the real people of those times because this was a genuine historical event:  his proclamation of the Messiah.  “The word of God came to John” because he was a prophet, even more than a prophet (Luke 7:26).  Then John roughly quotes Isaiah 40:3-4 and a bit more paraphrasing the ideas expressed in the rest of Isaiah 40.  Luke builds on the Baruch and Isaiah to say that God is now freeing us from captivity to sin to once again be a blessed people of God.  John proclaims a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sin which is our Advent way to make straight the way of the Lord to our hearts.

Psalm 126.  “The Lord has done great things for us; we are filled with joy.”  This is what the Hebrews proclaimed when they, captives of Zion, were brought back by the Lord to Zion.  We likewise proclaim the greatness of Lord toward us when we experience being brought back from sinfulness into the holy company of God.

Philippians 1:4-6, 8-11.  “I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work in you will continue to complete it until the day of Christ Jesus.” (code words to mean when Jesus comes the second time.)  “And this is my prayer: that your love may increase evermore,” “so that you may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, (the Second Coming) filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God.”  Let us welcome the Messiah as sinners who have become saints through the work of the Spirit.

Adv1C21.     Jeremiah 33:14-16.   “The days are coming, says the Lord,” “in that time, I will raise up for David a just shoot; he shall do what is right and just in the land.”  Advent is time to look forward to the coming of the Messiah as the loving Savior of our lives.

Psalm 25:  “Guide me in your truth and teach me, for you are God my savior, and for you I wait all the day.”

Luke 21:25-28, 34-36.  “Jesus said to his disciples: ‘There will be signs.’” “People will die.” “And then they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory.”  Jesus is saying that we should not live each day as though life is just a daily routine with little or no thought that each day is step on the way to eternity.  Live life now, as a part of eternity.  Each moment walk, breath, think and take each heartbeat in union with the Lord now.  Live with the Lord now, with the Lord as the heart of our daily life!  Walk daily with Jesus to his judgment seat and we will have nothing to fear when we stand before him in judgment.

1 Thessalonians 3:12-4:2.   Paul is writing to the Thessalonians for them to let the Lord make them “increase and abound in love for one another and for all,” so that they may “be blameless in holiness before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his holy ones.”  Advent is the time to prepare ourselves to receive the Lord by conducting ourselves to please God.  It is human nature to want to please one another so that they in turn are nice to us.  Advent is the time to think first and foremost of pleasing God.

Adv1C18.    Jeremiah 33: 14-16.   The Lord God promises “to the house of Israel and Judah” that he “will raise up for David a just shoot.”  In the Advent season we understand this to be applied to Jesus, who “shall do what is right and just in the land” by being the Messiah that will redeem the people.

Luke 21:25-28, 34-36.  Here we go back to November’s theme of the Second Coming of Jesus with the terrifying signs of the end of the universe.  “And then they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory.”  Then redemption is hand for those who have remained faithful to the Lord but destruction for those who were forgetful of Jesus and lost in worldliness.

Psalm 25:4-5, 8-9, 10, 14.  As we live out our daily lives we must constantly lift our souls in prayer to the Lord so not to be lost in the lowliness of this world.  A wonderful daily prayer is the first lines that have been given to us in today’s psalm: “Your ways, O Lord, make known to me: teach me your paths, guide me in your truth and teach me, for you are God my savior.”  It is so easy to get lost in ourselves, thinking that we have it all figured out and can do it on our own.  The psalm says that the Lord will only teach “the humble his way” but ignore the proud who do not feel they need God.  “The friendship of the Lord is with those who fear” or respect God for who he is in relation to us, the almighty, loving Father helping his children who need to be cared for daily.

1 Thessalonians 3:12-4:2.  “Brothers and sisters: May the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all, just as we have for you, so as to strengthen your hearts, to be blameless in holiness before our God and Father at the coming for our Lord Jesus with all his holy ones. Amen.”  As the God who created us to be loved by him, we should love one another, as he loves us all.  We should love the love that God has for us and love his will which is the supreme expression of his love for us.  In loving God’s will for us and acting in obedience to his will, we are made “blameless in holiness before our God and Father.”  Loving God’s will for us means that we conduct ourselves in way that is pleasing to God.

34BKing21.     Daniel 7:13-14.  This Old Testament passage makes a wonderful presentation of  the New Testament Jesus, who here is not seen as a person in the flesh and who has subjected himself to the cruelties of evil human beings, but now as a glorious heavenly being who has everlasting dominion over all.

Psalm 93.   “The Lord is king, in splendor robed; robed is the Lord and girt about with strength.”

John 18:33b-37.   Jesus answers Pilate, “My kingdom does not belong to this world.” “’My kingdom is not here.’ So Pilate said to him, ‘Then you are a king?’  Jesus answered, ‘You say I am a king.  For this I was born and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth.  Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.’” For Jesus the truth is eternal, timeless reality, in which our universe amounts to no more than a tiny pin head.  For us as humans, truth or reality is quite often what is around us in space and time.  It is whatever touches us or what we individually are in contact with.  For Jesus, truth is infinite; for us, reality is infinitesimal, minute or microscopic, that is, our little world.  To recognize Jesus as our king is to accept his invitation to us to live in the whole of reality, the truth. What a spectacular realm it is over which Jesus is king!

Revelation 1:5-8.   “To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood, who has made us into a kingdom, priests for his God and Father, to him be glory and power forever and ever. Amen.”   Jesus is at one and the same time king in his majesty over us and at the same time suffering savior in his unimaginable self-sacrificing love on the cross for us.  He is glorious by the power of his love.  We recognize his kingly glory by submitting ourselves daily to his loving will.

34BKing18.     Daniel 7:13-17.   Jesus uses this term ‘Son of man’ from the book of Daniel to refer to himself.  I take it to be a practical way for Jesus to refer to himself as truly human, yet beyond the capacity of human perception, infinitely more than human.  In this passage in Daniel, God, the Ancient One, makes the Son of man king receiving “dominion, glory, and kingship,” with “all peoples, nations, and languages” serving him.  Unlike an ordinary human king, “his dominion is an everlasting dominion.”

John 18:33b-37.   The religious leaders of the Jews felt greatly threatened by the popularity of Jesus and that Jesus had confronted them on their using religion as tool to serve themselves and not the faith of the people.  They accused him before Pilate but it appears that Pilate could not get a handle on what the charges were that deserved such a furious upset against Jesus.  Strangely enough he was trying to get Jesus to tell him what he had done.  Jesus certainly did not appear to be the kind of person who was attempting to be king or military leader of anyone.  Jesus answered Pilate, “My kingdom does not belong to this world.”  “You say that I am a king.  For this I was born and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth.  Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”  To Pilate that response made absolutely no sense.  It is as if, we might say today, they were from two different planets or worlds.  Truth for Pilate was holding down his job with the emperor.  Truth for Jesus is the reality that is eternal, the Alpha and Omega, the same that always was, is now and always will be.  Truth is the very person of God.  Everything else lives for a short while and is dead the next.  As Jesus said in John 14:6a, “I am the truth, the life and the way.”  Everything else is fraudulent, falsely claiming to be the truth.

Revelation 1:5-8.   “Jesus Christ is the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead and ruler of the kings of the earth.  To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood, who has made us into a kingdom, priests for his God and Father.”  He is the shepherd king, leading us by the sacrifice of himself on the cross from our being sinners to becoming saints into his kingdom, to be “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God’s own possession.” (taken from Preface I of the Sundays in Ordinary Time)  In Romans 6:5, Paul writes, “If, then we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him.”  Daily we are priests, not as ministerial priests saying the words of consecration but as lay persons who offer up our lives with Jesus on his cross through prayer so that we may live with him in heaven forever.

33B21.      Daniel 12:1-3.   This seems to have been written at a time when the pagan emperor Antiochus IV was cruelly attempting to force the Jews to give up Judaism and worship in his religion.  Daniel looks into the future to predict a cataclysmic event when those who remained faithful to Judaism would be rewarded eternally and those who apostatized would end in everlasting horror.

Mark 13:24-32.   Being made aware of the future enables us to live wisely in the present.  Jesus tells his Apostles that the earthly powers of that day would one day be destroyed and the victorious eternal power of God vested in him would be revealed.  “And then they will see ‘the son of man coming in the clouds’ with great power and glory, and then he will send out the angels, and gather his elect from the four winds, from the end of the earth to the end of the sky.”  Jesus will come on the last day of this material universe to claim those who lived their lives in obedience to him and leave the rest behind.  To prepare for his coming at the end of the world is to live now each and every day in the Lord.

Hebrews 10:11-14, 18.  The Old Testament priests had to offer sacrifices frequently because their daily sacrifices were not sufficient to take away sins and so needed to be repeated.  Jesus’ sacrifice of himself as an act of love for us was done only once and was sufficient for all eternity.  So great and so wondrous is the love that Jesus had and still has for us.

33B18.    Daniel 12:1-3.  The book of Daniel predicts that “there shall be a time unsurpassed in distress.”  The wise and “those who lead many to justice” will live shining “like stars forever” but “others shall be an everlasting horror and disgrace.”

Mark 13:24-32.  I think that to begin to make sense of this reading one must go to and read the whole of Mark 13.  Jesus refers to a whole number of things that will happen in the future, combining them in a sort of stew as one that might be cooking over a hot fire.  In Mark 13:2 Jesus, in roughly 33 AD referring to the temple, says, “There will not be one stone left upon another that will not be thrown down.”  In fact the Jews, rebelling against the Romans, go to war against them in 66-70 AD and lose.  The Romans destroy the temple in 71 AD.  In time Jesus says there will be many disastrous events that will occur, but for followers of Christ, “these are the beginnings of the labor pains.”  Christians will be imprisoned but he says do not worry about how to respond.  Jesus says in Mark 13:11c, “For it will not be you who are speaking but the Holy Spirit” who speaks through you.  He continues in Mark 13:13: “You will be hated by all because of my name.  But the one who perseveres to the end will be saved.”

Then Jesus says in Mark 13:14a, “When you see the desolating abomination standing where he should not” (Jesus does not say what or who this is, perhaps Satan himself), you must flee.  In Mark 13:22-23, he continues: “False messiahs and false prophets will arise and perform signs and wonders in order to mislead, if that were possible, the elect. Be watchful!  I have told it all to you beforehand.”  In the next verse which begins our Sunday reading, Jesus says in effect the whole universe will disintegrate, “and then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in the clouds’ with great power and glory, and then he will send out his angels and gather [his] elect from the four winds, from the end of the earth to the end of the sky.” In absolute contrast to his first coming as a helpless infant, Jesus, now in his second coming as the mighty King calling his own, his elect, who have been loyal to him to the end, up into heaven.  Then Jesus seems to be at odds or variance with himself saying at first that he does know when these things will happen when he says, “this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place” and then saying he does not know when these things will take place, saying, “But of that day or hour, no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but the only the Father.” My own understanding is that when Jesus says that these things will come to pass before this generation passes away is that each generation must think that the end may come before they pass away so that they may always be watchful and alert.  The term ‘elect’ is that Jesus chooses those who choose him.

Hebrews 10:11-14.  Jesus “offered one sacrifice for sins, and took his seat forever at the right hand of God; now he waits until his enemies are made his footstool.  Jesus, being divine as well as human, only needed to offer one sacrifice.  The Judaic priests who were simply human had to make many sacrifices.  When we join ourselves to Jesus’ sacrifice, we are made perfect.  He is God the Son who comes in power and glory.

32B21.    1 Kings 17:10-16.  During the time of a great drought, Elijah, the great prophet, went into pagan territory and called on a poverty stricken widow, first to give him “a small cupful of water,” and then “a bit of bread.” She told Elijah that she had only enough for her and her son’s last meal and then they would die.  Elijah assured her that “the jar of flour shall not go empty, nor the jug of oil run dry,” until the drought ended.  In her simplicity she put herself in hands of Lord and the Lord provided.

Mark 12:38-44.  Jesus condemns the scribes for whom religion was all about what they could get for themselves but he commends the poor widow who gave all she could to the Lord in whom she put her trust.  She was virtually giving herself to the Lord.  She and the widow in the first reading lived their lives in hands of the Lord.

Hebrews 9:24-26.  Jesus is the eternal high priest who offered up himself to give us the opportunity to gain heaven and still appears before God the Father on our behalf.  He “will appear a second time” “to bring salvation to those who eagerly await him.”  Jesus still lives for us who live for him.

32B18.   1 Kings 17:10-16.   What a heart-wrenching account!  “Just now I was collecting a couple of sticks, to go in and prepare something for myself and my son; when we have eaten it, we shall die.”  Elijah was able to bring the life–sustaining power of God to her aid, saying, “For the Lord, the God of Israel, says, ‘The jar of flour shall not go empty, nor the jug of oil run dry, until the day when the Lord sends rain upon the earth.’” The Lord provided in her dire need.  In Luke 1:53, Mary says, “The hungry he has filled with good things; the rich he has sent away empty.”

Mark 12:38-44.  Jesus calling his disciples to himself, saying, “This poor widow put in more than all the other contributors to the treasury.  For they have all contributed from their surplus wealth, but she, from her poverty, has contributed all she had, her whole livelihood.” God judges us individually on how much we do with how much we have.  Judgment is based not on a competition, one against the other but rather on our own individual effort.  When we are giving to God, we only give what God has given us.  He knows well what we are capable of. God is perfectly just, true to himself as a Father loving each of us, his children fairly.  He also condemns the scribes because they are only working for their self-interest and esteem.  “They will receive a very severe condemnation.”  This Sundays’ Psalm 146 says, “The fatherless and the widow he sustains, but the way of the wicked he thwarts.”

Hebrews 9:24-28.  Christ, who died for our benefit on the cross, ascends to heaven to “appear before God on our behalf.”  In John 14:6 Jesus said, “I am the way and the truth and the life.  No one comes to the Father except through me.”  Infinitely superior to the priests of the Old Testament who had to offer sacrifices continuously, Christ offers himself only once on the cross to take away the sins of many.  He will come “a second time, not to take away sins but to bring salvation to those who eagerly await him.”  Christ suffered and died so that we may be his holy people, sinners made by the Lord into saints, prepared to enter heaven to adore him forever.

31B21.       Deuteronomy 6:2-6.    “Fear the Lord, your God, and keep” “all his statues and commandments.”  This means that we must treat God as God, the infinitely Almighty, and do everything he tells us to do without exception.   The Hebrews of that time did not believe in an afterlife.  Their reward was to be in this life by having an exceptionally long life.  Also the reward for their fidelity to God was a prosperous life in this world.  To be God’s People meant to have him as the one and only Lord of their lives to whom they gave themselves totally and to no other in any way.  He was everything for them and nothing else was anything.  This is true for us too as Christians.

Mark 12:28b-34.   “Hear, O Israel! The Lord God is Lord alone!” Give God the place he deserves in our lives!  May our God be the Almighty Gracious One of every moment we live in the here and hereafter!  Life is all God; death is everything else!  All the external rituals, both Hebrew and Christian, must be permeated with the presence of God and never just actions that are just external and are not filled with the giving over of ourselves to God.  To love God is to belong to God from the very depths of our beings.  Our bodies, the world around us and the devil lay claim to us every of moment of our lives.  We can never rest from the struggle that is required to belong to God and God alone.

Hebrews 7:23-28.  Jesus “is always able to save those who approach God through him, since he lives forever to make intercession for them.”  Jesus offered sacrifice for sins “once for all when he offered himself” on the cross.  Jesus is at once and at the same time, the priest who offers the sacrifice, the sacrifice itself which is he himself and the altar upon which the sacrifice is offered.  Through Jesus’ humanity, God has redeemed us in his suffering and death on the cross.   Jesus continues his heavenly priestly work daily in each and every one of us.