the word made flesh, day 5

Come to Stillness: Take a few minutes to allow your mind and heart to be still before God.

Opening Prayer:
Almighty God, who came to us long ago in the birth of Jesus Christ, be born in us anew today by the power of your Holy Spirit.  We offer our lives as home to you and ask for grace and strength to live as your faithful, joyful children always.  Through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen. (A Guide to Prayer for Ministers and Other Servants)

Psalm for the Week: Psalm 85

Scripture for the Day: Colossians 2:9-15

Reading for Reflection:

“Guide our feet into the paths of peace, that having done Your will this day, we may, when night comes, rejoice and give You thanks…”  We begin the work that is before us this day, asking for the grace to do it well and to the glory of God.  We dress children and get them to school, we find our places and undertake the tasks for which we have been dreamed into being.  We do the work that is before us, the gift of study or play, the tasks and assignments, the places to go and the people to see.  We begin to sense that our work can be changed from job and task into service and act of kindness, from struggle for gain into the offering of gift, from slow death into life-giving co-creation.  The work itself can become something more as we come to see ourselves as co-laborers rather than pawns, as hands and feet of God rather than merely the shoulders and backs of the marketplace.  We keep our eyes open for the One Who Comes among us in our daily rounds.  (Living Prayer by Robert Benson)


The gospel says that we, who are God’s beloved, created a cosmic crisis.  It says we, too, were stolen from our True Love and that (as with Menelaus and Helen of Troy) he launched the greatest campaign in the history of the world to get us back.  God created us for intimacy with him.  When we turned our back on him he promised to come for us.  He sent personal messengers; he used beauty and affliction to recapture our hearts.  After all else failed, he conceived the most daring of plans.  Under the cover of night he stole into the enemy’s camp incognito, the Ancient of Days disguised as a newborn.  The Incarnation, as Phil Yancey reminds us, was a daring raid into enemy territory.  The whole world lay under the power of the evil one and we were held in dungeons of darkness.  God risked it all to rescue us.  Why?  What is it that he sees in us that causes him to act the jealous lover, to lay siege both on the kingdom of darkness and on our own idolatries as if on Troy—not to annihilate, but to win us once again for himself? (The Sacred Romance by Brent Curtis and John Eldredge)

 

 

Reflection and Listening: silent and written

Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself

Song for the Week: Come Thou Long Expected Jesus

Come, thou long expected Jesus,
born to set our people free;
From our fears and sins release us;
let us find our rest in thee.
Israel’s strength and consolation,
hope of all the earth thou art;
Dear desire of every nation,
joy of every longing heart.
 
Born thy people to deliver,
born a child and yet a King,
Born to reign in us forever,
now thy gracious kingdom bring.
By thine own eternal spirit
rule in all our hearts alone,
By thine all sufficient merit,
raise us to thy glorious throne.

Closing Prayer:
Come, Lord Jesus!
     You are my righteousness.  You are my goodness, the cause and the reason for goodness.  You are my life and the light of life.  You are my love and all my loving.  You are the most noble language I can ever utter, my words and all their meaning, my wisdom, my truth, and the better part of myself.  Amen. (Preparing for Jesus by Walter Wangerin Jr.)