First Sunday of Advent

More impulsively than prayerfully, I start a new blog on this, the first Sunday of Advent, 2013.  On Dec 2, to be specific.  I've been trying to connect to God in the many ways He offers connection, with varied degrees of confidence.  What I totally lack confidence in is dealing with my food issues through altering the nature of my obsession with food.  I'll continue all that in my frufoo blog.  But here, I'm stumbling through the path along which God, through the Christian fellowship, has and does guide us.

As is my habit the first Sunday of the month, I benefit from hearing two sermons, one Sunday School lesson, and one OA meeting.  All but OA were advent themed.  I guess OA, reading the beginning of the Bill's Story chapter in the Big Book was descent themed.

The text from Sunday School was from Jeremiah, though which I was reminded of Judah's long exile and eventual return to the Holy Land.  I don't have specific recall, and having started this on impulse don't have the class material at hand.  The jist of things was that Judah's people were inclined to blame their trials on institutions, while Jeremiah foretells a tectonic (Messianic) shift in the nature of our relation to God.  I was struck with something 'clever' to say just when class ended and it went unsaid and unremembered.  It probably had to do with our hope changing shape as we witness events that disappoint the form our hopes took, but not their substance.  Connie's sermon touched on that very thing, when she spoke of the urgency of end-time hopes in the First century, contrasted to the patience which 2,000 years has brought.  Patience or dismissiveness?  A little of both.

Lance's sermon used a video clip from Talladega Nights and a reproof of the Cartesian primacy of imaginative faculties, to say that God is bigger than what our imagination invites him to be, as some sacred corner of our life.  We do well to let God have His role in our life.  But in reality, far beyond the limits our imagination provides, is that we have a role in His plan, and settling into that role is where Advent can lead us, if we see past Ninja Jesus.  This has close parallel to what I've been learning of the Third Step.  Alliance with the beneficent (another emphasis of Lance's, taken from the Narnia tales) governing stream of affairs around us is more conducive to our sanity and sobriety than forcing our will and aspirations and imaginations upon what's at best an unyielding world, and more often an opposing world.  If I had the Big Book handy, I could cite chapter and verse, as I've learned many of my fellows in Recovery are equipped to do.

Connie went quickly past the Luke text which, in the spirit of stumbling, always snares me with the Preterist suggestion that all things will pass within the present generation.  She dwelt on the Psalmist's prayer of yearning to learn better the nature of God and the ways we might best respond to His actions and expectation.  I'm not putting that well.  Suffice that she recommends more deliberate use of the mundane tools of Christian discipleship -- Bible study and prayer, along with a specific device of reviewing the day's events attentive to when one perceived the nearness and distance of God, especially in the extreme.

I have two Advent calendars which give verses to reflect upon.  Can't find the one from CGB.  BME is disributing one that I found on my own last week and have as a PDF.  It's verse for today is from I Thess 3:9-10.  It was actually reading that which sparked the impulse to start this.  Paul was talking the 12th step joy of seeing others stay true to their beginning, and to begin to show the fruits of that persistence.  It works if you work it, so work it, you're worth it.  Here's to working it, in a season of yearning, yes, for the transcendent coming of God, but also confident of the regularity of His ways, in which sustainable commitments yield fruit as much or more as transformative heroics.