Sunday, December 1, 2024
Remember not the sins of my youth and my transgressions;
Psalm 25:6
remember me according to your love
and for the sake of your goodness, O Lord.
Welcome to Advent!
Last year at this time I was fully retired with only an occasional Sunday supply responsibility. In order to keep myself engaged with scripture, I undertook the task of writing a reflection on one of the Sunday Lectionary readings, as well as one from the daily lectionary. It was an enriching, albeit exhausting devotional practice.
Everywhere I’ve served I’ve encouraged congregations to take part in a daily devotional during Advent and/or Lent. Parishioners have found it a trying, yet fulfilling exercise. The thought of seeing one’s work in print was also and added incentive for some.
Sadly, I wasn’t able to pull that off at St. John’s this year for a variety of reasons. But I felt challenged to undertake the effort once again on my own, if for nothing else, the idea of continuing my own discipline of daily meditation on the Word of God.
Because of this lengthy introduction, the reflection for this First Sunday is slightly more expansive, but I will try as best as possible to limit myself to five hundred words or less, so as not to bore you. Besides, this year, unlike last, I will have a sermon to prepare for each Sunday, as well as my other weekly or monthly writing assignments.
A couple of other housekeeping notes before launching into the body of my reflection:
- There will be a link to each of the readings at the very beginning of the essay. I would encourage you to read them so you can better understand the context. and perhaps use them to springboard thoughts of your own.
- Again, the Sunday readings will be from the Revised Common LEctionary, and the daily readings from the Daily Office as found in the Book of Common Prayer, beginning on page 934.
- I will on occasion refer to the commemoration for a particular day. My resource for those is Lesser Feasts and Fasts as well as A Great Cloud of Witnesses, the Episcopal Church’s books of commemoration.
- A couple of other housekeeping notes before launching into the body of my reflecti
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Since I have chosen to include the Psalm selection only on Sunday, I thought I would focus on our assigned Psalm for this First Sunday of Advent, Psalm 25.
My focus verse (verse six above) is always a source of comfort for me when I recall the wild and crazy days of my youth an young adult years.
Like me, you have probably asked yourself more than once, “how did I survive the many mistakes or lapses in judgement of my younger days to get to where I am now?”
I don’t want to give the impression that i was incorrigible. But the discipline that I have now was nonexistent then, and it was only God’s grace that has forgiven the missteps that I look back on these days with regret.
Though I’ve been connected to a life of faith ever since I can remember, there were times when it was tenuous, and the consequences could have been much worse.
God’s love never wavered, even when my love for God was not what it should or could have been.
As the psalm so appropriately ends, “all the paths of the Lord are love and faithfulness.”
And for that we say, Thanks be to God!
Let us pray.
Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
(Book of Common Prayer, p. 211)
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