Second Sunday in Advent

December 7, 2008

Dear Friends,

I told her story today, as the guest speaker in the Sunday morning activities of a friend’s church. I showed her smiling face, the cover of this year’s NM calendar. Our stories were part of the advent theme there, “New Beginnings”. Because of the work here, people get a new beginning. This child of abuse lives as a redeemed child of God.

The painful parts of the stories of Neighborhood loved ones make people groan. Sin done to us makes others groan; it ought to. Two little girls have lived with Wayne and me for more than a year now. They are becoming our family. Their siblings and nieces are living with six other families in our NM fellowship; all together there are twelve children.

Thinking about the second week of Advent, as I have all week, I groan. Sin ought to make me groan … my own, the activities of perpetrators, “hurt people who hurt people”. John the Baptist, the first to practice Advent, cried out. “Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” and “bear fruits that befit repentance”. And then, Jesus … entered, came, because He so loved the world, offering up His life as a sacrifice for the sins of men. He came to die, which is at the very heart of Christmas!

We, the body of Christ, have the opportunity to so love the world. We have the ability to do so because His love courses through our spiritual veins, for love covers a multitude of sin. And then one day, the ultimate triumph of the next Advent, He will have His final “enough”! And the call to repent will be over, and The Kingdom will come! But, for now, we must pray His prayer that the kingdom will come here on earth, through us, where people groan.

I love you,


Kit

God sets out upon the humiliating path of reconciliation
and thereby pronounces the world free. 

God wills to be guilty of our sin, 
and takes over the punishment and suffering sin has brought upon us. 

God answers for godlessness, love for hatred, the saint for the sinner. 
Now there is no godlessness, no hatred, no sin 
which God has not carried, suffered, and atoned. 

Now there is no reality, no world 
that is not reconciled and in peace with God. 
God did this in the beloved son Jesus Christ.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Meditations on the Cross