Advent Devotions

Today’s author is Prince of Peace’s Intentional Interim, Pastor Steve Sylvester.

With his second sign, it appears Jesus decided to up the ante.  Sign number one, you will remember, was changing 120 to 180 gallons of water into wine.  To be clear, this was not a standalone trick.  The wine, after all, served a purpose.  It saved a family from embarrassment, and it kept a party lubricated for several days.  But it’s not like anyone’s life was on the line.  Not so with sign number two.  Someone’s life, the son of a royal official, was quite literally hanging in the balance.  So Jesus healed him.

After Jesus turned the water into wine, we are told that his disciples believed in him.  After Jesus told the royal official that his son would live, the man believed.  John chooses to call these signs because it was the belief Jesus’ actions engendered that were important to him.  Jesus’ actions make a claim about who he is, and those who experience or witness them believe because of them.

So, what about those of us who never get to experience even the water into wine sign, let alone get to see someone stand up from their death bed?  Some of us believe because it is bred in the bone.  It’s something we have grown up with, something that was passed down to us like believers in the Hebrew Scriptures who were encouraged to teach the faith to their children.  Some believe because of an out of the blue experience of the divine, like when Paul was thrown off his horse and blinded and heard the voice of Jesus asking why Paul was persecuting him.  Regardless of how we come to believe, however, there is then the question of what we do with our belief.

Many of us for most of the time do as the Bible says we should not.  We hide it under a bushel basket or bury it in the ground for safekeeping.  It is well to be reminded that there are two things Jesus asks us to do with our belief. 

The first thing Jesus tells us to do with our belief is to live in it.  To believe means to cling to God as the ground of our being.  It means not to allow ourselves to be defined by a world that tells us we are not enough or that we need to seek happiness or safety from a god that will prey upon us instead of loving us.  The second thing Jesus tells us to do with our belief is to share it.  As Paul wrote, we are always to be prepared to give an accounting for the hope that is within us. 

The first of those two is perhaps about how our belief informs our “private” life, while the second is how belief directs our “public” life.  Another way of putting that is that the one is about who we are in and of ourselves, while the second is about how we participate in the world.

I encourage you to think this week about what it means to have a private belief and a public belief.  How does your belief in God form you?  And how does your belief in God ask you to participate in the world?  Those are good questions to ponder.