Advent Devotions

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

Ancient Athens sounds so very much like the modern U.S.  First, there are all the idols.  In Athens, there were more idols than you could shake a stick at, including a cover-all anonymous idol in case the Athenians might have missed honoring one.  From entertainers and politicians and billionaire tech lords, to all the inanimate objects we also worship (has anyone checked to see whether Mark Zuckerberg really has a pulse?), we are awash with idols.

And when we are able to pull away from the people and things we worship, we immerse ourselves in the pursuit of novelty.  The good people of Athens were forever seeking to titillate with or be astounded by tales of whatever was new and different.  As the Athenians gathered stories and philosophies, we reach out for the newest phone, a new and different experience, the crankiest idea, the most outlandish take on current events.

Paul could rightly make the same assertion of us that he made of those long ago Greeks, that the desire to worship and the pursuit of novelty is our fumbling about for God.

Augustine of (the North African city of) Hippo was a theologian in the 4^th and 5^th centuries.  Augustine was a man of great appetites.  His early years were somewhat profligate, and in seeking to curb his voracious restlessness he became an adherent of Manichaeism, an elaborate dualistic cosmology taken up with the struggle between a good spiritual world of light, and an evil material world of darkness.  After souring on Manichaeism, Augustine fumbled about for a while till in his early 30’s he became a follower of Jesus.  Later in his life, reflecting on his decades of manic disquietude, Augustine penned the famous words that “Our hearts are restless till they rest in [God].”

In the late 1990s, standing on E. North Street in St Paul, out in front of First Lutheran Church, where I was serving at the time, I was stopped by a passerby who told me about his struggles to believe, and God’s seeming unwillingness to grant him the gift of faith.  He was anxious and distraught as he told me about the people and things he used to try to fill the emptiness.  After listening to him, I remember very clearly saying that it seemed the Spirit was very active with him, otherwise he would be dumbly content, like Eliot’s Prufrock, “etherized upon a table” instead of restlessly fumbling about.  I don’t know that I actually mentioned Prufrock.  I hope not.

Perhaps as Augustine also wrote and Paul observed, we focus so on looking for a god “out there somewhere” that we have a hard time seeing the God “in [whom] we live and move and have our being.”  Like the fish that doesn’t know what water is because it is immersed in it.  My prayer for us this day is that we be able to step away from the idols, appetites, distractions and novelties of life and simply float in God’s love.