Daily Office

Year Two, Advent 1, Monday

Today's Readings:

• Amos 2:6-16
• 2 Peter 1:1-11
• Matt 21:1-11

Amos continues the Lord's warnings: everything those in authority rely on will be taken away, they will be stripped of their power for their abuse and oppression of prophets. Prophecy is important, it allows anyone (Amos was a farmer, after all)
Peter opens his second letter with encouraging words.

His divine power has given us everything needed for life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. Thus he has given us, through these things, his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may escape from the corruption that is in the world because of lust, and may become participants of the divine nature. For this very reason, you must make every effort to support your faith with goodness, and goodness with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with endurance, and endurance with godliness, and godliness with mutual affection, and mutual affection with love.

It is a progression of the self to the corporate body Peter writes about. I think an appropriate cliche is "A chain is only as strong as it's weakest link." It also hints towards a separation of lust and divind nature. One of the early schisms in the Church involved various forms of Gnosticism, which claimed the material world as either an illusion or the creation of a malevolent god (described in the Old Testament). Gnostics were called heretics, but the separation between body and soul have been part of Christianity since the beginning. The world is described in Genesis 1 as being good, but Christians have mostly claimed that things of this world are lesser than the spirit world, and eventually evil. Go figure. Are Christians living in a state of heresy?
Matthew's Gospel relates the events just before Jesus' triumphant entry into Jerusalem, just a week before He is crucified. The mixing of Advent and Holy Week has always confused me. Lent is a season of preparation for the Resurrection, Advent is the season of preparation for the Nativity. Both seasons see the world growing darker (Lent is metaphorical, Advent is literal in the northern hemisphere), and the darkness is broken by light in both seasons. We are forced to remember that Jesus' birth, as wonderful as it is, is nothing compared to Easter.

posted by Josh English @ 1:04 PM