Second Week of Advent - “Let your daily actions witness: Christ will come again”

This Advent we will be reflecting on Biblical texts that lie behind Thomas Troeger’s Advent Hymn – “View the present through the promise”. The second verse of the hymn reads:

Probe the present with the promise, Christ will come again.
Let your daily actions witness, Christ will come again.
Let your loving and your giving and your justice and forgiving
be a sign to all the living: Christ will come again.

Colossians 3:9,10

9 Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have stripped off the old self with its practices 10 and have clothed yourselves with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator.

The second stanza of Troeger’s hymn reminds us that the “new” promised in Revelation, when Christ will come again, is not just a future event, it is to shape the way we live our everyday lives. To be follower of Jesus Christ, to live in the hope that he is coming again, is to live by the patterns of that new kingdom, the new that is coming. It is true that we do not know everything about that kingdom, but we do know enough about the values of Jesus Christ’s coming reign to begin to live now as citizens of the coming kingdom.

The call is to take off the clothes and practices of the old way, and put on the clothes of the new patterns and practices of the coming kingdom. This week (Dec. 5-11) we will be working slowly through one paragraph Paul’s letter to the church in Colossae (in present day Turkey) (Colossians 3:12-17) which describes the clothing of the new kingdom.

We put on this clothing, take on these practices, for two reasons. First, they are the pattern of life human beings were to have been living from the beginning of time. As people made in the image of God, these were to be our pattern of life from the start. But we failed to live that pattern. By the action of the Holy Spirit in our lives, we are given a second chance, to live a life in the image of our creator, God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Second, our commitment to living by the values of the coming kingdom is a sign, as Troeger’s hymn reminds us, to all the living that Christ will come again. We bear witness to all of creation in our daily actions that we believe that Christ will come again.

PRAYER:

Lord God, we wait for the full revealing of your reign. As we wait, teach us to live by the patterns of that new kingdom. In Jesus’ name. Amen.