Editor's note: "An uncommon Advent: the arrival of a Savior in our lives" is a sampling of biblical meditations composed by members of the Concordia University Wisconsin community. It is our prayer that you will take time during the Advent season to read and reflect upon God's Word and await the coming of Jesus with newfound anticipation and zeal through the Holy Spirit.
December 2 — The time of our lives
Isaiah 8:9-9:7 and 1 Peter 4:1-19
Time seems equal parts merely mundane and marvelously mysterious. On the one hand, the hands of the clock spin (as one might expect like clockwork—tick tock, tick tock—second after second, minute by minute, hour after hour, day in and day out.
Historians like me categorize the past according to years, decades, era, and epochs. Most of us arrange our daily calendars from the moment the morning alarm sounds until we reset it again before bedtime each night. On the other hand, there is something elusive about time—like sand slipping through an hourglass. “Time flies,” we say. Indeed, the past and the future also elude us. We cannot transport ourselves to either. No machine exists to take us back or forward in time. We have this moment…or at least we did a moment ago! Time is not always easy to figure out, nor are the times in which we live.
In their workaday world and everyday existence, God’s people routinely find themselves in troubled times. Isaiah lamented his own dark days. Peter reiterated what his readers knew from experience—their lives would be marked by struggles and suffering. Likewise, our moment in time has its degree of difficulty. To be a confessing Christian in our time and place rarely wins popularity points. Indeed, our December days are dark, and not only because the sun rises late and sets early. This world wallows as it wanders in darkness. There are days, it seems, that everything is unraveling.
Advent’s uncommon promise, one that the world cannot give, draws us again to Jesus. The eternal Son of God, the Alpha and Omega, who is without beginning or end, and who is unbound by any restraint of time or place, became flesh and dwelt among us. The same Jesus who entered into human history to redeem and save the God-so-loved the world comes to love and reach us even in the darkest corners of our own little worlds. The Light of the world scatters our darkness, too—in December and every other month of the year.
We believers do know this: our anticipation of Christ’s return in glory this Advent season draws us one year nearer to the final fulfillment of that promise. Concordia University Wisconsin celebrates and proclaims that promise. Until that dawn of the everlasting day when time gives way to eternity, we wait and pray. Come, Lord Jesus, come!
—Rev. Patrick T. Ferry, PhD, joined the faculty in 1991 and has served as president of Concordia since 1997. View a full schedule of “An uncommon Advent” readings here.
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