2025 Advent Devotion: Day 3

Wednesday, December 3

Isaiah 54:1-10; Matthew 24:23-35

Advent invites us to anticipate the “advent” of God in a threefold sense. We’re invited to enter through biblical memory into the people of God’s anticipation of the coming of God into a broken world to fulfill God’s community-making intentions for the world and the people of God in it, inaugurated in the incarnation of God in Christ. Advent also invites us to embrace the anticipation of the return of Christ to bring God’s community-making work to its consummation in the new heavens, the new earth, and the resurrection of humanity into this future reality. And Advent invites us to welcome the coming of God more fully into our lives in the present, participating more fully in the reign of God, which is the big community-making thing that God is doing in the world now to accomplish fully God’s creative intentions.

Our anticipation of the coming of God in each of these ways comes in the midst of much angst about the place of the church in American society. Christianity seems to be less culturally established than may have been the case in earlier times. It is certainly true that far fewer people are actively participating in the life of Christian communities now than previously. Research by religious sociologist Ryan Burge shows that only 15% of Americans attend a church of any kind on a given Sunday. It may seem that what we might regard as a once-culturally-dominant church in our context is now living in exile.

In these circumstances, we might be tempted to receive Isaiah’s good news to the exiled people of God of a return from Babylonian captivity to the land of promise as an assurance of restored cultural ascendancy for the church. But those who returned from exile came home not to a restored Jewish monarchy but to a future of continuing to live under the rule of other empires—first the Persians, then Greeks, and then Romans ruled over and sometimes militarily occupied the land the people of God regarded as the land of promise. They were called to continue doing what another prophet, Jeremiah, had admonished them to do while living in exile in Babylon: “But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare” (Jeremiah 29:7).

Today some insist that this or that movement is one through which God will bring a “revival” that will restore a “Christian America”—which in any case would be neither historically accurate nor constitutionally permissible, nor would it lend itself to the advance of the big community-making thing God is doing in the world. “Even the elect” (Matthew 24:24) may be tempted to identify this with the coming of God into our midst. This Advent, let us welcome the coming of God into our midst by re-committing ourselves to Jesus and the way he taught, for this is what “will not pass away” (v. 35).

Steven R. Harmon
Professor of Historical Theology