Tag: advent19

by jad

#AdventWord 2019, Week 4

#Message A few days ago, I reconnected to my best friend from 15 years, whom I haven’t seen or spoken to in about half that time; we’d both moved around since that period when we’d hung out almost daily. We caught up, reminisced, & he eventually asked me if I’m on Instagram; I told him he’d be in for a shock. “So you believe in Jesus and God and all the beautiful things in the Bible now?” Yes. Especially the beautiful things. We didn’t say much after that, but our brief exchange on a profound shift in my life made … Continue reading “#AdventWord 2019, Week 4” →

by jad

#AdventWord 2019, Week 3

#Turn Today’s the day we talked about “turning” at Epiphany Seattle. We touched on how “turn” is a code word for “repent,” that, yeah, they’re synonyms—technically, in the original languages—but are now more akin in my view to the relationship of “cheese” to “dessert”—they can be the same thing, and in some contexts they are, but we don’t often experience them the same way. We shared what these two flavors of the same idea—to turn, to repent—have meant in our own lives of conversion and change. And since ”turn” is the start of a whole series of words based on … Continue reading “#AdventWord 2019, Week 3” →

by jad

#AdventWord 2019, Week 2

#Worthy “What is more harmful than any vice? Active sympathy for the ill-constituted and weak—Christianity.” That’s a quote from Nietzsche’s The Antichrist. Nietzsche understood what—& how—Christianity valued, and he vehemently rejected it for that very reason. To his eyes, Christianity is worthless because it values the unworthy. Interestingly enough, Nietzsche didn’t really attack the person of Jesus the Christ; he called Jesus the “only one true Christian.” But he certainly got the Christ he opposed all wrong, & without the doctrine of the Incarnation—without the Advent story—that’s easy to do. With no appreciation of that mysterious move from the infinite … Continue reading “#AdventWord 2019, Week 2” →

by jad

#AdventWord 2019, Week 1

#Unexpected This color is a dark, grayish cyan, though one website calls it “juniper.” Sherwin-Williams markets it as “peacock plume”; I know this because I picked the paint out myself, using their swatch cards. It covers the walls of an office that I never planned to occupy, but—I think—I was meant to find. Last December, I told myself that I wanted to do the next #AdventWord for a church—to make church my day job. And here I am, taking a photo of the wall across from the desk in the church where I’m sharing words for Advent. There really wasn’t … Continue reading “#AdventWord 2019, Week 1” →