Wednesday, November 30, 2022
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Gentling up to some truth now and then
How can they call on him if they have not believed? Believe in him if they have not heard? Hear without someone to preach? Preach unless they are sent? As it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!”
Riding across an 80 degree Austin afternoon in late November with Aki toward our volunteer time at the Austin Disaster Relief Network thrift store, I remembered something Augustine said, which gave Philip Yancey a title for his memoir. Philip is at Columbia Bible College, he’s reading books that are not assigned to him.
In my reading I have discovered Augustine, a connoisseur of women, art, food, and philosophy, who celebrates the goodness of created things. He says of his preconversion years, “I had my back toward the light, and my face toward the things on which the light falls.” (p. 233)
And I think how much that sounds like me, too. Our living room is cluttered with boxes of Christmas, celebrated with ornaments and nativity scenes and red and green candies, with books of Christmas mysteries, pioneer Christmas stories, and several versions of the birth of baby Jesus.
Your words, Lord, are spirit and life. They are more precious than gold, than a heap of purest gold. Sweeter also than syrup or honey from the honeycomb.
The clutter will gradually clear, if we do our part. What will be left, I hope, is a quiet place where Jesus will feel comfortable, since after all, He lives here too.
I hear Jesus saying, “I’ll be comfortable if you are, David. I hope you will relax and just be with me.”
In his book Yancey continues to think about Augustine’s way of seeing the world.
The Latin phrase dona bona, or “good gifts,” appears throughout his writings. “The world is a smiling place,” he writes, and God its largitor, or “lavisher of gifts.” A smiling place—not once have I thought of the world like that. Perhaps I lack certain receptors for goodness, as Mr. H. suggested. How can I find the dona bona?
Can I rejoice in having found the “dona bona” in my life? I think so, and I hope you can too. During Advent I will read more than my share of devotions and reflections on these topics. Here’s one from Philip Britts, anthologized in a sweet book titled Watch for the Light:
We are human and finite, and thus cannot live perpetually in a sense of expectation, or in a continuous Advent. We are distracted by many things. Our spiritual awareness waxes and wanes in intensity.…It is here that we need to see why it was necessary for Christ to come to the earth.
God has come to us because we, by our own power of soul, by our own emotions, even the noblest and most sublime, can never attain redemption. True expectancy, the waiting that is genuine and from the heart, is brought about by the coming of the Holy Spirit, by God coming to us, and not by our own devices.
And I think, that coming must arrive every day, to “renew your right spirit within me,” as a Lutheran doxology put it every Sunday when I was growing up. Driving to Austin I listened to that same church in Lincoln’s service at 8 am Sunday morning, the first Sunday of Advent.
Come after me, says Jesus. And I will make you fishers of men.
During the offering I heard those words from Psalm 51:10-12. “Create in me a clean heart, O God.”
And I was happy.
(Romans 10, Psalm 19, Matthew 4)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
#
