O Come, O Come, Emmanuel – November 29th
Advent Wreath Candle Lighting
First Week of Advent, November 29, 2020
Reader One: If ever there was a year we needed Advent, this is the year. We hardly know how to describe the year we have lived through. We hesitate to reflect on all the mess around us in 2020. All we know is that nothing seems right, nothing seems like it used to be, nothing. We need Advent!
Reader Two: The prophet Isaiah cried out for us, “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down … To make your name known … so that nations might tremble at your presence.” So tear through the mess, O Lord, and come down to us again. We long to be your people, a people of hope.
Reader One: We light this first candle as a sign of our hope. Hope that you can meet us, even in the mess of our world. Hope that you still see us, though we feel we are lost in the rubble. Let this light be the guide that brings us to Emmanuel once more.
Reader Two: O Come, O Come Emmanuel.
Open our eyes, Lord, especially if they are half shut because we were tired of looking,
or half open because we fear to see too much,
or bleared with tears because yesterday and today and tomorrow are filled with the same pain, or contracted, because we only look at what we want to see.
Open our eyes, Lord, to gently scan the life we lead, the home we have, the world we inhabit, and so to find among the gremlins and greyness, signs of hope we can fasten on and encourage.
Give us, whose eyes are dimmed by familiarity, a bigger vision of what you can do even with hopeless cases and lost causes and people of limited ability.
Show us the world as in your sight, riddled by debt, deceit and disbelief, yet also shot through with possibility or recovery, renewal, redemption.
And lest we fail to distinguish vision from fantasy, today, tomorrow, this week, open our eyes to one person or one place, where we – being even for a moment prophetic might identify and wean a potential in the waiting.
And with all this, open our eyes, in yearning, for Jesus.
On the mountains, in the cities,
through the corridors of power and streets of despair, to help, to heal to confront, to convert,
O come, O come, Immanuel.
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