Sunday Stretch: Vol. 12

Start off your week with a grounded take on Bible, prayer, the world, and your life ...

As I’m preparing Sunday sermons week in and week out lately, with lots of extra holiday services and guest preaching invitations, I’ve found a common theme cropping up again and again. Each week, as I read the common Advent texts, I’m getting the sense that I need to figure out how this works in community. Maybe it’s a result of spending the past two Christmas seasons amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, and maybe it’s a reaction to my introvert tendencies - but I just keep being drawn to reading these texts with a lens of how we do them together.

This Sunday and second week of Advent are all about peace. And I can decently “do peace” on my own. I can sit and pray in quiet or listen to music or read, and it feels pretty peaceful. But the Peace that Jesus brings to the world is not a self-centered indulgence. Instead, Jesus’ peace invites us to live in peace together, a decidedly more difficult proposition. And at the same time, a decidedly more beautiful one.