John Pavlovitz - Low: An Honest Advent Devotional

Contents

Copyright

Copyright 2019 by John Pavlovitz.

All rights reserved. For permission to reuse content, please contact Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, www.copyright.com .

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise marked, are taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION. NIV. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189, U.S.A. All rights reserved.

Cover design: Jennifer Pavlovitz

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Print: 9780827221932
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Introduction

We naturally read the Bible retrospectively. We encounter our faith tradition in the rearview mirror of history, and as a result we approach it knowing how the story ends. This often leads us to sanitize the gospelsto obscure the gritty, messy reality of those moments as they were experienced in real time. We tend to over-spiritualize the events being described, and we view the God-narrative as if from 30 thousand feet, safe in the abstract places of detached theology. Scripture is a movie we are passively watching rather than a story we are participating in, and so we often miss the gravity of moments, failing to experience them on a visceral level.

But there is a beauty in trying to see these accounts from the ground level, to imagine how they looked and felt from the low places of peoples ordinary lives. When we do this, we remember what is really going on here. We remember that this is the story of an olive-skinned baby, born amid the smell of damp straw and animal dung because no human-worthy welcome could be found; of a child of young Palestinian Jewish parents, desperately fleeing politically ordered genocide. It is the story of a poor, itinerant, street preaching rabbi spending his days dining with the lepers and prostitutes, enlisting the doubters and the backsliders, and comforting the bleeding and the grieving. It is divinity coming low to inhabit humanity.

When we place our feet firmly in the dirt and dust of the everyday within the gospel stories, we see Jesus getting low to meet us there. The spiritual journey is spent largely in the low and shadow places. We are there in that beautiful lowness when we live humbly. We are there when we seek forgiveness. We are there in our grief and suffering. We are there when we kneel in reverent awe. We are there when we spend ourselves on behalf of someone else. When we place ourselves in these postures, our perspective changes, our attitude toward people shifts, and we become agents of love in a way that actually resembles Jesus. We perpetuate his character through our very lives.

When Jesus offers the prayer, Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven, he reminds us that as we walk the road of Advent the invitation is not to escape this place to an elevated heavenly sanctuary somewhere; it is to bring heaven down. Immanuel means God with us. In other words, it is Jesus getting low. This is really good news for us here on the ground.

Lets head to the low places together.

Week 1 Sunday: A Messy Nativity

While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son.
Luke 2:67

I still remember witnessing my wife giving birth to our first child, Noah. The wait of the previous nine months had seemed agonizingly slow, but during those final moments in the hospital, everything accelerated to a velocity approaching light speed. After warnings that his arrival was imminent, Id been quickly ushered into a closet-sized space adjacent to the delivery room and instructed to don a white outfit that seemed part HAZMAT suit, part late-Elvis stage jumpsuit sans the bedazzling. Just as I was finishing fastening myself in, I was led to my wifes side, where I essentially became a passionate, well-meaningthough incidentalspectator. Up until that point, I thought Id prepared myself. Id attended all the classes along with her, had countless lengthy conversations about what to expect, and read all the requisite books to feel properly equipped for what I was about witness. I had no idea. The sounds and scents and sights were the kind of disorienting sensory overload that transcends words. I stayed uprightbut barely.

We tend to sanitize the birth story of Jesus, fashioning it into a pristine, shimmering nativity scene adorned with gold accents and residing comfortably on a hallway table or atop a fireplace mantle. It all becomes so benign and serene that we forget the visceral reality of the moment, that it was as loud and chaotic and messy as childbirth is. Jesus was pushed through Marys birth canal and into a strange world. To miss this fact is to cheapen the event by trying to soften it into something neat and orderly, when in truth (as with all births) there was surely mess and chaos in the moment.

We do this with our spiritual journeys too, wanting them to be comfortable and clean, desiring something attractive that we can easily accessorize our lives withbut that isnt reality, is it? Life comes with the collateral damage of living, with failed plans and relational collapse, with internal struggle and existential crises, and we carry these things with us into this season. The good news is we dont need to discard our messiness to step into this season, and we couldnt even if we wanted to. Bring every bit of your flawed self and all your chaotic circumstances to this day. Welcome the mess.

Week 1 Monday: Faith in the Intersection

As Jesus was walking beside the Sea of Galilee,
he saw two brothers, Simon called Peter and his brother Andrew. They were casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen. Come, follow me, Jesus said, and I will send you out to fish for people. At once they left their nets and followed him.
Matthew :

I lived on the planet for 26 years before I met my wife. My road twisted and pinballed for a quarter of a century with me not knowing she even existeduntil one day, there we were sharing the same space and time in a college classroom in Philadelphia. Our long and very separate journeys suddenly overlapped, and we didnt know it at first, but everything in our lives would be different. All of our relationships can be understood as intersections: the places our road meets that of another person and both stories are rewritten, sometimes wonderfully and sometimes less so. Each of us is a product of these many crossings.

I always liked the idea of reading the gospel stories and looking for the intersectionsthe times Jesus life crossed the path of another personand how each person was irrevocably changed by the occasion. A man driven to madness and isolation finds rest in his own head. A shunned leper receives an unprecedented embrace. A woman caught in adultery is surprised by extraordinary mercy. A despised tax collector is invited into revolutionary ministry. A man four days dead is raised to life again. A young, terrified woman is asked to bear a planet-rocking baby. Over and over, when someone meets Jesus, transformation and restoration are waiting; there is something wondrous to be witnessed. The very birth narrative of Jesus is the image of the most profound of intersections: God and earth meeting, and the latter being completely altered.