December 29: God's Gift of Salvation
♫ Music:
WEEK FIVE INTRODUCTION
TITLE: EMBRACING THE GIVING CHRIST & THE CALL TO GENEROSITY
December 29 - January 6
We are more than familiar with the phrase “Christmas is about giving,” realizing full well all that we have and are is the result of God’s generosity towards us. God gave the first and foremost Christmas present--the priceless gift of eternal life through Christ. As Pastor Rick Warren states, “God is a giver and all of God’s gifts [to us] are wrapped in Jesus.” Warren goes on to say there are three things that mark a true believer--integrity, humility and generosity. “Generosity is love in action,” he proclaims. As followers of the Giver, we want to give as God gives without expectation, without demanding anything in return, just to serve in the best ways we can. When we take our attention off our own problems and circumstances and focus on somebody else’s needs we forget about ourselves. The Christian gives with grace but at the same time is able to receive, so there is a beautiful cycle--ultimately giving and receiving are a package deal. So, it’s also true that “Christmas is all about receiving."
Sunday, December 29
Title: GOD’S GIFT OF SALVATION
Scripture: Ephesians 2: 4-10
But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come He might show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them.
Poetry:
Tour
By Carol Snow
Near a shrine in Japan he’d swept the path
and then placed camellia blossoms there.
Or—we had no way of knowing—he’d swept the path
between fallen camellias.
THE GRACIOUS GIFT OF CHRIST JESUS OUR LORD
We can be assured by God through the Apostle Paul that whatever our reactions to, whatever our appreciation of, any of this entire Advent Project’s images, melodies and poems, these cannot establish nor undo our made-newness in the gracious gift of Christ Jesus our Lord.
And we need this assuring reminder of grace because Advent has brought many of us to Christmas through our own spiritual efforts at self-justification. Through writing devotions or reading them daily. Through giving, and being seen and recognized to give, to those we love or are expected to love. Through envying the gifts received by others- materially or in the graced lives others live compared to the spiritual paucity of our own. Just as we are thinking that we’d have done better to choose our own holiday gifts, or as the batteries are mercifully wearing out on those of our kids (if the toys are not already broken), by his word the eternally merciful love of God locates us in the heavenly places with our Lord.
What do you see when you focus on the art work image of today’s devotion? Stained glass windows, bringing august lighting into a Cathedral, footed by a pink neon sign!? Is this shrewd missionally contextualized worship of the God who is love, in contemporary graphic script? Or simply and depressingly the desecration of sacred space with the tawdry and sacrilegious? Is this lurid descent into the murky world of feelings a distraction from elevated theological reflection on God’s gift of himself at Christmas? Or is it the sharp shock of expressiveness that you need, in your post-Christmas day lethargy, to allow the Holy Spirit to spark you into an effective soul commitment to the walk of good works prepared beforehand for you this Christmastide?
How we respond to these questions tells us that in the light of the certain kindness of God’s grace, we are, so often, in this time between Advents, caught up in ambiguity. This is why grace is so gracious. Carol Snow explores ambiguity in her poem, Tour. What do we do when we have no way of knowing? The presumed gardener had swept and scattered blossoms … or swept between them – they had fallen or were placed – which is it?
More remarkable than the answer is the awareness of the question itself. Often, as Christians, we know too much when we fashion grace in our image. We claim to know God’s love in Jesus but restrict the expression of joyful receipt of that love to the conventional forms and liturgical contours of our particular tradition. The other is suspect, perhaps, especially, the neon pink other.
There is a note of ambiguous openness in Tracy Enim’s work entitled ‘For You’. For whom? ‘I felt you and I knew that you loved me’. Is this a lover, a child, our Lord and Savior, Jesus, God incarnate? What is this feeling? Is it emotion or touch? Can we distinguish the two? Christmas is so tactile: putting up and decorating trees, the heat from a candle, the crumpling of wrapping paper, a baby born and swaddled. Touch and feelings are the language of God’s grace, the love with which he loved us while we were still dead in our transgressions, if we take the incarnation seriously. Because of it, we are now elevated to the heavenly places in Christ, like bundles of complex, ambiguous, fleshly neon sentences lifted up to a Cathedral’s worshipful, stained glass glory.
Emin’s confessional art may be precisely what the grace of God invites, may be precisely the ambiguous acknowledgement of our deadness in sin that we must recognize, however distasteful, to the praise of his glorious grace, and in order to know the Jesus we welcome at Christmas. And then, in uplifting, vivacious neon pink, we might join the praise of his glorious grace to which also stained glass testifies. Emin’s originally temporary installation for Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral has become permanent. May our ambiguous praise of our God in Christ Jesus joyfully accept the permanence that comes through his grace alone, transforming deadness to life.
Prayer:
We are loved,
More than we know,
More than we could hope for,
After everything we've done.
As sure as the sun will rise,
And chase away the night,
Your mercy will not end.
Praise you, Heavenly Father of our Lord Jesus,
May your Spirit rekindle our feeling of your gift of love,
Amen
Adapting Ellie Holcomb and Rusty Varenkamp’s lyrics
Dr. Andy Draycott
Associate Professor of Theology and Christian Ethics
Talbot School of Theology
Biola University
For more information about the artwork, music, and poetry selected for this day, we have provided resources under the “About” tab located next to the “Devotional” tab.
About the Artwork:
For You (3 installation views)
Tracey Emin
2008
Pink Neon
Church of England Cathedral of the Diocese of Liverpool
Liverpool, England
Liverpool Cathedral, Britain's largest cathedral, commissioned this bright pink neon work that reads “I Felt You and I Knew You Loved Me.” Though colored glass, light, and text have all been cornerstones in Christian worship for many centuries, this work by contemporary artist Tracey Emin has combined all three elements into a thoughtful, award-winning permanent installation above the west doors of the cathedral. When the work was installed in 2008, Emin said that she wanted to “make something for Liverpool Cathedral about love and the sharing of love.” Its title, For You, is a very personal one that reminds us that love is a gift.
https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/message-love-liverpool-tracey-emin-3473408
About the Artist
Tracey Emin (b. 1963) is a British artist known for her poignant works that draw from Emin’s life through a variety of media including painting, drawing, photography, video, sculpture, and neon text. She is a prominent member of the Young British Artists who rose to fame in the late 1980s. Emin’s seminal works have provocatively contributed to feminist discourse with the raw, confessional nature of her art. “There should be something revelatory about art,” she reflected. “It should be totally creative and open doors for new thoughts and experiences.” Born on July 3, 1963, in Croydon, United Kingdom, Emin cites Edvard Munch and Egon Schiele as early inspirations for her expressive style of self-representation. Emin went on to received her MA from the Royal College of Art in London, where she is now a Royal Academician and Honorary Doctorate. She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1999 and was awarded a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in 2013. Emin currently lives and works in London, United Kingdom. The artist’s works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Goetz Collection in Munich, among others.
http://www.artnet.com/artists/tracey-emin/
About the Music:
“As Sure as the Sun” from the album As Sure as the Sun
Lyrics:
There is good news,
There is good truth,
That you could never change,
No matter what you do.
You are loved,
More than you know,
More than you could hope for,
After everything you've done.
As sure as the sun will rise,
And chase away the night,
His mercy will not end. His mercy will not end.
There is good news,
There's a promise,
That no matter where you go,
You will never be alone.
In the dark,
In the doubting,
When you can't feel anything,
O His love remains the same.
Even through the night,
Silver stars will shine,
Hope of glory's light,
That will wake us once again.
About the Composers:
Ellie Holcomb and Rusty Varenkamp
Russell Leon "Rusty" Varenkamp (b. 1976) is a Grammy-nominated and Dove Award winning producer/songwriter based out of Nashville. He has received two GMA Dove Awards, for production, and is a Grammy Award-nominated producer and songwriter. Some of his projects include collaborations with Tenth Ave North, MUTEMATH, TobyMac, Ellie Holcomb, Kristian Stanfill, Sanctus Real, and Toby Lightman. Most of his work has been in the pop/rock/dance/electro genre(s). In addition to a career of making albums and singles, he has also successfully written and produced for film & television. Some of his songs have been featured on MTV, VH1, Provident Films, ABC, CBS, and CW.
https://www.rustyvarenkamp.com/
About the Performer:
Folk singer-songwriter Ellie Holcomb (b. 1982) was born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee. She comes from a musical family and started her professional musical career in the same band as her husband, singer-songwriter Drew Holcomb. She has released multiple solo albums, most recently Red Sea Road. This latest release came out of a time of loss and suffering in Ellie’s community. Not only was she writing songs about her friends’ pain, Holcomb was faced with her own fear of the unknown during the project. Just prior to going into the recording studio, Holcomb’s father, famed music producer Brown Bannister, was diagnosed with cancer. Ellie and her siblings wrote the song “God of All Comfort” as they clung to God’s promises and rested in His embrace and peace.
https://www.ellieholcomb.com/
About the Poet:
Carol Snow (b. 1949) is an American poet. Carol Snow is the author of Placed: Karesanui Poems (2008), The Seventy Prepositions (2004), and Artist and Model (1990). She is the winner of both the Poetry Center Book Award and the Joseph Henry Jackson Award in Literature. Poet Fanny Howe describes Snow’s work as “post-traumatic—half-seen, half-remembered, half-named—the event more than half gone….” A Pushcart Prize winner, Snow has also received support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Fund. In 2002, she taught at the University of California, Berkeley, as the Roberta Holloway Poet-in-Residence. She currently lives in San Francisco, California.
https://poets.org/poet/carol-snow
About the Devotion Writer:
Dr. Andy Draycott
Associate Professor of Theology and Christian Ethics
Talbot School of Theology
Biola University
Andy Draycott is a British immigrant scholar living in Southern California with his family. He is a lifelong Charles Schultz’ Peanuts fan, enjoys reading novels and social history, cycling, running and baking. Currently, he is an Associate Professor of Theology and Christian Ethics at Biola’s Talbot School of Theology. He counts God’s blessings in Christ, in local church, in family life, and in delightful work colleagues.