Author: Jeff Hampton

Second Monday of Advent

Originally posted Thursday, March 5, 2015 – DURING LENT

It’s interesting the way we’ve boxed Advent and Christmas into wintertime and Lent and Easter into spring. It seems we want our Jesus to be born on a dark cold night and to rise on a bright warm day; to come into this world under the harshest of human conditions, and to return in an explosion of heavenly glory. But the weather doesn’t always cooperate. Here in North Texas, it was relatively mild during Advent; not once did it dip below freezing, and we enjoyed many days in the 60s. And today, on the 16th day of Lent, it is 25 degrees with four inches of snow and ice on the ground. We’re supposed to be walking through the quiet, thoughtful, prayerful days of Lent, but we just finished an invigorating trudge to the city park, ankle deep in snow, where families were sledding under a clear, sunny sky. We came home and LeAnn made a snowman, while I went inside to work on taxes.

It’s all mixed up, and that’s OK, because Christmas and Easter don’t belong to a season. They belong to the heart – in whatever season the heart is in.

Second Sunday of Advent

From Wilshire Advent Devotions 2010

On the desk in our upstairs guest room is a framed poem that I wrote one summer while visiting my grandparents. Titled “Peace,” I typed it on my grandfather’s heavy, black, Underwood typewriter with the title word stamped into big block letters with asterisks.

With lines like “It’s in the beauty of the flowers, but not in war or Communist power,” the perspective is definitely 1960s. The evening news was full of the Vietnam War, racial unrest and political turmoil, and pop culture overflowed with songs and posters about peace. I was obviously mimicking what I saw and heard.

Continue reading “Peace”

First Saturday of Advent

Originally posted Tuesday, November 26, 2016

Their redemption was incomplete. They almost had it, but alas, their commitment was not 100 percent and they fell short.

With tongue in cheek I’m talking about the 10 college students seen on national television on Saturday afternoon who painted their torsos with purple and gold paint. No doubt they’d planned it well, spent time painting each other, and then they’d gone to the stadium to line up side-by-side and spell out the word REDEMPTION. But it was cold and the student wearing the N put on a brown coat. When the TV cameras swung by, the word was incomplete. It was REDEMPTIO_.

Seriously though, Sunday began Advent, the liturgical season when we watch and wait for the coming of the redeemer, the one who was sent to save us from our sin and weakness. The one who kept the commitment that God had made to all humankind and that was foretold through the words of the prophets. The one who let himself be scorned, stripped and scourged. The one who did not grow cold to God’s promise and did not hide under a brown coat. The one who completed our redemption. Thanks be to God.