Welcome to the Blue Ocean Advent devotional podcast. I’m Emily, and I’ll be your guide these next four weeks. This first podcast is simply an overview of what you can expect.
Each podcast will last approximately five minutes, though you can pause at various points if you’d like to spend more time praying or meditating on a particular portion.
The format will go something like this:
- We’ll start with a moment of gratitude, where we can name something we’re thankful for each day.
- Then we’ll move into a time of petition, where we will have an opportunity to pray for something or someone each day. This portion will be more specifically guided.
- Next I’ll read the daily Scripture portion, perhaps with some commentary depending on the reading. The Scripture will tie into the Advent theme of “darkness.”
- Then we’ll close with a short guided meditation on a portion of those Scriptures.
The word advent means waiting; it’s a four-week season when we practice waiting on the presence of God to show up, symbolized in the celebration of the birth of Jesus on Christmas Day.
In the Julian calendar (which was a later version of the Roman calendar), Dec. 24 or 25 was winter solstice. We know that, in the northern hemisphere, daylight diminishes between summer solstice and winter solstice, and then increases again starting at the end of December. The Romans celebrated the day when sunlight started its renewed expansion, Dec. 25, as the birth of the Sun god.
And so it seems that Christians in the third century adopted the birthday of the Sun god as the birthday of the Son of God. The idea being that, after increasing darkness, there appeared a great light. When we celebrate Advent—when we practice waiting on God—we’re practicing waiting in the darkness for the light to come.
The podcast theme for Advent this year is “darkness.” But I want to note that darkness has several meanings in Scripture. In the modern Western world, the metaphor of dark and light historically has racist tinges—as if dark implies nefariousness and light implies goodness. But in Scripture, which pre-dates our modern associations, darkness far more often simply means “things which are hidden and unseen”; it can mean evil; and it can also mean something like “powerfully holy.” A few of the most profound moments in the Bible depict God surrounded by darkness or by dark clouds—like when God makes the Abrahamic covenant with Abram, or when Moses receives the Ten Commandments.
So we’ll meditate on these various ways darkness is depicted, and think about what it means to wait on God when things seem hidden from us, when the world seems messed up beyond redemption, and when God is powerfully present but we can’t seem to see her through the dark clouds.
My prayer is that you’ll find these meditations relevant and helpful as we find ourselves shaped each year by this practice of waiting for hope and light. Come, Lord Jesus.