December 2024
A Message from Pastor Becca Niemeyer
Dear Church Family,
Welcome to the season of Advent! It is a season of waiting, of anticipation for the coming Christ, a season of making room in our hearts and our lives for the living Christ to be born. I’ll be honest, we have been playing Christmas music off and on since Halloween (oops!). The music carries its own invitations to joy and mystery, which is an ambience I love! While this season can easily become busy with preparations, shopping, and shoveling snow, the month leading up to Christmas can also be a deeply contemplative space for us to assess our own hopes and longings associated with Christ’s presence in our lives.
You are cordially invited to some intentional conversation during Advent following our Sunday services, in which our coffee hour will be transformed into soup lunch and conversation time. I’ll be drawing from meditations in Bette Dickinson’s book ‘Making Room in Advent’ - 25 Devotions for a Season of Wonder. You are welcome to purchase your own copy, though I’ll offer meditations during the church service that we will draw our conversations from. In preparation for this season, I was looking for good resources that help us really lean into the power of Christ’s presence with us through the Holy Spirit, and this theme of ‘making room’ really struck me. In her introduction, Dickinson explores the foretelling of Christ in the Old Testament as the shoot coming forth from the stump of Jesse (Isaiah 11:1), and shares these thoughts:
“This shoot, as it grew, would rule with true justice on behalf of the needy and poor. Jesus would show us what God’s life giving, fruitful, and expansive kingdom looks like - a kingdom that grows and stretches to the nations. A kingdom that takes those on the margins - the stranger, the widow, and the orphan - and brings them into the center of his story. Out of the withering stump of Jesse, Jesus would grow into a fruitful tree that gives life to the world.
Because this is just what God does.
He makes barren places fruitful.
He renews old places with new life.
He takes what is dying and grows a shoot of hope.
This is what God does when Jesus first enters the scene, and it is what he does through the stories of those who make room for him. Could it be then, that what seems dead in our world may be the very ground where new life grows? The very place where we have said...
“I can never recover from this.” “It’s too late for me.”
“I have made too many mistakes.” “No good could come from this.” “That dream is dead.”
...this could be the very place into which God springs new life - from an old, decaying stump. As you read this devotional consider, What is God bringing to life in you?”
I absolutely LOVE that last question, so it will be the theme of our Advent sermons this month. What is God bringing to life in you? God is always at work in us and all around us. Are we making rooms to see it, to know God intimately so that the Spirit might reignite life in places that seemed dead? The incarnation happened - God coming down in Christ as a baby. We celebrate and rejoice the mystery of God with us. But we also know it was just the beginning - our lives are ever forming realities, in which season of life and death become familiar rhythms. I pray that as we enter in this season, we would truly look for what God is bringing to life in us and through us in the lives we are living today.
Blessings, Pastor Becca
