Advent Calendar 2007

Index | December:2nd | 3rd | 4th | 5th | 6th | 7th | 8th | 9th | 10th | 11th | 12th | 13th | 14th | 15th | 16th | 17th | 18th | 19th | 20th | 21st | 22nd | 23rd | 24th | Christmas |

Day Four : 5th December

5 December 2007

Isaiah 25:6

On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples
a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines,
of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.

7 He will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples,
the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death forever.

8 Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces,
and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth,
for the Lord has spoken.

The Rev. Claire Woodley-Aitchison writes:
We all long for the space we inhabit to be sacred, to be "really real" (to use Mircea Eliade's phrase). To be fully alive as human beings demands our living in sacred space. The ordained ministry is a way of keeping the question of the sacred alive, the question of what it means to be a human being.

IN YOUR MIDST
I, God, am in your midst.
Whoever knows me can never fall,
Not in the heights,
Not in the depths,
Not in the breadths,
For I am love,
Which the vast expanses of evil
Can never still.

Hildegard of Bingen

While Isaiah is using the shroud as an image for death, in the twenty first century we are experiencing the shroud that leads to global warming. In many places pollution is not only a shroud cast over peoples, but a bringer of death.