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Advent Study 2009 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Understand the True Meaning of Christmas
“We live, as Jesus lived, in a world all too full of injustice, hunger, malice and evil. This prayer cries out for justice, bread, forgiveness and deliverance. If anyone thinks those are irrelevant in today’s world, let them read the newspaper and think again. The more I have studied Jesus in his historical setting, the more it has become clear to me that this prayer sums up fully and accurately, albeit in a very condensed fashion, the way in which he read and responded to the signs of the times, the way in which he understood his own vocation and mission and invited his followers to share it. This prayer, then, serves as a lens through which to see Jesus himself, and to discover something of what he was about. When Jesus gave his disciples this prayer, he was giving them part of his own breath, his own life, his own prayer.” - N. T. Wright N. T. WRIGHT is Bishop of Durham, the fourth-ranking post in the Church of England. Formerly Canon Theologian of Westminster Abbey and dean of Lichfield Cathedral he also taught New Testament studies for twenty years at Cambridge, McGill, and Oxford Universities. Among his many other published works are The Meaning of Jesus (with Marcus Borg) and The Challenge of Jesus. < Click here> to register. Registration is $10 and includes a copy of Wright's book and
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“We live between Advent and Advent; between the firstgreat Advent, the coming of the Son into the world, and the second Advent, when he shall come again in power and glory to judge the living and the dead. That’s why Advent is sometimes quite confusing, preparing for the birth of Jesus and at the same time preparing for the time when God makes all things new, when the whole cosmos has its exodus from slavery. That apparent confusion, that overlap of the first and second Advents, is actually what Christianity is all about: celebrating the decisive victory of God, in Jesus Christ, over Pharaoh and the Red Sea, over sin and death —and looking for, and working for, and longing for, and praying for, the full implementation of that decisive victory.” – N.T. Wright
In this year’s Advent Study we will follow N.T. Wright as he examines each of the stanzas of the Lord’s Prayer with an eye to putting them in the context of the historical Jesus and then applying them both to our devotional lives and our ministry as Christians. For Wright this prayer is key to understanding who Jesus is, who God is, and their relationship to us and our world.
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