Belmont University Advent GuideSample

I have often said, as I look at a room full of students on the first day of class, “There are 24 of us in this room and that means there are 24 different worlds in this room. Each of us carries an entire world of particularities within ourselves: memories, understandings, desires, and hopes.”

This passage, John 3.16–21, has these phrases: not condemned, fear deeds will be exposed, coming into the light, what has been done has been done through God. We all know what it is like to carry an inner world marked by condemnation and fear because of failures and scars. Like Nicodemus who stealthily moved about at night, we all know what it is like to live in avoidance. Academia, the world of books and theories and gowns and titles, is a perfect hiding place.

We wait for a light to arrive that carries no condemnation. Frederick Buechner, as a little boy, carried a world of fear when his father committed suicide. Buechner walked around for years fearing important people would abandon him and fearing he was responsible for the happiness of those closest to him. In middle-age, a therapist told him to write out an imaginary dialogue with his father and these words of healing gushed from that imaginary father: “There is nothing to worry about. That is the secret I never knew . . . it is all good.”

A Benedictine monk who was a mentor once told me, “When you wake up, drift into consciousness with a light of gratitude for the Accompanying Presence. After a while, the Presence dominates all else.”

The final verse in this passage is, “so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God.” A young boy watched an old man on a park bench carving a stick. The boy asked if the old man had ever seen God. The old man replied, “Son, it’s getting to where I can hardly see anything else.”

In Advent, a season of darkness, what would it look like for our inner worlds of condemnation and fear to begin to take in the light of the Christ-child at Bethlehem? God so loved the world; God so loves our inner worlds.

Ben Curtis
Professor of Religion