A meditation offered by the Reverend Canon Mpho Tutu van Furth, Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
As we begin this season of waiting and wonder, we are invited to return to the Source—to remember who we are and whose we are.
My favorite scriptural image is of God playing in the dirt—not making mud pies (as I used to), but making mud people. We are the mud people God formed from the earth, from humus. God made Adam—earth-being—of the very stuff that is our home. The Christ who came in great humility (humus) is the grounded Christ, the one who knows of what, by whom, and why he was made. He is of the earth and for heaven, bridging dust and divinity.
To cast away the works of darkness in our time means turning from all that desecrates God’s good earth and God’s beloved people. Environmental devastation and racial injustice are twin shadows of the same sin: forgetting our shared origin in the soil of creation and the breath of God.
When we put on the armor of light we reclaim our kinship—with creation and with one another. We live as earth-beings awakened to glory, protecting the fragile and the forgotten, tending the world entrusted to our care. As we light the first candle of Advent, may its flame remind us of the Christ who is both earth and heaven’s child—calling us to live grounded in love, radiant in justice, and alive with hope for the renewal of all things.
Environmental devastation and racial injustice are…forgetting our shared origin in the soil of creation and the breath of God
