Here we are, finally, at the Last Sunday in Advent! Like Lent, Advent is supposed to be an up ‘n’ down experience of spiritual joys face-to-face with yearning for Something More. In venerating the Little Town of Bethlehem, Phillips Brooks nicely referred to “the hopes and fears of all the years” met there at the Manger of the Incarnation. Closer and closer we creep, rising on tiptoe to glimpse the glory.
Lessons for this week speak to an audacious Hope that God is yet in charge. In II Samuel we meet King David’s angst about living in a fine palace while Yahweh “lives” in a wooden chest in a tent. (7:1-11) “You can’t make a house to contain me,” says the Lord. “Rather, I will make for YOU a ‘house’: a great name, and a place for my people, and a rest from your enemies.” We often worry about how our children’s children will cope with the surrounding attitudes of greed and anger. Yet God gives us a trans-history message: “your throne shall be established forever.” (v.16)
Instead of a Psalm, The Magnificat (Luke 1:47-55) may be read. This is Mary’s song after Gabriel announced her pregnancy with Jesus. This shouldn’t be read sweetly, but as a radical foreshadowing of how the world will be overturned! The coming Christ will vanquish injustice and oppression…
Paul’s concluding sentence of his message to the Roman Church–take a long breath–is an Advent-like surrender of himself to the ongoing divinity of The Christ, “according to the revelation of the mystery that was kept secret for long ages.” (16:25-27) He says that it has been, and is also yet unfolding.
Luke’s Gospel account is that of the conversation between the Angel and Mary. It could be a Call to Worship: “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.” (1:28) As before, the hearer is invited to become David, to become Mary, to transcend the historical in order to know how God is involving each member of the faith-community in every Season of Advent.
The signs are all about us — in the desperate faces of single mothers at the laundromat; the glossy catalogues of toys for all ages, offered at obscene prices; the bell-ringers at Walmart, greeting people shopping in their pajamas; wreathes made of gift packages at Penny’s; parents of toddlers standing in line to scare their children with a close encounter with an Old Bearded Guy. For what do we yearn? “O Holy Child of Bethlehem, descend to us, we pray; cast out our sin, and enter in; be born in us today.”
God Bless Us, Every One! Horace Brown King
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