Tag Archives: Advent

God with us: A Sermon for Advent 4A, 2025

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You may have seen the stories over the last couple of weeks about the nativity scenes set up by various churches across the country that protest the actions of ICE. At a Roman Catholic Church in Dedham, Mass, the figure of the baby Jesus was removed and replaced with a sign “ICE was here.” Apparently the Archbishop protested and demanded it be removed, but the last I heard, it was still there. Similar scenes have been displayed in Chicago and Charlotte, where ICE activity has been especially pronounced.

We may find this sort of political protest unseemly or offensive, but it’s hardly new. There were similar displays during the first Trump administration and two years ago as Israel was reducing Gaza to rubble. Our tendency, our temptation is to want our Christmas celebrations to be escapes from the realities of the world and our lives, but the fact of the matter is that the story of Jesus’ birth is the story of God breaking into the world in all of its messiness and pain.

“Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way.”

Today, on this fourth Sunday of Advent, we hear the story of the birth of Jesus as related by the gospel of Matthew. And I’ll bet that as you listened, you may have found it a bit strange, perhaps even unfamiliar. For it’s a very different story than the familiar one from Luke that we hear on Christmas Eve, with Bethlehem, the manger, shepherds, swaddling clothes, and all of that.

Matthew’s story seems to focus on Joseph. Mary and her pregnancy seem to be problems that need solving, and the birth itself is recounted in the sparest of terms. The focus on Joseph is odd in a way, if you think about it. It’s even odder when you put the reading we just heard back into the context of Matthew’s gospel, for these verses appear after a lengthy genealogy that relates Joseph’s ancestry back to Abraham. Thereby Matthew links Joseph not just to the ancient patriarchs and matriarchs—Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Rachel, but also to the Kings—David and Solomon. 

What’s odd about this is that of course Joseph is not biologically the father of Jesus.

Matthew gives us a genealogy for Jesus, and it’s worth considering why he thought it was appropriate, or important, to do so. There’s even something more interesting in all of this, because the words he uses to introduce the genealogy at the very beginning of his gospel, and the first words we heard in today’s reading, are very similar—both make use of the Greek word genesis—and it’s likely that Matthew intends his reader to think of the first book of the Hebrew Bible, Genesis. 

So it’s curious, isn’t it, that Matthew, after providing all of that background to the birth of Jesus, taking the time to carefully construct a genealogy that links Joseph back to Abraham, then tells the story of what basically constitutes an illegitimate birth.

The story that we heard is familiar. Joseph and Mary are engaged, or to use the traditional language, they are betrothed. It’s not just that he’s given her a ring, and they’ve begun to plan for the big day, scheduled the date and the venue, hired the caterer and the like. No, in Jewish law, the betrothal meant they were legally married, even though the marriage had not been consummated and they were not living together.

Because they were legally married, Mary’s pregnancy was not just an inconvenience. It indicated to Joseph that she had been unfaithful to him. Legally, because, as the text says, Joseph was a righteous man (in other words, he kept the law), he was obligated to divorce her publicly—something that might result in her execution for adultery. But Matthew tells us that he wanted to spare her the indignity, and perhaps himself as well, and divorce her privately.

So he’s got a huge problem on his hands, what to do. It’s likely, though Matthew doesn’t tell us, that Mary is feeling considerable anxiety and fear as well. After all, it’s in Luke’s version of the nativity that Mary is told by an angel that her pregnancy is miraculous, that she’s carrying the Son of God. 

In Matthew’s story, the angel comes to Joseph to explain things to him. He does as he’s told, and almost as an afterthought, Matthew tells us that the child is born and Joseph names him Jesus. Again, to use contemporary language, Joseph adopts Jesus as his son.

Christmas, which the songs tells is the “most wonderful time of the year,” can also be a time of great sadness and struggle. We are presented with images of the perfect family or the perfect holiday celebration but so often, our own experiences of Christmas are very different. We live in a messy world, we lead messy lives. Our families can be complicated; there can be ruptures or conflicts with family members; there are all the complications of modern family life, divorce and remarriage, blended families. We want everything to be perfect, just so, and so often the reality is very different.

I think there’s something reassuring for us in the twenty-first century in the way Matthew tells this story. He wants everything to be perfect, too. He fashions a genealogy that links Joseph to Abraham, carefully constructing 14 generations from Abraham to David and 14 generations from David to the exile, 14 generations from the exile to Joseph. To put it language from American history, it would be as if Joseph were descended from the Daughters of the Revolution and the descendants of the Mayflower. But it’s not just that the link from Joseph to Jesus is tenuous—it’s that in the midst of that genealogy are prostitutes like Rahab, and victims of rape and incest like Tamar, foreigners like Ruth.

And in the embarrassment of Mary’s unwed pregnancy, in the embarrassment of that genealogy, is an important lesson for us today. Just as we want our celebrations to be perfect, we assume that there’s something wrong with us if things don’t live up to those expectations and we wonder whether in the midst of our struggles, we can hope for God to come to us, for God to be with us.

The story of the birth of Jesus as told by Matthew is a reminder to us that God didn’t choose the wealthy, or powerful, or the Norman Rockwell family in the Norman Rockwell New England town. God came to Mary and Joseph, to a peasant woman and her fiancé, in the outmost corner of the Roman Empire. God came to people in the midst of enormous struggle and great heartache. 

The message of this story is that God is with us—here and now—no matter what our situation is, no matter what our lives are like, no matter what struggles we have, or worries, no matter what shame or guilt we might be experiencing. God comes to us. God is with us. That’s the point of this story. That’s the point of Christmas. God is with us. Here. Now. Emmanuel.  God with us. Thanks be to God.

Stir up thy power, O Lord: A sermon for Advent 3A, 2025

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Advent 3A

December 14, 2025

Stir up thy power, O God, and with great might come among us…

The collects for Advent are beautiful and powerful, none more so than this one which provided the name this Sunday is known as” Stirrup Sunday.” It is a profoundly Advent prayer, bidding God to come to us in the midst of the suffering and evil in the world, which we experience so profoundly. With all the suffering that is taking place, our hearts breaking and broken, we may feel that we cannot bear anything else. But then…

I went to bed last night amid the news of the mass shooting at Brown University. This morning, as I was looking over my sermon again, I heard about the mass shooting targeting a Jewish Chanukah celebration at Bondi Beach in Sidney Australia. How do we maintain our faith that God is coming among is in the presence of such tragedy, such evil? Our gospel reading seems especially appropriate for us today.

Last week we saw John the Baptizer at the height of his power and career. Crowds were coming to see him and to be baptized by him. Even the movers and shakers were coming—the Pharisees and the Sadducees. How do think he was feeling as he saw the response to his preaching, the adoring crowds and the changed lives. As evidence of his power, we hear him attacking the religious insiders with language of great drama and violence.

Now, some weeks or months have passed and John is in a very different position. Herod had arrested him because John had criticized him for marrying Herodias, his brother Phillip’s wife. Another important point to note is that in the synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus begins his public ministry only after John is arrested. In other words, John doesn’t actually see Jesus’ preaching and healing ministry in action. He only hears about it second hand. 

John is in prison, waiting. In the Roman world, prison was a place of waiting, not of punishment. Prisoners were waiting to find out what the judgment would be, whether they would be found innocent or guilty, and what their punishment would be. Execution, sentenced to the galleys or the mines? John was waiting.

John had been waiting for a long time, not to find out his fate. He, like Israel, had been waiting for the one who was to come; he was waiting for deliverance. And so, from prison, he asks that question, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?”

As we saw in last week’s gospel, John was looking forward to a great reckoning; the day when God’s justice would come down to vindicate the righteous and punish the wicked. John had prophesied, “Even now the ax is  lying at the root of the tree; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”

John was now in prison, hardly evidence that God was making things right. And Jesus, the one whom John had baptized, the one in whom he had placed his hopes, had continued John’s preaching. He, like John, was proclaiming the coming of God’s reign. But there seemed to be no signs of its arrival.

So, John, lying in prison, wonders. He wondered whether everything he had been about had meant anything; whether his preaching had been worth it. So he sent two of his followers to ask the question. It’s an obvious question, but still it’s a very interesting and important one. And it is a profoundly “Advent” question. Advent is a time of already but not yet; it is a time when we recognize Christ’s presence among us, Christ’s having come among us as a human. But at the same time, we are looking ahead to that final reckoning. Like John, we are looking ahead for that time when God makes all things new; when God’s justice rolls down like water, and God’s righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

John’s disciples asked Jesus the question, “Are you the one who is to come or are we to wait for another?” 

Jesus’ reply is not a simple and unambiguous affirmative. Instead, he instructs John’s disciples to tell him what they have seen, “the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.”

We hear this passage and we think it’s all so obvious and we may even wonder how John the Baptist could have had any question about who Jesus was.

But think about it a moment. Think about all of the suffering in the area where Jesus was preaching and healing. He may have performed some healings, but there were many other people who continued to suffer and the oppressive yoke of Roman occupation was as harsh as ever. Did Jesus’ answer convince John’s disciples? Did it convince John?

Like John, we are living in a time of already but not yet. We believe and proclaim that Christ has come into the world; that Christ has ushered in something quite new; that his death and resurrection have changed everything.

At the same time, we continue to see the suffering and injustice around us. Many of us experience great suffering and pain in our own lives. It may so overwhelm us that we despair.

Jesus’ answer to John’s disciples is his answer to us. In the midst of the world’s suffering, in the midst of our own pain, he challenges us to see signs of his coming; to look for signs of God’s coming reign; signs of his healing power. Those signs may be faint; they may be overwhelmed by the bright lights and glare of the world.

Like John, we want to see clear evidence; we want to see God coming in glory, destroying evil, beating down the devil. We want to see the carnage and a complete and total victory.

Instead, we are pointed toward this. A few people are healed; a few hear the good news and are transformed. God’s reign breaks in, tentatively, quietly, almost unnoticeably. So we have to pay attention. 

There are signs, but we need eyes that will see them; ears that will hear them. I invite you to look for those signs, to imagine what such signs might be in our world today. In the midst of the suffering in the world, in the midst of all of our troubles, where do we see Christ’s healing power? Where do we see God’s justice rolling down? Where do we see God’s reign breaking in and transforming lives and the world?

The Magnificat, Mary’s song, gives us another perspective on this, and another perspective on time. She sings:

My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord,

my spirit rejoices in God my Savior; 

He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, *
and has lifted up the lowly.

He has filled the hungry with good things, *
and the rich he has sent away empty.

Mary sings about God’s mighty acts, but she is not looking into the future, hoping for God’s making all things right. She sings in the past tense, these are things God has already done; this is God making things right, bringing justice and equity to the world.

Look for those signs, in the world, in the lives around you. Become those signs, to the world, to the lives you encounter. God is here among us, healing us and the world. Christ will come again to make all things new. May we rejoice to see his coming; and may we see the signs of his coming in our faith and in our actions.

Advent 1A

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November 30, 2025

Time is a funny thing. There are times, as when we are in the middle of something exciting, when it seems like it passes in an instant. And then there are those times when we’re sitting in a waiting room and time seems to pass slowly, especially when the doctor is late for our appointment. Years ago, I would schedule my doctor’s appointments for first thing in the morning, so when I had to wait a half-hour for him to finally show up, I could let my outrage boil over, knowing the delay wasn’t due to them dealing with another patient, but rather they were just late getting into the office. Needless to say, I eventually tired of this and found a new primary care physician.

There’s also the way in which time can seem to pass in an instant. One of the realities I’ve had to deal with as I have been rector of Grace for now more than 16 years is the disorienting way in which time passes. I’ll find myself recalling some event, or someone, thinking that it occurred a few years ago, and suddenly realize that it’s been more than a decade. It’s particularly disconcerting to encounter young people who I baptized when they were infants and are now graduating high school.

The season of Advent challenges us to reflect on the meaning of, as well as our experience of, time. In the first place, it is the beginning of the liturgical year; for Christians who follow the liturgical calendar, the first Sunday of Advent is New Year’s Day.

While thinking about today as New Year’s Day would seem to help us place ourselves in time, in fact, we find it does something else entirely. It is profoundly disorienting to our sense of time, and our sense of our place in time. Advent encourages us to look forward—to Christmas and the birth of our Savior, but as it does so, it also prompts us to look backwards, to those events that took place two millennia ago in Bethlehem.

Simultaneously, though, Advent propels us forward not to December 25 and the rituals and stories of Christmas, but to the end of time itself, to the second coming. 

This disorientation and reorientation is fundamental to the season of Advent; and it is fundamental to the Christian faith.

One way in which we are being reoriented is through the changes in the lectionary. Each of the three years of the lectionary cycle, we focus on one of the synoptic gospels. This past year it was Luke. This year, it will be Matthew. This focus allows us to spend some time getting to know the gospel writer and the context and community within which they were writing. In Matthew’s case, as we shall see, there is a particular interest in laying out the similarities and distinctions of the Jesus movement with first-century Palestinian Judaism. At the same time, Matthew, like Luke, draws on the gospel of Mark for much of its chronological structure and many of its stories about Jesus.

Today’s gospel is one of those places where Mark’s influence is particularly evident. We have a section of what scholars call the “little apocalypse—” a sermon of Jesus given in the last week of his life, while he is teaching in and around the temple. We actually heard Luke’s version of some of the same material in recent weeks.

When I was a kid, for some reason, one year one of the local churches was given the opportunity to show Christian-themed movies in the schools. One of those films, I don’t know the title anymore, was about the second coming. I remember one scene especially. A man was in his bathroom shaving, and suddenly he was gone. It was a movie that aimed to depict what is called the rapture, an idea that emerged in nineteenth century Evangelicalism and captured the fascination of many—the idea that at the second coming, the faithful would be transported to heaven while the rest of humanity remained on earth to face the consequences.

One of the proof texts for the rapture is in this passage: “Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left.”

It’s a frightening image, and especially as the idea has played out in modern Christianity, it has captured, and traumatized many. But it’s a misreading of scripture, and a profound perversion of the notion of the second coming. Contrast that fear-mongering with Isaiah’s vision from the first lesson:

they shall beat their swords into ploughshares,
and their spears into pruning-hooks;

nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war any more.

This vision, cast in the ninth century bce, continues to inspire. The idea of an age of peace, of justice and equity, when God reigns is a powerful image, reminding us that even as we experience all the ways in which our world and our lives fall short of that vision, our faith continues to express itself by hoping that God will make all things right.

But it will happen in God’s time, not ours. One lesson that Advent teaches is that even as we look ahead to Christ’s coming at Christmas, as well as Christ’s second coming, the day and the hour are not ours to set. God’s time spans past, present, and future. Indeed, God is outside of time.

Yet as the reading from St. Paul’s letter to Romans reminds us, our waiting, our experience of time is not flat and meaningless. “Salvation is nearer to us now than when we were first believers; the night is far gone, the day is near.”

Both the gospel and the reading from Romans point to the ways in which early followers of Jesus were disoriented in time. There’s a great deal of evidence that those early Christians expected Jesus’ imminent return. When he seemed to tarry, they began to wonder whether their hopes were real, and if there hopes of an imminent second coming were not going to be realized, what would that mean for their faith in Christ?

Jesus warns his listeners, “But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.”

In a way, Jesus’ words are doing to his listeners just what Advent is doing to us. He is trying to reorient them toward a new understanding of time, to change their expectations and experiences of it. So too does Advent do this to us. We are betwixt and between. Even as the circles of time continue through the years, Advent breaks in upon us and presents us with a different sense, or senses of time. As we look ahead for four weeks to Christmas, we are looking even further beyond to Christ’s second advent and those two markers remind us that ultimately, we are not in our time, or time of our making, but in God’s time. And in God’s time, God will make all things new, and we will beat our swords into plowshares and our spears into pruning hooks. And we will study war no more.

Thanks be to God.

Singing the Song of Mary in a week of tragedy: A Sermon for Advent 4, 2024

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December 22, 2024

Over the years, I’ve come to recognize that there’s a certain rhythm to the season of Advent. The scripture readings of the season begin ominously, with emphases on the Second Coming of Christ, urging us to watch, prepare, and to get ready. Then there’s a shift to John the Baptist, who is no less ominous in his warnings, but brings our expectations and waiting closer to the present, as he prepares us for the coming of Christ. Finally, on the fourth Sunday, we come even closer to the great events of Bethlehem and the Nativity, as we hear stories related to the coming birth of Christ.  Most years, our attention on this Sunday is even more relentlessly, more expectantly, more joyfully toward the blessed events of Christmas.

This year, that rhythm has been broken by the events of the last week. We are reeling, unmoored. The shock of the national scourge of school shootings has come to Madison. We know the grief and the horror that so many other communities have experienced over the last few decades. Many of us are also consumed by anger and frustration by the impotence and unwillingness of our political class, our society as a whole to prevent these heinous acts. The Onion headline speaks the truth for many of us: “No way to prevent this,’ says only nation where this regularly happens.”

As we struggle to regain our footing after this week’s events—I won’t say “as we try to make sense of them”—it may feel like Christmas is further away if not temporally, then spiritually, further away than it’s ever been. We may find it difficult to put our hearts and minds into the final preparations for our celebrations, it may all seem a bit hollow. And that’s where a refocus on the themes of Advent might be just the bracing challenge we need.

In my Advent sermons and meditations I always emphasize that Advent is about Christ’s Second Coming as well as his first. By now, you may be tired of this constant message. But it bears repeating, especially now. It’s not just the way in which Christmas has evolved in our culture; the drawing out of the season, this “most wonderful time of the year,’ when we are likely to be watching holiday or Christmas movies in November, or even earlier.

Christian liturgy has made its own peace with the expansion of the Christmas season, so we often hear about the four Sundays of Advent being about “hope, peace, joy, and love.” Lovely, pious sentiments, these, but a far cry from the traditional Advent themes of the four last things: “Death, Judgement, Heaven, and Hell.” 

At the heart of the traditional observance of Advent is a cultivation of a sensibility that the world is not as it ought to be, that it lies in thrall to the forces of evil. We know that, but too often, especially as Advent is eclipsed by Christmas, the four last things ignored in favor of inflatable santas. Unfortunately, Amazon doesn’t sell Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse inflatables which would be much more appropriate for Advent décor. Too, often, we allow ourselves to be distracted from those realities. Sometimes, like now, we may need such distractions.

And so, even when we come to today’s gospel story, we overlook the judgment in favor of the saccharine. 

The familiar story we have heard today has been painted thousands of times throughout history. Two women, one young, one elderly, both of them pregnant, greeting each other. Often, the elderly one is deferring to the younger one, kneeling before her. Other times, the two are embracing. It’s such a familiar image, such a familiar story, that we tend to pay it little attention. Certainly, it does not factor largely in our devotion. Though it’s the occasion for two of the most common hymns or devotions in Catholicism—the Ave Maria and the Magnificat—we probably rarely reflect on the narrative context from which these hymns come. And really, it’s hardly shocking that we don’t pay closer attention to the Visitation, for it’s a brief episode, not more than a couple of verses (not including the magnificat itself). 

Two women, well, an elderly woman and a teenager, Their words seem hardly natural; they are carefully composed, more reflective of the Gospel writer’s concerns than in any way the actual conversation of two pregnant women meeting for conversation.

The tradition has shaped Mary’s image in so many ways that’s hard to get back to what Luke is really about. We think of Mary as a passive recipient, someone who accepts what happens to her without complaint. The tradition has turned her into a model for a certain kind of discipleship, a femininity that is meek and mild, passive, receptive, quiet. 

But that’s wrong. Listen to her song again: 

         
He has shown the strength of his arm, *
    he has scattered the proud in their conceit.
He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, *
    and has lifted up the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things, *
    and the rich he has sent away empty.
He has come to the help of his servant Israel, *
    for he has remembered his promise of mercy,
The promise he made to our fathers, *
    to Abraham and his children for ever.

These are not words of pious sentimentality, docility, or humility. The faith Mary proclaims is a faith in a God who takes decisive action on behalf of God’s people, a God who vindicates the righteous and condemns the wicked. The God to whom and of whom Mary sings is a God of liberation, a God who intervenes for the oppressed, the powerless, the poor and hungry. These are words proclaiming in a God who saves, but the salvation on offer is not for individuals, it is a salvation for all God’s people. 

Indeed, so powerful is this God, so vivid the imagery in the song, that it is hard to imagine they are the words of teenager, a young woman who has just learned she is to be a mother by miraculous means. And the fact of the matter is that Mary’s words are not hers alone. They are also the words of another woman from the history of God’s saving acts, another woman who found herself with child, almost miraculously.

The Magnificat, Mary’s wonderful song, is a reworking of the Song of Hannah, which Hannah sang when she learned she would give birth to Samuel, a boy who would become judge, priest, and prophet over all of Israel. Like Mary after her, Hannah sang in praise of her God, confident of her people’s salvation through God’s continuing care for Israel, confident that God would bring justice and righteousness to the world.

Hannah’s words were put in the future tense. Her song of praise was a song of hope that God would one day make things right. Mary’s song is in the perfect tense, suggesting that God’s liberating action has already begun to take place, but that it is not complete. God’s reign, with its promise of justice for the poor and the oppressed still lies in the future, though Mary can see signs of that reign in the world around her.

God has scattered the proud in their conceit, cast down the mighty from their thrones and lifted up the lowly. God has sent the rich away empty and filled the hungry with good things. It’s hard to hear these words without thinking of our own society and economy where income inequality is greater than at any time in a century, where the elderly and the poor risk losing what few benefits they have, where money equals power and our political class seems oblivious to the deep need in our nation. It’s hard to think of these words, of a God taking such action when people are grieving across the city, frightened, angry, frustrated.

When we sing or reflect on the Magnificat our tendency is to see these words as Mary’s words, not our own. We lack the imagination and faith to make these statements ours. But if we believe in a God who comes to us in a manger in Bethlehem, it shouldn’t be beyond our capacity to believe in a God who acts in history on behalf of the poor, powerless, the hungry and the oppressed. But more than that, we need to do more than sing the song, to proclaim the greatness of the Lord. Luke reminds us that a true follower of Jesus is one who hears his word and obeys it. This Advent and Christmas, this year and beyond, we should proclaim our faith that God is acting in history to vindicate the oppressed, and we should do all in our power to usher in God’s reign.

Stir up your power, O Lord: Reflections on the Abundant Life Shootings

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I sent the following to the congregation yesterday:

Dear friends in Christ,

The collect for the Third Sunday of Advent reads:

Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us; and, because we are sorely hindered by our sins, let your bountiful grace and mercy speedily help and deliver us; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom, with you and the Holy Spirit, be honor and glory, now and for ever. Amen.

Our hearts are breaking; our hearts are broken. The scourge of school shootings has come here to Madison. We are confronting the horrific violence, the trauma, and the grief that so many communities across the nation have experienced over the years. Many of us are also reacting with anger and frustration over the inability of our nation and our society to take the common-sense steps that could prevent such tragedies in the future. It might seem like this is the final straw; that on top of all the other events of the last years, the anxieties, fear, and despair that many of us are feeling, that we cannot go on. The burden is too great, the way forward too difficult. 

Yet the collect above and the Season of Advent reminds us that all is not lost, that we should not allow our fear and despair to overwhelm and immobilize us. Christ comes among us in humility and weakness, revealing God’s power and love, preaching the coming of God’s reign. Even as we grieve the deaths and injuries and condemn the violence, we can also come together to work for change, to stand in solidarity with the suffering, to gather for comfort and consolation.

Christ comes to a broken and hurting world, to a broken and hurting humanity. Christ comes to us in our grief and pain. His coming offers joy and hope in the midst of our sadness, anger, and grief. May his joy and hope sustain us in these difficult days, and may his boundless love transform our lives and the world.

Silence, Songs, Prophecy: A Sermon for Advent 2, 2024

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December 8, 2024

This past Sunday, on the First Sunday of Advent, we began a new liturgical year, and with that new beginning, we also began reading a new gospel—the Gospel of Luke, which will be our focus throughout the coming year. Because of the different gospels emphasized in each year, each liturgical year takes on a different aura and different themes predominate.

For Luke, one of those themes, and it’s consistent with what I emphasized last Sunday, is to place the story he is telling in a clear historical and geographical context. We get that emphasis very clearly in today’s gospel reading, which a newcomer to the gospel might assume is the beginning of the gospel as a whole. John the Baptizer is situated in the reigns of emperors, governors, and other rulers, and his ministry is firmly located in Judea, the region around the Jordan river.

But there’s another theme that emerges in this year’s gospel readings, and it’s one of my favorites. Each Advent Sunday moving forward, our readings will include canticles—songs, taken from scripture that have been used in Christian worship for centuries, and in the case of today’s canticle, and the Song of Mary, which we will hear in two weeks, likely derive from Christian worship that predated the writing of the gospel. But they have also been used in Christian worship over the centuries—especially the Song of Mary, the Magnificat, and today’s canticle, The Benedictus or Song of Zechariah.

The latter has been a fixture of Morning Prayer in the Anglican tradition for centuries; used almost daily for many years, and still used that way for those who pray Morning Prayer following Rite I. Over the years, I have come to know the Benedictus almost by heart, although without ever trying to memorize it: 

Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel

He has come to his people and set them free

He has raised up for us a mighty savior

Born of the house of his servant David…

One of the miracles to me each time I encounter this canticle in Advent is how a text with which I am intimately familiar becomes new and illuminating in a new liturgical context of Advent. In a season of waiting and watching, this canticle takes on new meaning as it proclaims what God has done in the past and continues to do, and promises that God’s saving work will continue.

More than the words themselves, it is the context in the story that helps to deepen the meaning and power of this canticle. You may recall the story. Zechariah was a priest, serving in the temple in Jerusalem when he is visited by the Angel Gabriel who tells him that he will have a son who will become a prophet like Elijah and call the people to repentance. 

Zechariah finds this hard to believe as he and his wife are elderly and responds to Gabriel’s words by saying: “How can this be so?” In response to his incredulity, Gabriel strikes him speechless for the duration of Elizabeth’s pregnancy. When their son is born, Zechariah writes on a piece of paper that his name should be John, and immediately his voice returns to him. He began to speak, praising God. Then Luke writes, Zechariah was filled with the Holy Spirit and began to prophesy. This song, the Benedictus, was his prophecy.

It’s quite remarkable, if you think about it. We rarely think of prophecy and song as being connected in any way, even if, in our bibles, the prophetic books often appear in verse form. Songs are for entertainment, enjoyment, relaxation, and diversion. But they do so much more, as well. There are protest songs of course: the great legacy of Woody Guthrie, the songs of the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement, Bob Dylan. When we encounter a song like this one, however, we may be inclined to think of it rather differently.

One other thing I would like to point out. If you were voiceless for nine months, and your voice returned only upon the birth of your child, what would you say? Would you have spent those nine months thinking about what you might say if you got your voice back? Would you release all of your pent-up anger and frustration, blurt out all the things you had wanted to say but couldn’t? Well, whatever Zechariah was thinking and planning over those nine months, according to Luke, this is what came up out of his mouth when he had the chance: “Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel…”

Think of the waiting, the silence. Think of the hope that Zechariah had. As a Jew, a priest, living under the Roman Empire, dreaming of the restoration of Israel, doubting it would ever happen, going about his routines; chosen out of all of the priests in the temple to perform the daily office of sacrifice, and in that moment an angel comes to him and offers him new hope—had he and Elizabeth given up hopes of children years ago, decades ago?

And now, because of his disbelief, doubt, ridicule, silenced. Unable to share with Elizabeth the miraculous joy; the hopes and planning for a child, lost in his own thoughts.

It’s a powerful story, a powerful evocation of the Advent experience. Waiting in silence and hope; hoping in the midst of doubt and fear; meditating on the coming events, preparing for joy. 

Perhaps, this Advent, instead of focusing on the man whom Zechariah’s son would become, John the Baptist, the voice crying out in the wilderness; instead of focusing our attention on the coming of Christ, we might focus our attention and meditation on Zechariah, the silent one, the voiceless one, waiting, wondering whether his voice would ever return, but in that silence, preparing himself for the miracle that might come, that could come, when his voice was restored and he was free to say what he wanted, to sing his song, to prophesy about God’s goodness and redemption.

Advent, the weeks leading up to Christmas can sometimes seem overwhelming—the bustle of activity, all the things to do, holiday concerts, and parties. It can be a time of eager expectation and bitter disappointment. It can be a time of tears as well as joy as we think of loved ones who are no longer present in our lives, broken relationships, a world full of tumult. Finding time to spend with God, deepening our relationships with Jesus, preparing our souls and hearts for the coming of Christ may seem like an unnecessary luxury or even a burden of guilt.

Zechariah’s example may inspire us. As he waited in silence, the voiceless one, perhaps he had room to listen for God.

Perhaps in his silence he came to a deeper knowledge and experience of God, that enabled him to sing his song. Perhaps he experienced the tender compassion of God. May this Advent be for us a time to listen for God, to look for God’s presence in our lives and in the world, and to cultivate God’s tender compassion.

Apocalypse, Dystopia, and the Coming of God’s Reign: A sermon for I Advent, 2024

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There’s something about the coming of the Season of Advent that always takes me back to the first year I spent in Germany in 1979-1980. Maybe it’s because it was then that I first really felt the darkness of the season. Marburg, where I was studying was much further north than the part of the Midwest where I grew up and the constantly gray skies and short days combined to create a gloom that seemed to encompass everything. 

But it was also then that I first encountered the powerful themes of Advent in the Lutheran tradition; not just the Advent wreath but the great German hymns, like the Bach Chorale “Wachet Auf” which we will be singing later. Lutheran theological reflection on Advent also shaped me deeply: the theological reflection on Christ’s comings—at Christmas, at the end of times, and in Word and Sacrament. A few years later, I would listen to the great Swedish New Testament scholar and later bishop of Stockholm, Sweden as he preached to a tiny congregation of students at Harvard Divinity School on the symbol of lighting candles in the midst of deepening darkness. As darkness descends in the Northern Hemisphere, to light candles is not only a necessity but an act of hope in a time that can seem disorienting when the darkness seems overwhelming.

In the twenty-first century, we have the luxury of electricity that helps us keep the darkness at bay. It’s hard for us to imagine, unless we’ve experienced lengthy power outages, or are accustomed to camping in the wilderness far from human habitation, the ubiquity, intensity, and sheer power of darkness, especially as it was experienced in previous centuries. For those of us who are sighted, it is hard to imagine how blind people experience the world—the darkness in which they are enveloped all of the time.

As rich and powerful as the imagery of darkness and light is—and we will see it not only now in this season of Advent but right through Christmas and Epiphany, it is not without its problematic side—it can easily slip into the binaries of white and black, good and evil, that have had such a pernicious and persistent effect on our culture. Can we imagine other ways of relating to darkness—its mystery, its infinity, its unknowingness, the way it has of disorienting and reorienting us?

While the language of darkness and light is almost ubiquitous in our liturgy, other themes dominate our scripture readings and theological reflections in Advent. Chief among these may be time. 

We see that theme emphasized in the beautiful collect for the First Sunday in Advent:

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

This beautiful and powerful collect for the First Sunday of Advent stresses that this season is not only a time of preparation for Christmas; an opportunity to get a head start on Holiday festivities. Advent directs our attention to Christ’s second coming and teaches us that we live as Christians between that time of Christ’s incarnation, his death and resurrection, and the consummation of our final hope in Christ’s return. As Christians, we have experienced the first fruits of Christ’s transforming work, but we languish in this world, in this time, enmeshed in the powers of evil that surround us and seem to hold sway.

In a very profound sense, all of Christian life lives in that tension between Christ’s coming and the Second Coming. It’s often said that Christians are “Easter People”—the reality is that we are also Advent people, living in the interstices between Christ’s first coming and his second. Of course, we usually do what we can to reduce that tension between time past, time present, and time to come, and we most often do that by ignoring or downplaying that focus on the future, on Christ’s second coming. 

Those of you who grew up Evangelical in the 70s, and perhaps even in the decades since, may still bear with you the trauma of endless warnings on the imminence of Christ’s second coming and the rapture, much of it precipitated by Hal Lindsey and his bestselling book—The Late Great Planet Earth. Lindsey died this past week, but his legacy lives on.

Now, however, It may be that our visions of the future are dominated by dystopian nightmares : the movies of the Mad Max franchise, or the Handmaid’s Tale; and the dystopian future may seem ever closer and more realistic. In the gospel reading, we have hints of such dystopias: signs in the sun, moon, and stars, the roaring of waves and the sea.

We may be tempted like so many in the past and in the present, to see in those signs evidence of the nearness of the Second Coming. Certainly, however we interpret those signs, we may be full of fear as we look into the future of the next few months, or the next four years, or beyond.

This morning’s gospel comes from Luke’s version of Jesus’ apocalyptic warnings to his followers. Present in all three synoptic gospels, though with significant differences among them, this speech is located in the last week of Jesus’ life, when he is preaching and teaching in the temple, and confronted by his opponents. In fact, it comes from Luke’s version of the story we heard from Mark just two weeks ago. To set the context a little more clearly, the chapter began with Jesus’ prediction of the destruction of the temple, followed by the disciples asking him when all this would take place. Then Jesus gives lists of things to look for, warnings of what will happen to those who are his followers—arrest and persecution.

Now, here, Jesus gives his followers advice. Be on guard! Be alert! Stand up and raise your heads! But there’s another piece of advice that seems to contradict what else he says. Jesus refers to the fig tree. He points out something every gardener knows, that when a plant begins to show signs of growth in the spring, the summer is on its way. On one level, that’s obvious and might be interpreted as another sign of what is to come. But as every gardener knows, a tree that leafs out and blossoms in the spring, may not bear fruit until the late summer or fall. In other words, the new growth may be a sign of things to come. But there is also a lot of time to pass and probably some hard work to do. 

Most importantly however, the signs Jesus mentions are not signs of doom and destruction. They are signs that our redemption draws near. They are signs of the coming of the Reign of God.

There’s a sense in which all that we do in this season of Advent, all that we do in the run-up to Christmas, is about the nearness of God’s reign. The promise we hear in the words of the prophet Jeremiah, that God will keep God’s promise and restore justice and righteousness,–that promise beckons still. 

But the reality is rather different. God’s reign draws near but the world knows it not. God’s reign draws near but the shoots of new life are only that, faint signs in the midst of a turbulent and difficult world. God’s reign draws near but it is easy to miss those signs and to fall into despair and disappointment.

We shouldn’t interpret Jesus’ instructions to be alert, stay awake, as warnings. We shouldn’t lapse into fear and foreboding. Instead, we should look for the signs that God’s reign draws near, signs of promise and hope, signs of new life in the midst of our troubled world. Advent is a time when we should look for such signs, cultivate and nurture the signs we discover, and be signs of the coming of God’s reign to the world around us. 

Among those signs, but more than a sign is the third way that Christ comes to us in Advent and throughout the year. In the proclamation of the Word, and in the sacrament of his body and blood, we experience Christ’s coming among us, to us, in us, even as they are signs of Christ’s second coming and signs of God’s coming reign. Truly our redemption draws near. May this season of Advent be a time when we experience and see Christ’s coming to us and to the world. 

Advent Poetry: A homily for Advent 3B, 2023

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December 17, 2023

There’s something about the season of Advent that always draws me to poetry. It may be the ambiguity of the season, the idea that we are waiting for Christ coming to us in multiple ways. It may be the binary opposites of light and darkness, goodness and evil, that permeate the traditional imagery of the season, of our hymnody and scripture readings.

This week I’ve been reading the latest work by Christian Wiman, a poet and theologian who now teaches at Yale Divinity School. For many years, he was the editor of Poetry magazine. He writes with beauty, power, and elegance about his ambivalent faith and his decade-long struggle with cancer. His latest book is entitled Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries against Despair. 

While there is a great deal that is worthy of reflection, the thing that stopped me cold—and keeps drawing me back, is a poem by Anne Carson that he includes and upon which he reflects. It’s entitled “God’s Justice”

I love that image: “on the day He was to create justice God got involved in making a dragonfly and lost track of time.” It alludes to something that I have come to believe more and more strongly—God’s boundless and infinite creativity, a joyfulness and play at the heart of creation and at the heart of God. 

But there’s something else here that’s poignant and sad—perhaps. The sense that there is something fundamentally wrong with the world as we experience it—that it isn’t just and right. We know that all too well—the suffering in the world and in our lives, the pain inflicted on human beings by other human beings and the inability, unwillingness to try to make this right. We know the evils of the world and, as the prophet does in today’s reading, we cry out for justice. 

In the beginning there were days set aside for various tasks
On the day he was to create justice 
God got involved in making a dragonfly
and lost track of time.

It was about two inches long
with turquoise dots all down its back like Lauren Bacall.

God watched it bend its tiny wire elbows
as it set about clening the transparent case of its head.
The eye globes mounted on the case.

rotated this way and that
as it polished every angle.
Inside the case

which was glassy black like the windows of a downtown bank
God could see the machinery humming
and He watched the hum

travel all the way down turquoise dots to the end of the tail
and breathe off as light.
Its black wings vibrated in and out.

Our lessons today remind us of where our focus should be, where and how we should proclaim Christ, where and how we should work for justice. 

The reading from Isaiah, the first verses of which provide the text for Jesus first public proclamation in the Gospel of Luke, offer both reassurance and command. As Christians, we read these words as promise of Christ’s coming, of the future reign of God that he proclaimed and for which we hope. We see ourselves as recipients of that good news, and of the promised healing and release.

At the same time, we must see ourselves in this story, not just as recipients of God’s grace and justice but as participants in the coming of that justice. We are called to rebuild the ruined cities—and here we might think not only of literal cities, but of all the ways that human community, the common good, have been undermined and attacked in recent years.

Even stronger are the words from the Song of Mary. It’s always helpful to remember just who she was—a young woman, likely a teenager, mysteriously, shamefully pregnant, as vulnerable in her historical context as a similar young woman would be in our day. Yet from that small, unlikely, reviled person, comes this powerful hymn that witnesses to God’s redemptive power:

My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord,

my spirit rejoices in God my Savior; * 
for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant.

From this day all generations will call me blessed: *
the Almighty has done great things for me, and holy is his Name.

He has mercy on those who fear him *
in every generation.

He has shown the strength of his arm, *
he has scattered the proud in their conceit.

He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, *
and has lifted up the lowly.

He has filled the hungry with good things, *
and the rich he has sent away empty.

This familiar hymn has suffered for its popularity and familiarity. Its use in worship over the millennia has numbed us to its revolutionary power. We need to reclaim it today, sing it with meaning. We need to do more than sing it, we need to work so that it comes into being. We need to imagine the possibility that God is working in this way, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, in spite of all our fears, doubts, and despair. We need to believe that the words of a first-century teenaged single mom can inspire to see God at work in the world around us. For remember, the world in which she lived was unjust and violent as well, and for many people hopelessness and terror were ways of life.

Like the poem with which I began, Mary’s song is a thing of beauty, sung in the midst of injustice. It calls us to see beauty in the broken world around us. It calls us to see God at work in those beautiful things created by God, even in us. It calls us to to the hope that in spite of the ugliness and suffering in the world, God’s beauty and justice are present, making all things new, and through God’s grace, remaking us as well.

The Wildness of Advent: A Sermon for Advent 2B, 2023

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On Monday, I had the opportunity to spend a few hours with poet, theologian, trans activist, and faithful Christian Jay Hulme. I have been following Jay on Twitter for many years. I’m not sure how I got connected but over the years, in addition to sharing his spiritual journey and some of his poems, he posted photos of many of the old churches he visited, and whose towers he climbed. He is currently churchwarden of St. Nicolas, Leicester, England, one of the oldest, perhaps the sixth oldest continuing church in England. Dating from the 8th or 9th century, it is built on the ruins of a sixth century church, which in turn is built on Roman ruins. 

Jay’s poetry is fierce and powerful. He writes about the many places he visits, about holy wells, and saints, and sacred places. There’s a wildness about his poetry and personality. He is courageous and frank. We talked about the very different senses of history that come from being among buildings that date back 500 years or a millennium and the relatively newness of our own buildings. I showed him Grace Church and sent him up the bell tower and I expect we might see a poem one day about that experience or about the cheese curds we shared at the Old Fashioned over lunch.

Listening to him read his poems brought home to me the wildness of the God he encounters in those strange places, on holy islands like Lindisfarne, or in the saints like Joan of Arc about whom he writes. So I was thinking about wildness when I reread the gospel for today, Mark’s take on John the Baptizer. 

In fact, there’s a wildness about Mark as a whole. Probably the first of the gospels to appear, Mark begins in the middle of things and ends abruptly, with an empty tomb and frightened women. In between, there are stories of Jesus encountering people possessed by evil spirits, by demons, Jesus taming storms, and there’s a sense that Jesus himself is doing battle with Satan and demonic forces. 

But wildest of all may be John the Baptizer himself. As Mark tells it, John suddenly appears in the wilderness, preaching and baptizing and attracting large crowds. He is clothed in camel hair and ate locusts and wild honey. Did the crowds come out of curiosity or a desire to hear the words of a prophet? Ultimately, his wildness, his uncontrollability will lead to the inevitable result, his arrest by the authorities, in this case Herod, and his execution.

Our observance of the season of Advent is complicated and contradictory. It is a season of preparation and waiting, preparing for Christ’s coming at Christmas, but as our scripture readings and hymns remind us, it is also about the Second Coming-Christ coming in majesty.

 We tend to downplay that aspect of the season. It can make us feel uncomfortable and inappropriate in light of the larger cultural focus on the coming of Christmas, the round of holiday concerts and get-togethers; the ways in which the advent wreath, for example, originally intended for use in homes, has found its way into churches and given liturgies that focus on themes like love and joy. 

And then we encounter John the Baptizer, with his wild hair, his wild dress, and his wild preaching—Repent! For the kingdom of God has drawn near. John breaks in on us and our complacency. John breaks in on our self-satisfaction and our delusions. John breaks in on the certainties of our lives and our of our seasonal celebrations and cries “Repent.”

This is wildness, uncontrollable. Like the images of the second coming that have dominated our readings over the last month. Like the threats of judgment and warning given to servants, and to bridesmaids, and to us.

That wildness surrounds us—wildness of our own making and not of God’s. The threats of climate change. Are we at a tipping point, with the threats of the melting of the Greenland icesheet while politicians dither over concrete actions, in of all places, Dubai, a monument to our thirst for fossil fuels and conspicuous consumption?

Are we at a tipping point, with thousands already dead in Gaza, and threats to hundreds of thousands, while politicians and pundits debate “genocide” and silence critics of the devastating war that is taking place in front of our eyes and with the support and weapons of the US.

We look around and see all of the crises that continue to threaten us—and the ways in which we threaten the lives of others and all the while we make our plans, do our shopping, plan our menus. The chaos of it all, the wildness, threatens to overwhelm us and so we grasp at those familiar rituals that help to center us and to stave off those feelings of fear and despair.

Wildness, chaos is often understood to be a product of evil yet it’s worth remembering that in the story of creation, God was there, in the midst of chaos, bringing order, speaking the universe into existence, bringing light, and life and creativity. The voice of John crying in the wilderness is not a sign of chaos but a call to repentance, a call from God to us.

Advent reminds us that God is coming into the world, a world beset by evil, threatened by chaos, changed and degraded by our own human actions, our hubris, greed, and rampant desires. But God is coming into the world, coming to us. Indeed, if we pay attention, as we should, we will realize that God is already here, in the wildness, and in the chaos, remaking us in God’s image, bestowing grace in our lives and in those we love.

We may be fearful; we may be disheartened; we may lose hope. But God calls us from the wilderness and the wildness, God calls us in our own wildernesses and wildnesses, when our steps falter, our faith flags, our strength fails. God calls us, comes to us and leads us into the future where there is hope, and justice, and peace.

November 27, 2022

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I’m not one of those people who complains every spring and fall when we have to change our clocks for daylight savings time. Sure, it’s a hassle, and there used to be the stress of wondering whether we’d forget and get to church either an hour early or an hour late—but cell phones have done away with that anxiety. I don’t really care about losing or gaining an hour of sleep, for truth be told, I never sleep well on Saturday nights—I’m always worrying about my sermon and about what’s going to happen on Sunday morning.

Still, there’s something shocking about that first Sunday evening when it gets dark an hour earlier than it did the night before. Whatever the temperature outside, the fact that it grows dark around 5:00 is a reminder that winter is coming, and I feel my body and spirit coming to terms with that fact.

We’re deep into it now in late November. We had a little over 9 hours of daylight yesterday; thankfully it was sunny and warm, so our spirits weren’t oppressed by the dreariness of a cloudy November day. We know it will get darker; that the days are still getting shorter. 

One of the realities of modern life is the extent to which the electric lightbulb has changed our lives and cultures. The inevitability, the ubiquity, the sheer pervasiveness of darkness has been overcome permanently. It takes a power outage to remind us of the human struggle against darkness, the futility of that struggle, and all the ways that darkness limited and continues to limit human life and culture in so many ways.

Light, darkness. In spite of our technology that keeps absolute darkness at bay most of the time, we all know what it’s like when we turn on a flashlight in a dark space and are able to orient ourselves to our environment. We also know what it’s like when the light suddenly goes out and we don’t quite know where we are. This experience, the contrast of light and darkness are definitive aspects of human experience. We may tend to think of them as oppositional and there’s temptation to give them moral qualities—light is good, dark is evil. Certainly, one can see such tendencies in scripture.

Light and darkness is a leitmotif of our season and those that are to follow—Christmas and Epiphany. Think of the opening verses of the Gospel of John that is read on Christmas Day each year: “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot comprehend it.”

The collect for the First Sunday of Advent highlights this theme: “give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light…” It is a quotation from the epistle reading, in which Paul urges his readers to pay attention, to wake up from their sleep for the night is far gone, the day is near, by which he means Christ’s coming.  

There’s something about the advent wreath that conveys the tentativeness, the vulnerability of the season, and of our hope. Around us, the world grows darker as the days grow shorter. Around us, the world is dark—literally so in Ukraine where Russian missiles and drones knock out the power grid, forcing millions to shiver in the cold and struggle in darkness. The world is dark, the relentless march of mass shootings across our country. The light of hope seems nearly extinguished. 

But in the midst of that darkness, even as we know more darkness is to come, week by week we light the candles of Advent, and as we do the Advent wreath grows brighter, its witness stronger, even as the darkness of the season deepens. 

The witness of a single candle burning in a space shrouded by dusk or darkness. That is a metaphor of our Advent experience. St. Paul was writing a couple of decades after Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection. We sense already in this text some of the uncertainty that arose as Christ’s expected return, in majesty as the collect says, was delayed. Stay awake, he admonishes, the night is far gone.

For us, that urgency, that expectation is even more distant. Oh we know all about those Christians who look for signs of Christ’s imminent return; those who interpret every historical event in light of the Book of Revelation or other biblical prophecies. But really, do most of us think that the loudest exponents of Christ’s imminent return believe it, or rather that they are using it to gain power, prestige, and wealth?

Do we believe it? We say we do, every Sunday, when we recite the Nicene Creed: “He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.” Still, the second coming of Christ, is one of those doctrines with which we might struggle, even as we acknowledge, as we see in the gospel reading as well as in the epistle the centrality of that belief to early Christianity and to the teachings of Jesus as well.

It may seem so farfetched that we press it from our minds, leave it to those other Christians to ponder, to reflect on, and to exploit. Our feet are on the ground, we take comfort in the rational world in which we live, and so we push away those beliefs—even if, from time to time, our minds may wander and wonder. 

The images are gripping aren’t they? Two people in the field, one taken, one left. When we hear it, our mind goes to the stories we’ve heard or the movies we’ve seen that claim to depict Jesus’ second coming and the Rapture—a 19th century invention that has gripped the fascination of generations of especially American Christians.  

If not that, then what? I don’t mean to demythologize or downplay the Second Coming. It is, after all, a central concept in Christianity. One way of thinking about it is that it highlights the contrast between what is and what should be. We know all about what is: the violence, the evil and hatred, I won’t recite the litany. We have a sense that things aren’t right and when we hear the words of scripture as the vision described in Isaiah 2, we feel in the marrow of our bones the disconnect between the world we inhabit and the world that God intends: a world of peace and justice, where swords are beat into plowshares.

At its core, the Second Coming is an expression of our hope that God will make all things right, that God will bring justice and peace, an end to suffering. 

And so, in Advent, we light week by week the candles of the advent wreath, expressing our hope that even in the darkness of our world and of our lives, we can discern the light of God’s presence. And as the candles burn, they proclaim our faith that Christ will come and make all things new. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness cannot overwhelm it. Amen.