2 Samuel 7:1-5, 8B-12, 14A, 16 | Romans 16:25-27 | Luke 1:26-38

Oh God, eternal majesty, whose ineffable word, the Immaculate Virgin received through the message of an angel and so became the dwelling place of divinity, filled with the light of the Holy Spirit, grant, we pray, that by her example, we may in humility hold fast to your will.  Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

This is the last chance I have to talk to you before we celebrate the great Feast of the Incarnation.  I want you to imagine with me that this particular part of the revelation that God had planned to reveal to people from the very beginning took a very long time before he felt they were ready to receive it.  No one quite knows how long human beings have been around.  The numbers are all over the place, but let’s just, for a round number, let’s just say about maybe almost a million years.  And what we’re learning over that time about human nature is that it slowly and steadily evolves, changes, grows, becomes more what God intended it to be — what God intended human beings to be.  And how do we know whether what he intends us to be is good or evil?  Well, I think one of the ways you might understand it is what he said is, “I have made you in my image and likeness.”  If God said, “I made you in my image and likeness,” then we have to be people who are fundamentally good, loving, caring, nurturing, forgiving.  If we’re made in God’s image, that’s who we are.  But one made a statement to me once that stuck with me forever, and it goes like this.  It says, “We were made in God’s image, and once we understood that, we returned the favor and made him in our own image.”  But the problem with that is the own image that we made him in is not truly who we are, because it seems to me, if you look at the history of human beings with God, especially in the Old Testament and now even in the New Testament, there’s a way of imagining God as one who is in charge but is a demanding God who expects from us certain behavior, and if that behavior isn’t there and we’re judged to have fallen short of it, we have then a response from this God, and that’s judgment and then condemnation.  So God has, in a sense, put us on this planet as a test to see if we’re worthy of him, and so when we do the things that we do, if we do them well, out of our will and our determination, then we get a star, a gold star, and we’re told, “All right, now you’re doing what I asked you to do.  Come into my kingdom.”  And nothing could be further from the truth.

Yes, that might have been the way people understood God in the Old Testament because of the way, in a sense, human beings had to be cared for.  They had to be given something that was important before they understood the importance of it, and they had to be given a motive.  And the motive was always destruction.  So the fear of being destroyed is a great motivator to do what is right, so let’s just say, as you might give punishment to a four-year-old, “Don’t do this, or you’re go to your room,” or, “Don’t do this, or you’ll be spanked,” or something like that.  It works, and so let’s just imagine our human consciousness at one point in the history of our being was such that that’s all it could understand, but there is this thing called evolution, moving closer and closer to who we are intended to be.

I love Catherine of Siena.  She’s a marvelous woman that lived in the Middle Ages, and she basically had this relationship with God where she could speak to him, and he would speak to her.  She was a true mystic, a direct connection to God and Jesus, and one day she asked him, “What can I do for you?  What can I do for you?  I’ve already done everything.  I’ve given my life over to you.  I’m in a monastery or whatever.  I want to do more for you.  I’ve got my life probably the way you want it to be.  I’m a good person and doing good, but what more can I do?”  And he said, “I don’t need anything from you, but if you want to do something that pleases me, that gives me joy, then treat my brothers and sisters like I’m telling you that I treat them.  Love them, forgive them, nurture them, help them to grow.  Let them see and encourage them to see their weaknesses, their darkness and not to think that that’s who they are but to believe that there’s something about that role of evil in the world that is there for the purpose of awakening us to more and more of the light.  The darker it is, the more you seek light.  So there’s this wonderful, wonderful way in which Catherine of Siena grasped the thought that this God of ours is not a God of judgment, of condemnation but a God that wills and wants nothing more than for us to grow and to become who we are.  She also made another statement that is great.  She said, “Become who God has intended you to be, and you will set the world on fire.”  Set the world on fire.  There’s a great prophecy about Jesus wanting to set the world on fire by transforming it into what it’s intended to be.

So on this third Sunday or this fourth Sunday, rather, of Advent, we look carefully at what we’re asked to imagine this Feast of the Incarnation is all about.  So it’s about surrendering to the fact that there is something in this God that longs more than we could ever imagine for us to grow and to change and to become who we’re intended to be, and it was clear that it was hidden forever, as the second reading talks about.  St. Paul says, “There’s a mystery that’s been hidden forever.”  Well, it was hidden from those who couldn’t understand it, but what it is, is that we have a servant God who wants to enter into us and to partner with us in this extraordinary work of becoming fully who we’re intended to be.  Tell a four-year-old something about maturity and saying, “I’m going to be there with you, and if you’ll let me, I’ll infuse this maturity into your four-year-old brain.”  The brain just isn’t ready for it, so it took time, and we’ve been engaged in evolution of consciousness. 

Now for as long as we’ve existed, and it’s growing, becoming more and more evident, that the ultimate goal of a human being is to be a gift to other human beings.  To find out how they are empowered to do this work is the gift of enlightenment.  Light comes into our life to show us the reality.  Reality is we’re a mixture of good and evil, but fundamentally we are good.  Fundamentally we want what is best for others, because ultimately we will see with a fullness of consciousness that the most pleasant, the most wonderful feeling, the thing that gives us a sense of value and dignity, is when we have improved the life of another person.  That’s the joy that we are made for, and it’s the joy we see so clearly in this figure God in the Old Testament.  He’s slowly revealing himself.  “I want to take care of you.”  He called the people together.  It was his voice, the word to Abraham.  “Form a people for me.  I have something to say to them that I need to say to them as a community.”  Those words were finally written down.  They were rolled up in scrolls, and they were carried with the Israelite people as they went on this journey from darkness to light.  It was a tabernacle, and it was in a tent.  Then ultimately that tent ended up in a temple in Jerusalem.  If you look at those images, first the intimate word from God to us — but it was only to a few, to Abraham and those prophets, patriarchs.  Then when it was written down, it was carried as a presence of this wisdom, and the tent went wherever the people went.  But then when it got into the temple, something began to happen.  It was in the temple that it was in the center of the temple, and the people were kept on the outside, that weren’t believers, and the inside was first women, and then next were the men, and then the only ones that could get close to God were the priests, supposedly the holy ones.  So what we see is God finally saying, “All right, I dwelt with you in a word to the prophets, then in my written word, and then in a place of worship, where this word was honored, but that was all set up to bring you to the point where we are now.”  We are now in the most amazing time of the presence of God entering into you and me and dwelling in our hearts, indwelling presence.  And what he’s saying is, “If I come to dwell within you, then I am there to be the source that you need to move in the direction you know that you long to be,” though it’s an unconscious, sometimes, realization.  I want to be there for others.  I want to be like Christ.  I want to forgive.  I want to accept.  I want to encourage.  I want to enlighten people.

So in this first reading, we see this image of God talking to David through the prophet, and he’s saying, “Look, you want to do all these things for me.  You want to build a house for me.  You want to create something majestic and powerful for me.  I don’t want that.  I want you to understand that I’m not the God that is looking to be served by you,” and this is shocking for so many people.  “I’m the God that wants to serve you.  Stop making me into this king figure and let me be your servant.”  That’s what God wants.  “I want to serve you.  That’s the only joy I have, is enabling you to become who you’re intended to be.”  That’s the seed of goodness in every human being.  It’s there.  It’s growing.  It’s becoming.  We’re getting better.  The world is better now than it’s ever been.  I believe that with all my heart, because the world is more consciousness than ever before, and what we see more and more in people is a recognition.  Maybe it’s an idea.  Maybe it’s just the illumination that this is who we really are and who we’re meant to be.  Other people see it more in a mystical way.  This is God in me, coming in me, dwelling in me, talking directly to me, showing me things, correcting things, never with judgment and condemnation but with love and forgiveness.  That’s what the Old Testament, the Book of Samuel, is trying to get across.  “I have come to dwell within you, indwelling.” 

Think of a dwelling.  What is a dwelling?  A space, some place you live in.  The scariest thing about human nature is that we can create a dwelling that is harmonious and loving and life-giving, and we can also create in our imaginations one that is fearful, terrifying and about to destroy us all.  We create our dwelling sometimes, and nothing could be more dangerous than to create a world that is less than God intends it to be, particularly when it diminishes the role that we actually have while we’re here and diminishes the power of God so that we don’t believe that he is the servant God that he is, enabling all these things to happen to us, because he wants it.  He wants it more than you do.  He wants your happiness more than you want it.  He wants your joy.  He wants you to feel his presence, and in the feeling of his presence, like in Mary — she’s the one who represents — this is the fullness of revelation.  Mary is the church.  Mary is all humans, the feminine part of all of us that is receptive and open to mystery, and she’s there to say, “This scares me.  I don't know what we’re doing.  I don't know how this is going to work, but if you say that you need me to allow you into me, I will do that.  And you want me to name that presence in me?  Okay, I’ll name it — I’ll do the name you want, Jesus.  What does it mean?  God saves, God loves, God heals, God takes care of us, God improves us.  She’s got that.  She comes into the world, and she becomes the first fully-conscious human being, a human being walking around with divinity growing inside of her.  And in nine months, when that growth was inside of her, before it ever manifested itself, and then there was even the nurturing years she had to go through and develop and give life to Jesus.  We’re a strange species.  We take forever to be weaned off of our parents, but imagine all that time of the seed being in Mary and producing life and then finally coming to life and then growing up and becoming who he was those 33-plus years.  That’s what we’ve been through up until the time of this wonderful gospel story.  We don’t believe in that story enough.  We don’t trust in it.  We stay too much in the darkness of a night, and yet we know that, when it’s dark, when it’s really terribly painful and we’ve lost hope or something, that’s when a little light just means everything.  So this is a time of enlightenment, incarnation, God dwelling in us, creating a space where we are present to him, and he’s present to us.  Out of that presence, we become a gift, a present to everyone around us.  That’s the mystery of Christmas.  That’s the hope of the future. 

 Father, your gifts are beyond measure, beyond our imagining, yet we find ourselves often caught in a world where they are diminished by fear, shame, anger.Bless us with eyes that see, hearts that are receptive to a presence that changes everything.It’s not up to us to see the truth.It’s up to you to reveal it to us, and all you ask is that we say, “Yes, I believe. I want this gift,” and it is ours. Amen.