4th Sunday of Advent: Cycle A 22-23
FOURTH SUNDAY OF ADVENT
Isaiah 7:10-14 | Romans 1:1-7 | Matthew 1:18-24
Pour forth, we beseech you, oh Lord, your grace into our hearts that we, to whom the incarnation of Christ, your Son, was made known by the message of an angel, may, by his passion and cross, be brought to the glory of his, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God forever and ever, amen.
This Sunday we have something that we had last week, and that is a reading from Isaiah that prophesies something about the coming of a Savior, the Messiah, and then in the New Testament reading, we see it being fulfilled. But the interesting thing in both last Sunday and this Sunday, we see words on the lips of Isaiah that are exactly like the words that happened to Jesus and to those that were most intimately connected to his incarnation. So last week, we saw that the prophesy had to do with all the wonderful things that God’s gift would be, through Jesus to us. Eyes would be opened, ears would be able to hear, tongue would be able to speak, the lame would leap like stags. It’s all images of fulness and wholeness and being able to be who God intended us to be. That’s the promise, and I think it’s interesting that the Old Testament prophets were there proclaiming it, like Isaiah, and then yet still the Pharisees, the scribes didn’t get it. They didn’t understand it, and when Jesus’ life was unfolding, instead of being excited about the fact that these things were happening in exact ⎯ the way that they were prophesied to happen, just underscores the fact that they didn’t really know the scriptures, the Pharisees, the scribes that were running the temple. They had lost their groundedness in the story, and it led to all kinds of abuse, all kinds of ways in which Jesus would describe this place of healing and lifegiving strength and grace turned it into a place that was robbing people of life, a den of thieves. So it’s important for us not to fall into the trap of the Pharisees for sure but to look at these stories and understand they are so filled with something that we need to be conscious of, not just from the standpoint of I know it but I’m living it ⎯ I’m living it.
So there’s this quote in Isaiah about a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Immanuel. And then we see that same phrase being on the lips of an angel, and the angel is the one that came to Joseph to explain to him the mystery of this thing that had happened to the woman that he was in love with, that she was found to be pregnant outside of the marriage, that they hadn’t been betrothed yet, or they were betrothed, promised, but they hadn’t gone through any kind of ceremony to make them husband and wife. And yet we have this mysterious dream of Joseph, and I love the fact that this thing that we all experience, called dreaming, is very much a part of the way in which sometimes God works and speaks to us in our dreams. And if you ever know anything about Jung psychology, it’s filled with an invitation to pay attention to the images in your dream, not necessarily that they’re all voices of angels but that God uses them, uses everything to bring about something within us, some transformation, some change. And in this set of readings, what I love about that image of Immanuel, the angel says that there is this ⎯ this virgin will have a child, and the child will be named Immanuel. And it gives exactly what the name means. It means God is with us. And it’s also interesting that there’s a time when, in another passage from Luke, there is this image of Jesus’ name being given to Mary through an angel, and it’s God saves, God saves, God heals. I think it’s interesting to take those two and put them together, because that’s what I want to talk about, is this image of a God who comes into the world to save us and then returns to heaven to guide us from there often implies something perhaps that God is not really with us. It’s God is within us, and you see in that opening prayer this beautiful image of grace, grace being poured into our hearts.
You’ll notice in the reading from Paul, he’s saying at the end of it, “Grace and peace from God and from our Lord Jesus Christ.” The two are one, grace and peace. What is grace and peace? First, it is the indwelling presence of God within us. God does not come into the world and do something that radically changes the understanding that we have of how God works and the saving us from our sins by his own death and surrendering to the fulness of his humanity, in a sense, on that cross when he said everything that he was doing was, in a sense, radically opposed to our humanity, and he was able to be filled with passion and intention and desire and go through that crucifixion and find resurrection. And that’s the story of every one of us, that grace, God’s presence, God’s favor is poured into our hearts, and that can sustain us as we go through the radical transformation of being confronted with the thing that we call sin, our self-centeredness, our self-worth, our need to be somebody important in our own eyes and maybe the eyes of others. Jesus was able to pass through that incredible place of letting go of all of his egocentric parts of him as a human being, and he taught us something in that moment, that there is this gift that is given to us called grace, God’s presence. God is with us. God is within us.
Remember when Jesus was baptized in the Jordan by John and the Holy Spirit descended upon him, and what were the words that everyone seemed to clearly hear? “This is my Son. My favor is with him.” So I want you to think of grace as a pouring forth into your hearts continually, once you allow God to dwell in you, once you believe that he dwells in you, his presence, his grace that sanctifies, sets us apart to do a certain work in this world. It’s real. It’s there all the time. We may not feel it all the time, but if you know that it’s there all the time doing its work of filling us with an awareness that we have this grace, this powerful love inside of us of God, his favor, his being with us to awake in us something that was radically needed and, in a way, desired, that we were willing to be set apart to do this work. That means to be sanctified. Grace sanctifies, sets us apart, and what is it inviting us to do? The same thing that Jesus did, to go through something like our own passion, our own transformation, our own growing and becoming who we’re intended to be, but also there’s an image in this passage from Paul that says, “You’ve been given this grace, this favor from God.” And it’s about our apostleship ⎯ apostleship. What is apostleship? Being an apostle is being one who is sent out to do something. A disciple is somebody who’s learning. All the disciples became apostles. All the learning, all the growth that we have inside of us that puts us in touch with who we are and the process of transformation that God’s grace and presence and peace creates in us, all of that is what we are engaged in, to be continually moving in this direction of being people who move from discipleship to apostleship. That means we’re interested in giving something to other people, sharing this wisdom.
So what I’m asking you to consider in these images of grace and peace that they are the fruits of the presence of God inside of our hearts, and when we connect with that, we join the intention of God. And the intention of God is that we bring grace and peace to the people around us. And there’s something about Christianity that’s dangerous, that can be subtly getting into our way of imagining what God is asking of us and, in a way, stop the process. And when it’s too focused on perfection and our own selves and we are so interested in becoming holy and perfect and sinless, and that’s not the process of apostleship. The apostleship is not interested in so much being a perfect person but being a person who helps other people to be better, to be stronger, to be closer to the reality of who they are. In other words, if we focus not just on self but on guiding other people into this place called the kingdom, where we find so much grace, so much peace, that’s the challenge, and that’s the work of Advent, to awaken us to this beautiful world that we’re to live in, a world of grace and peace, knowing that we have a gift to share and a wellbeing that we are participating in that very gift. God bless you.
Father, Saint Paul gives us this beautiful image of who you are, the God who fills us with all that we need. So bless us with this grace that sends us forth to share our faith with one another and the peace that ends the tension and the war inside of us trying to get rid of our sins and growing into a place of patience as you slowly transform us. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.