Family History

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

12.22.13; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Matthew 1:1-17

So we’ve wandered away from the pre-assigned readings a little bit this morning, into the section that begins Matthew’s story of the birth of Jesus.  Why?  Why, you may ask, would I have subjected you to seventeen verses of that?  

C’mon, please, something Christmasy, anything Christmasy, but please, not another list, because Lord have mercy, you already have lists waiting for you at home.  Those lists weigh on your minds as the minutes click away to Christmas day with the tension-building relentlessness of a self-destruct sequence in some sci fi flick.  “An Alien versus Predator Christmas Special,” perhaps.  Just don’t open that large egg shaped package, unless you’re planning on having Christmas dinner end unpleasantly.

And still, in the back of our minds, that list of things we haven’t done clicks down in Siri’s voice.  “Seasonal autodestruct failsafe has been passed.  Your Christmas will be a complete failure and your children will hate you forever in nineteen.  Eighteen.  Seventeen.  Sixteen.”  

But it’s Advent, and as we’ve said for the last four Sundays as we’ve lit those candles, Advent means arrival, and arrivals are beginnings.  Given that we’re talking about the birth of Jesus in just over a day and a half, you’d think starting at the beginning would be a good thing, but here?  Here at the first verse of the first chapter of the first book of the New Testament?  Hoo boy.

As a writer who struggles with only occasional to come up with the best possible start to my stories, that hook, that sentence that draws you in?  Wow.  The greatest story ever told kinda doesn’t exactly get off to a riveting start.  

It’s a list, one that you can easily imagine being read by Ben Stein in a class once he’s stopped saying “Bueller?  Bueller?  Bueller?”  And if the Gospels are our greatest tool for evangelism, the best way to teach a broken world about the joyous message of Jesus Christ, why for the love of Pete would we start them this way?

That the wise Christian souls who select our readings every year have chosen to skip over this passage makes a ton of sense, not least because it’s the sort of text that makes most readers break down and weep openly in front of the whole congregation. Shealtiel?  Who names their kids Shealtiel?  Probably the same kind of folks who name their sons Salmon.  Not the fish.  Not sahmohn. SaL - Mon, like Poh-Keh-Mon.  There’s nothing like publicly reading seventeen verses of one barely pronounceable name after another to reinforce your fear of public speaking.  

Instead, they start with our second passage from today, as Joseph the father of Jesus struggles to come to terms with the reality that his new bride is pregnant and he’s not the father.  That passage, and Joseph’s acceptance of this child, that feels like Christmas.  But this one?  It gets skipped for a reason.

So why did Matthew start his story that way?  Why is a long list of names the way we begin?

Because to understand Jesus, it helps to know the family he was born into.  That’s what Matthew’s doing here, because each of these names isn’t just a name, stuck onto the equivalent of an ancient Judean organizational chart.  These are people with stories, part of a web of relationships that went back thousands of years.

And when Matthew writes this list, he’s writing it to people who would have known exactly what he was talking about.  Matthew’s Gospel was written to a community of Christians who were still deeply connected to their Jewish heritage, and every single name on that list would have echoed with a personal story.  These were old family tales, each name opening up like a flower with a rich narrative all it’s own.

Oh, Abraham we know, because that’s where the story of the family begins.   And we know Isaac his son.  We know Isaac’s tricksy son Jacob, who wheeled and dealed his way through life, stealing blessings and always with some scheme up his sleeve.  There are women, too, on this list Matthew has slapped together.   They tend to be the...well...how to put this...the “interesting” women.  

There’s Rahab, who worked as a foreign prostitute before she married into the family.  There’s Ruth, who even though she came from a people who were enemies managed to prove her faithfulness, so much so that Rahab’s son couldn’t help but fall in love with her.  

Like father, like son, those folks listening would have thought.

There’s Bathsheba, when David saw her bathing on the roof, and her beauty and the moonlight overthrew him.  Matthew’s still a little unfairly cheesed at her, to the point that he won’t even speak her name.  You know, that woman.  The wife of Uriah.  But the kid that came out of that sordid mess was Solomon the wise.  Can’t leave him out, now, can you?

Name after name, and mixed in with the names, the times of family triumph and disaster are whispering echoes.  “King David,” says Matthew, the only time in this long list he uses a title.  King David.  Remember when he was King.  We had a real King, once, a weeping, singing, a beautiful and flawed poet-warrior.

And in the list, too, a little note...remember when we were forced to move, when everything we had was torn away from us and we found ourselves owned by the man, struggling to get by in a strange land?  And heads would nod.  Yeah, we all know what that feels like.

It’s a list, sure, and lists are boring, but churning just under the surface of the list is the story of a family going forty-two generations back.

And Lord have mercy, families are many things, but boring is rarely one of them.  Families are messy and complicated and alive, so much so that maybe a little bit of boring might be welcome for a change.

This time of year, we feel that strongly.  Because this season is the time when families gather and reconvene.  Or they don’t, and we feel that too.  It’s a time of year when those memories of our family life mix and bubble to the surface, when old patterns of life seems to rise back up and claim our souls, for good or ill.

It’s a time to sing and laugh and reconnect.  It’s the time when we remember the laughter of voices that are now passed, and old wounds of loss and misunderstanding and betrayal reopen just enough to sting.

It’s the mess of family, and that, I think, is why Matthew brings up those stories.  This is who we are, he’s saying.  This is where we came from.  

And now into this mess, we’ve brought something new.  We’ve chosen to let it in, just as Joseph chose to claim that child as his own.  That’s the promise of this Season, that into the mess and flesh and chaos of human story, something new has entered in.  And that new thing has the promise of changing the whole feel of the story.

Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.

Stale Expectations

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 12.15.13

Scripture Lesson: Matthew 11:2-11

It’s that time of year, when the days have grown as short and cold as Napoleon’s corpse, when every day brings the possibility of winter banging down your plans for the day.

Oh, there are times we try to push past our relationship with the reality of Washington area Decembers and Januaries.  We stay late to get that memo done, even though the rest of the office has piled out early.  It’s just gotta get done, we tell ourselves.  I can make it to the daycare on time if I factor in an extra...ten minutes.  Surely that’ll be enough.  We fling ourselves out onto the highway, convinced that maybe, just maybe, every driver in the Washington Metropolitan Region will have remembered everything they were taught about driving in inclement weather.

Hope springs eternal.

Here we have a sprawling urban megaplex designed around the car, a transportation network which barely works in the best of times.  A little rain, a light dusting, wild and crazy things like the sun setting, these events turn the entire overcomplex system into an unworkable mess. We should know better.

We do that a few times, times that involve us sitting in traffic for six and a half hours, increasingly regretting the large bucket of coffee we drank right before leaving.  The snarl of cars inches and slides forward, a dying serpent wriggling through the slush.  Night falls, and we’re still in our cars grows later and later and we become more and more terrified that the daycare center will sell our toddlers to organ harvesters.  Those late fees do pile up after all.

We learn, pretty quickly, that there are times when the patterns of our everyday life just have to change.  We leave early.  We stay home.  We adjust, because we’ve encountered something that demands an adjustment.  We can’t just do what we do, because suddenly right in front of us is something that makes those expectations and patterns of life completely meaningless.

Those huge events, those major moments when reality comes and whups us upside the head, sometimes we have trouble wrapping our minds around them.  We still expect, in our simple human way, that we’ll be able to just stumble onwards with our lives as they always have been, no matter what new things we encounter.

But sometimes, we encounter things that so challenge our expectations that we find ourselves forced to adapt.

And here, defying our expectations for this season, we find ourselves flung far forward into the story of Jesus.  It’s only the third Sunday in Advent, as those candles tell us, and we’ve leapt ahead smack into the middle of Matthew’s story. Jesus isn’t gurgling and cooing cherubically in the stench and smell of the Manger.  Forget wise men and stars in the East.  Forget Bethlehem and the manger.  

We’re thirty years ahead now.  He’s already preached the Sermon on the Mount, and shared his message with thousands. So why here, why now in the story?  

Because, again, this is the Advent season.

These passages from Matthew’s Gospel lay out the details of what is a complex relationship between John the Baptist and Jesus, and are chosen for this season because they speak to two separate things, each of which is essential for grasping the purpose of this season.

First, in talking to the crowds that had gathered to listen to him teach, Jesus affirms again that John the Baptist bore a message that was fundamentally similar to the one that he himself preached.  He does not come to replace or to challenge John, but instead bears a message that honors his teaching.

That Matthew intentionally includes this story here is a testament to the ongoing reputation of John the Baptist in the Jewish community, even during the time of the early church.  He’d been a pretty big deal, with some very passionate and dedicated followers, and for the early church, establishing that John and Jesus were both in communication and on the same page was intensely important.

He goes so far as to equate John the Baptist with Elijah the prophet, who in Jewish tradition had never died, and would return to announce the fulfillment of the messianic age.

Second, Jesus...assuming that many who have come to listen to him also went out to listen to John as he preached and proclaimed in the wilderness...pitches them a couple of pointed rhetorical questions.

Why did you go out into the wilderness?  What did you expect to encounter there?

It seems a simple enough question, but Jesus gives them answers.  Did you expect to see a reed shaken by the wind?  Did you expect to see someone dressed in soft robes?

The first answer may suggest tall grasses growing in the wilderness, but it might also be intended to evoke an image on the coins circulated by Herod, which included a reed.   The second answer was mean to evoke wealth and opulence, the garb worn by the hangers on around the court of Herod and the priests who helped themselves to the riches that poured into the cities.

To which his listeners would undoubtedly say, well, of course we weren’t!  Why would we go out into the desert to see someone dressed up, or to look for coins?  I mean, c’mon.  Why would we do that?

And then Jesus reminded them of just what it was that John came into the world to preach.  Which, of course, pressed his listeners to come to terms with the reality that they claimed to understand about why they’d gone to listen to John in the first place, and why they came to hear Jesus.

“You know,” Jesus says, “that you were going to see a prophet.  But did you really listen to what that prophet was saying?”  Because the implications of what John the Baptist taught from his place out there in the wilderness weren’t just that he paid no attention to his own comfort and his own needs.  

They weren’t just going out there to spectate.  They were there to stand in encounter with the message that John bore...and by extension, the message that Jesus was soon to live out and embody.

It was a message that bore such potency that for all of John the Baptist’s fame, and for all of his sacred reputation, Jesus could say with confidence that even the most incompetent and stumbling member of the Kingdom of God would be “greater” than John.

That’s the experience that Jesus was teaching.  That’s the point and purpose of all of his parables, which draw us as listeners into relationship with the Kingdom that he proclaimed.  That’s the reason underlying these days, and we have to ask ourselves if we really grasp what we’re in encounter with as we gather here to celebrate the season.

What is the nature of the encounter we’re seeking here?  As we gather every Sunday, do we really grasp the depth of what it is we are intentionally stepping into?  Even standing here, with my comfy robe, I find myself struggling with the implications of what it is that Jesus taught, because to truly stand in engaged relationship with it is a tiny bit staggering.

It’s easier, far easier, just to drift along through this Advent season without realizing what it is we are being called into relationship with.  It’s not the expected, not the shine of your Harvest Reed Mastercard, not the remarkable comfort of your Land’s End Goretex Liturgical Garments.

It is the season of Immanuel, of God with us, of a time of justice when what we hear and see changes.

How, in this season, are we being transformed towards that purpose?  Because when you encounter something as radical as what Jesus describes, it has an impact on who we are.  It defines who we are, shaping our responses not just to that event, but to everything.

Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN

Different Deserts

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

12.08.13; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Matthew 3:1-12

The story we hear today is a story of a desert faith, a story of a human being whose life was formed and shaped by the dry desolation of the wilderness, and that’s a bit of a hurdle.  Because here on the East Coast, we don’t really have a feel for the whole desert thing.

This area of the mid-Atlantic is green and moist and seasonal.  Today couldn’t feel less like desert, to be frank.  From what the Super Doppler Storm Center Nerve Center Weather Alert Action Team was telling me on the eights this morning, the official forecast for this afternoon is “Slurpee.”  I’m hoping for a mix of Berry Citrus Slam and Coca Cola Classic, although I’ll admit that cleanup could get a little bit sticky.  

Few things could seem further away than the hot arid brightness of Arizona or the Sahara.  

Earlier in the week, it did sort of feel like summer, which was bizarre given what today is like, but even at the very height of a Washington summer, it’s nothing at all like what you’d encounter in New Mexico.  Here, summer is like getting into a jacuzzi while wearing a sleeping bag. Take yourself out into the wastes, and the heat is totally dry, with strong winds that howl across the flatlands and up the sides of the arroyos with not a single molecule of H2O in them. It’s the kind of dry that greedily pulls the moisture from your mouth and throat, leaving your throat like sandstone, and your eyes like sand-crusted marbles.

Desert is a dead place, barren and empty and devoid of water, and nothing could be farther from our experience.  What little potential you find for life there holds on by the skin of the teeth of its nails, or something like that. It is the farthest thing from a place of abundance.

And our world, the world we inhabit, is a land of remarkable abundance.  Everything is big, everything is copious and bountiful and supersized.  Our food is large, our houses are large, and the vehicles we drive to go get our large food to eat in our large house as we sit in front of our large screen?  Well, they’re large too.

If deserts are dry places, our abundance is perhaps best measured in water, and we Americans really do have plenty of water.  How much water we use on a daily basis has always hornswoggled me.  The average American household uses...according to EPA data... around 300 gallons per day.  When you factor in all of the water used to create all of the food and products we consume, that translates into...per person...over seven hundred and fifty thousand gallons of water per person per year.  I can’t quite process this.

Americans do not have a desert mentality.  And yet in all of this abundance, the great river of water and product that flows through our lives, we still feel that there is something missing.  It’s a peculiar thing.  We can still feel that absence, like our lives are an empty and dry wilderness.

The desert and those wilderness places in the world have always been central to the lives of those who wanted to get down to the most essential, the most necessary, the most vital parts of their faith. Throughout the history of the people of Israel, desert places had always been the ones that had provided refuge from the distractions of the world. It was into the wilderness that monks had fled seeking escape, and it was from the wilderness that prophets came with proclamations of truths that were beyond the grasp of those who had forgotten what was truly necessary in the world.

As Matthew’s Gospel begins, we heard today of a prophet who came from the wilderness, of John the Baptist. Mark’s book of the story of Christ begins by first declaring itself good news, and then gets right into a reference from the prophet Isaiah. That prophet’s poetic cry of the arrival of a messenger in the wilderness is declared a reference to John the Baptist. What John did was not too uncommon among the Hebrew people. Rituals of cleansing in water were part of the way in which Jews in the first century reclaimed themselves and recommitted themselves to their faith. In order to be ritually pure for worship in the temple, the Torah requires ritual bathing. It’s the ritual of the mikvah, and it’s still practiced today.  While the process of being baptized was not quite the same, it had the same spiritual foundation.

But while there were similarities between what John did by the banks of the Jordan and what others had done before, there were some real and significant differences. What was striking about John was how intensely he pointed beyond the act that he was engaged in. While he was engaging in a ritual that had deep symbolic roots, the one who was to follow on afterwards, and who John himself was to baptize...that one would engage in an act far more potent and transforming than the ritual and symbolic cleansing of baptism by water.

The baptism by the Holy Spirit described by involves a far deeper transformation, a changing of the will through the presence of the grace of God. That sense of the presence of God, and the awareness that in some strange way God is working through you to change you, that was the point of that moment of baptism.  God’s kingdom is present, right here, so close you can touch it.  This was at the core of what John the Baptist taught.  We hear it in chapter three, verse one, when he says “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”

In Matthew’s story, this message is also the heart of the message proclaimed by Jesus, who...after being baptized by John, goes out into the desert for a time of testing and preparation.  When he returns, we hear in Matthew 4:17 that he picks up that very same cry: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”

But, you may ask, how does this work for us, today? To get a sense of the powerful presence of God’s Spirit, the prophets wandered out into the wildernesses of Judea. To know the working of God’s grace in themselves, the monks of the early Christian church isolated themselves in the deserts of North Africa, seeking out places where life was whittled down to its most essential.  Nothing extra, just enough to sustain the process of life.

We live in a very different place.  We live in a land where in many of the thousands of catalogs that seem to show up at my door every day, one hot selling product this year appears to be a hat with a fake knit face beard attached.  I realize that beards are awesome, obviously, but is this really a thing we need.  We live in a land where we pour our real money into virtual things, like, say, an app that was banned from the iTunes store earlier this year.  It was called “I Am Rich,” and all it did was cause a single red gem to glow in the center of your device.  Cost: Nine Hundred and Ninety Nine Dollars and Ninety Nine Cents.  Evidently, the app name “I Have More Money Than Sense” was already taken.

For all of our abundance, for all of the choking, crushing cornucopia of materialism, we are far closer to the desert than we might think.  It feels, sometimes, as if all of the stuff that pours out of the maw of consumer culture is as relentless and inhospitable as a Death Valley sun at the middle of the day.  Those possessions and the expectations they create beat down upon us, and shrivel us, and leave us parched and spiritless and dry as antelope bone.

So perhaps, perhaps we do know the desert experience.  We all have our wilderness places.

Those broken and barren places may be a friendship that has soured. It might be a relationship where once there was love and now there is only hurt. It might be a time of struggle with illness and mortal frailty.  It might be a place that should bring direction and hope, but brings only anger and confusion. It might be a season that should bring comfort and joy, but instead yields only stress and grasping and an absurd sense of inadequacy. 

So I’ll take back what I said about how we don’t know the wilderness.  Our lives do not lack for deserts.  They’re just different deserts.  They test us as truly as the burning sun tested the prophets. How we respond to those times and places is the measure of our faith.

We all have our deserts. And just like we need to take every opportunity to drink in the desert to keep it from drying us out like a stone, we need to take every opportunity to both seek and express the fruits of the Spirit in those desert places in our lives. There is no moment or place in your life where that cannot be expressed, where the Spirit cannot work change. It comes when you offer a word of grace instead of a cutting remark. It comes when you choose to reach out to someone who is different, or who seems to stand in opposition to you. It comes when you choose to help someone grow, instead of ignoring them or allowing them to continue to fail.

Whereever your desert is, however it tests you, remember:  From that time of testing comes the possibility of deeper graces, and a stronger relation with our Creator, whose Kingdom is, truly, at hand.

Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN. 

The Day and the Hour

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 12.01.13

Scripture Lesson: Matthew 24:36-44

Here we’ve come out of the great feast of Thanksgiving, and the impact of every last one of those gravy-ladled carbs can be felt as we try to cram ourselves back into those pants...that must...oof...have shrunk the last time...urgh...we did a wash.

I’m particularly sensitive to that this year, because over the last few months, I’ve been trying to push back the inexorable sprawl of my mid-forties midsection.   

It was largely inspired, I think, by the pictures posted on Facebook after the water-balloon fight.  I’d just gotten back from the beach and some time in Hawaii, during which I’d managed to slather on more pounds than sunscreen, and seeing those images up on social media was a wee bit difficult.  

Those pictures pranged up against my internalized images of myself, to the point that it suddenly struck me that I no longer matched my concept of myself.  Lord have mercy, I look like that now?  It was like someone slapped an Amish beard and a t-shirt onto a lightly moistened manatee.  

With the scale showing just a tick shy of my goodness I’ve never seen that number before, I was fully thirty pounds heavier than I’d been when my oldest son was born, and he’s not *that* old.  I was feeling it.

I could feel it as I moved, feel it as I tried to run.  It was clear that I was in a pattern that was slowly and permanently adding to my mass.  I’d never paid much attention to it, honestly, but that time of inattention just needed to come to an end.  I was going to have to make some changes.

And the real challenge to those changes was that those couldn’t be fleeting.  Oh, but we want them to be.  We want to be able to just drink a bunch of protein shakes, or buy into some product or program or pill, and then...bam...we’ll suddenly be just like we were when we were twenty.  Or maybe there’s just an app.

But the reality is very different.  You have to make a change, and then you have to make it stick. It has to be every day, or it isn’t going to accomplish anything.  It’s meant, for me, smaller meal portions, consistently and every day.  It’s meant avoiding the urge to snack.  It’s meant...and this is the painful one...ratcheting waaay back on the tasty hoppy and highly caloric India Pale Ales.  It has meant that longstanding habits have had to shift, and be replaced by habits that involve more exercise and fewer calories.

That sustained, day-in, day-out pattern is the nature of intentional change, and the only way we really transition ourselves. It’s not one day, or one moment, or one instant.  It takes work and focus and sustained effort.  If we want anything truly new to happen for us, it happens only when we make the difficult choice that comes from choosing differently every single day.

But we really don’t want to hear that.  We want it right now.

Which I think is why for over two thousand years, Christians have struggled to interpret and engage with the passage that launches our season this Advent.  It’s kind of a funny way to start out the Advent season, actually.  We’re prepping ourselves for a season of celebration, as our neighborhoods begin to fill with lights and wreaths, and what we hear from the lectionary is this?  Talk about the flood, and then end of things?  I mean, shoot, things can’t end yet.  There’s still shopping to do!

This section from Matthew’s Gospel is one that is echoed in Luke 21, with both Matthew and Luke drawing from the original text of Mark in Mark 13.  It’s Mark’s Little Apocalypse, which was picked up by and expanded upon by Matthew.  In that expansion, we have a text that has been used in some rather interesting ways over the last coupla thousand years.

This text and its mirror in Luke, perhaps more than any others, have been used to justify a Christian teaching called the Rapture.  If you’re not familiar with this peculiar doctrine, it’s the idea that at some point before the end of all things, everyone who’s gotten themselves in right with God will be suddenly whisked off into heaven.  When things get rough, folks will just vanish into thin air, because, you know, that’s what Jesus says.  Two men in a field, one gets left.  Two women grinding at the mill, one gets left.  It’s become something of a “get out of jail free” theological card for the faithful, promising that when God finally gets into that smiting mood, no faithful person will actually have to suffer.

That premise was the entire point of those Left Behind books, which sold like hotcakes just a decade ago, and which were made into some of the most marginally watchable films ever to arrive on a screen back in the year 2000.   For cinephiles, take note: they’re trying a reboot of the franchise, with the Kirk Cameron role now played by Nicolas Cage.

The idea of the Rapture feeds into a peculiar fascination that so many people have about how things will end, and that they come from this passage seems the deepest of ironies.  What people hear is that one is taken and another is left, and somehow suddenly we’ve got Jesus standing next to Scottie in the transporter room beaming up the righteous while leaving the unrighteous stranded on Ceti Alpha Five.

It’s what leads so many folks to make wild predictions about when things will end, to be tragically consumed by an obsession with the end times.  That, as evidenced by the fate of Family Radio broadcaster Harold Camping this last year, only ends in sorrow.

In fact, the point Jesus is making in these stories is precisely and diametrically opposed to the idea of the Rapture.  As a doctrine the Rapture, does three things.  First, it distracts us. It becomes an object over which Christians speculate and debate, even though the very passages that supposedly justify this teaching tell us that we shouldn’t.  It’s been predicted countless times over human history, most recently and famously by Harold Camping.  Camping was a Christian radio broadcaster.  He seemed a decent guy, actually, if you got to know him, but he became obsessed with finding the date and the time of the Rapture.  He figured he’d cracked the code, and got the word out through his radio network.  That date, if you’ll recall, was October 21, 2011.  That was not a happy day for Camping and his followers, and honestly?  The relentless media attention was a bit of an embarrassment for Christianity.  

Second, the very idea of the Rapture makes the assumption that being Christian means escaping times of trial and suffering.  This is not true, and it has never been true. Looking out over the course of human history, Christians have struggled and weathered their way through not just personal hardships, but disasters and famines and the collapses of entire societies.  The faith remained when Rome fell, and the faith endured when storms raged and the earth shook.  

Our faith gives us the strength to cope with trial, and to do so with as much grace as possible.  But what it is not is an escape.  We endure, and we transcend, but we do not flee from suffering.  That’s why we have this symbol hanging in most of our sanctuaries.

Third, the Rapture puts more emphasis on a single moment than it does on the lifelong process of being transformed.  Instead of focusing on the manner of life that should define every moment of a Christian’s journey, the misreading of this passage as indicating a “rapture” completely distracts from the entire purpose of the teaching.  It’s about preparation in the right now, about living your whole existence in such a way that it reflects your end purpose.

The purpose of faith is not to distract us. It is to give us something that cements our integrity, that focuses our lives every day on a new way of living. That’s what transforms us, slowly but surely, in ways that go well beyond dropping extra pounds.  

And for all of the joyousness of this season, that’s the entire point of Advent.  It is a reminder that God’s most gracious intent for us does not exist as an abstraction.  It was and is incarnate. It was born, and lived among us. It breathed and ate and grew, and in every moment, was fulfilling its purpose.

Being aware of that, and living into it, that’s the entire purpose of this Advent season.

Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN