Fourth Sunday Of Advent
Preaching
Lectionary Preaching Workbook
Series VII, Cycle C
Object:
Theme For The Day
Advent is a time for seeing the promise.
Old Testament Lesson
Micah 5:2-5a
The Shepherd-King From Bethlehem
"O Little Town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie...." Here is the text that provided the inspiration for this famous carol. From this small, insignificant town shall come the one who is to rule in Israel -- "whose origin is from old, from ancient days" (recalling the glories of the Davidic dynasty, v. 2). Verse 3 speaks of waiting until the time when "she who is in labor has brought forth" -- evidently, the mother of the new king. Further emphasizing the Davidic imagery, this messianic figure will, like that greatest of Israel's monarchs keeping his sheep, "stand and feed his flock in the strength of the Lord" (v. 4). Iconic imagery abounds in this passage: David is the shepherd-king, whom the church will later identify with Jesus, the good shepherd.
New Testament Lesson
Hebrews 10:5-10
A Body To Sacrifice
Out of the long and convoluted argument in Hebrews that Jesus is the new high priest, making perfect sacrifice for the sins of the people, are plucked these five verses -- quite out of context. For proper understanding, they must be read with reference to the entire argument. This passage speaks of Jesus coming into the world and being given a body, so he can offer it in sacrifice. The concept of Jesus "coming into the world" is likely the reason for the selection of this passage as an Advent text, but it is an odd choice -- and a difficult passage to preach, because it requires elaborate background information about the overall message of the Letter to the Hebrews.
The Gospel
Luke 1:39-45 (46-55)
Blessed Are You Among Women
In order to emphasize the miraculous events by which Jesus came into the world, Luke presents the parallel story of Elizabeth and the birth of John the Baptist. These two stories, in turn, echo the Old Testament accounts of the birth of Samuel to Hannah. This episode is famous in Christian art as "the Visitation." It is the subject of innumerable paintings from the Medieval and Renaissance eras. John the Baptist leaps in Elizabeth's womb when he hears Mary's greeting. "Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb," marvels Elizabeth (v. 42). She is obviously privy to the secret of the miraculous way Jesus has been conceived. The passage continues with an optional extension, the Magnificat of Mary -- a powerful hymn extolling not only God's goodness in offering the Messiah to the world, but also upholding the cause of justice for the poor, even at the expense of the rich and powerful.
Preaching Possibilities
It's a scene that happens in the early months of pregnancy, in many an obstetrician's office: An expectant mother and father are ushered into an examining room. The mother-to-be lies on her back, on a vinyl-covered table topped by a sheet of crackly white paper. The nurse asks her to pull up the lower portion of her blouse, exposing her swelling abdomen.
Taking a plastic squeeze-bottle, she spreads a thin film of clear, conducting jelly on the expectant mother's skin. Then the nurse takes a device into her hands that looks like an oversized electric razor. It's tethered by a thick wire to a large, electronic console on wheels. Slowly the nurse slides the handheld device over the expectant mother's abdomen. It emits a soft, buzzing noise.
Off to one corner of the room sits the doctor, peering intently into a computer screen. "Aha!" she exclaims, swiveling the screen around so the mother- and father-to-be can see it. "Look there!"
The parents look -- and there, almost lost in the grainy, low-resolution image, is a tiny, beating heart. They squint, and look some more: a scrawny leg becomes visible to their eyes, then an arm. A coil of umbilical cord connects to what must be the belly. The head -- chin bent downward to the chest -- seems impossibly large.
It's a modern miracle: the ultrasound scan of a fetus in utero. Nowadays, it's the first vision most parents have of their child-to-be. That grainy, indistinct ultrasound image -- thoughtfully printed out for them by the medical office staff -- is likely to become the first image in their baby's scrapbook. Some enthusiastic first-time parents have been known to display it on their Christmas cards.
Ultrasound wasn't available, of course, to Mary and Elizabeth, those two expectant mothers in the first chapter of Luke. When Mary, cheeks flushed with pregnancy (and with the residual awe of having just met an angel), goes to visit her cousin Elizabeth, both women rely on the timeless technique of a hand on the belly to sense the reality of the child within. Elizabeth doesn't need the touch of a hand any longer: for the moment she beholds her cousin walking toward her, "the child leaps in her womb." Elizabeth's son -- the child who will one day become John the Baptist -- has, in some mysterious way, come to recognize his own cousin: Jesus Christ, Savior of the world.
Somehow, with a mother's intuition, Elizabeth and Mary can both see the promise, growing within them. Through tears of joy they gaze into each other's eyes. Without exchanging a word, each one knows the other is deeply blessed. Elizabeth does finally put that thought into words: "Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb" (Luke 1:42b). It's a handy talent, this ability to see the promise.
Where would Mary have been without it? Just think about how Mary might have received the angel, otherwise. She was only a young teenager, after all. In that society, that meant she had very little status. First, she was young. Second, she was a woman. Third, she came from a humble family of common people. Who would believe the angel Gabriel would come to the likes of her? To plain old Mary?
Who, indeed? Scripture doesn't record for us the reaction of her parents, but we can well imagine what it might have been. There she is, engaged to Joseph, a solid, hardworking craftsman. Her dowry is paid, her life is reliably spread out before her, and then Mary shows up with this news of a pregnancy. What a disgrace! She risks losing everything. Her parents must have been furious.
Scripture doesn't tell us, either, exactly why Mary goes off to visit her cousin Elizabeth in the hill country: but it may well have been to hide her pregnancy. It may have been that, when Mary's parents heard the news, they packed her off to that distant relative's home. There, they may have thought to themselves (in the tradition of parents of unwed mothers from time immemorial), she can wait out her remaining months, and quietly have her baby -- away from prying eyes and gossiping mouths.
Yet when Mary sees her cousin, she instantly knows there's a reason why she's traveled all that distance and that reason has nothing to do with keeping a secret. For Elizabeth receives her with the warmest possible greeting: "Blessed are you...."
It's not the sort of thing people typically say to an unmarried teenage mother. No, the people around such a troubled young woman are more likely to say, "Cursed are you. Cursed are you, to have brought such a fate down upon yourself, and upon this family." Elizabeth, however, has no such reservations. She welcomes her kinswoman with open arms. She blesses her.
More than that, Elizabeth treats Mary as her social superior -- despite their difference in age: "And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me?" The very fact that Elizabeth's own unborn child leaps in the womb is an early sign of what the adult John the Baptist will one day say of his cousin, Jesus: "He must increase, and I must decrease."
Mary's not the only one who can see the promise. Elizabeth does, too. Between them, they have more than enough faith to see this thing through, and to bring into the world both Jesus and John: two men who, between them, will change the world. It couldn't have happened without the faithful vision of Mary and Elizabeth; their ability not only to hear God's promise, but to see it being lived out, before their very eyes. These two need no sonogram to know what quality of life they carry within them.
It's not always an easy thing to glimpse God's promise in these days before Christmas. It's so much easier to see the things the world is fond of seeing this time of year. The promise of the secular Christmas is merrymaking, without true joy. It's a profusion of material goods, bereft of spiritual values. It's frantic, scurrying people grasping for things they don't have, all the while failing to recognize gifts of the Spirit they've already been offered in abundance.
If, as we move in and out of both the sacred and secular manifestations of the holiday, we can only ask ourselves, "Where can I meet God in this?" we may be pleasantly surprised at how often God pops up. Even the tackiest, most materialistic holiday observances have at their base a deep yearning for the good, the kind, the beautiful. Better to affirm the good that's present there, than to lose ourselves in griping and criticism. Better to open our eyes and see the promise than to close them and not see much of anything at all.
Mary found herself in quite a predicament during the early months of her pregnancy. Undoubtedly there was tension in her family. There was fear of losing her fiancé, Joseph. There was shame at the hands of a censorious and unforgiving culture. Yet Mary sees none of these things. Instead, she feels the new life stirring within her. She gives herself over to that life. Most of all, she remembers the promise she received from the angel, and she believes it.
Blessed are you, O Mary, "who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken ... by the Lord" (Luke 1:45). Blessed are we, as well, if we walk through these final days of Advent with eyes wide open to the signs of God's presence -- and God's promise -- all around us!
Prayer For The Day
God of all hope and joy,
open our hearts in welcome,
that your Son, Jesus Christ, at his coming
may find in us a dwelling prepared for him,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God now and forever. Amen.
To Illustrate
Before the onslaught of Christmas materialism, it's easy for good, Christian people to get discouraged about the holiday. We all do it: We complain. We complain about Christmas trees going up in department stores before Halloween. We complain of how "Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer" and "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" seem to drown out "O Come All Ye Faithful" and "Silent Night." We complain about giant inflatable Santas and snowmen on front lawns. We complain that the holiday seems to have hijacked the holy day.
Well, these observations are all true enough, but if we Christians let our distaste for yuletide materialism overcome the spiritual meaning of Christmas, then the materialists have won. There are two ways to get sidetracked by secularism at Christmas: We can give in completely to shallow, "Seasons Greetings" materialism, or we can invest so much energy fighting it that we lose track of what Christmas is all about. Far better to go through these few remaining days of Advent smiling with amusement at the tinseled excess all around us, while remaining attentive to the true gold that glimmers only briefly, and can be found only by those who truly seek it.
***
I know that this world is a world of imagination and vision. I see everything I paint in this world but everybody does not see alike. To the eye of a miser a guinea is far more beautiful than the sun and a bag worn with the use of money has more beautiful proportions than a vine filled with grapes. The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way. As a man is so he sees. When the sun rises, do you not see a round disk of fire something like a gold piece? O no, no, I see an innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying, "Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty."
-- William Blake, eighteenth-century English painter and poet, cited in Geoffrey Cumberledge, A Treasury of the Kingdom (London: Oxford University Press, 1954)
***
The same pattern of rebirth that I learned in baptism showed up in everything from bathing to watering plants. The same pattern of relationship that I learned in communion was available in every meal eaten mindfully. The laying-on of hands took place as I held a crying baby or rubbed the shoulders of a tired friend. With a little oil, I could even offer the sacrament of a pretty good massage. When I walked outside and looked at the smoking compost heap, I saw a sacrament of death turning into life. When I used my little bottle of whiteout to correct a mistake, I remembered that my errors did not have to be permanent. Everywhere I turned, the most insignificant things in the world were preaching little sermons to me. Everywhere I turned, the world was leaking light. All that was required, apparently, was my willingness to be a priest -- to walk through the world aware of God's presence, ready to hold ordinary things up to heaven with my own hands so that I and anyone else who was interested could see the holiness in them -- even the soiled and broken things that were just waiting for someone to come along and love them (I learned this part from Jesus).... Following the leader, I take the very ordinary stuff of my life into my very human hands. I bless it, break it so that the light comes out, and then I offer it back to God -- who, nine times out of ten, says, "Thanks, but you can have it. I made it all for you."
-- Barbara Brown Taylor, When God Is Silent (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Cowley Publications, 1988)
** *
A penny can hide the sun if we hold it close enough to the eye, and a transient difficulty can shut out from a fearful soul all life's large blessings and all the horizons of divine will.
-- Harry Emerson Fosdick
***
The master became a legend in his lifetime. It was said that God once sought his advice. "I want to play a game of hide-and-seek with humankind. I've asked my angels what the best place is to hide in. Some say the depths of the ocean. Others the top of the highest mountain. Others still the far side of the moon or a distant star. What do you suggest?"
Said the master, "Hide in the human heart. That's the last place they will think of!"
-- Anthony DeMello
***
Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.
-- Carl Jung
***
It is the heart always that sees before the head can see.
-- Thomas Carlyle
***
Every mother is like Moses. She does not enter the promised land. She prepares a world she will not see.
-- Pope Paul VI
Advent is a time for seeing the promise.
Old Testament Lesson
Micah 5:2-5a
The Shepherd-King From Bethlehem
"O Little Town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie...." Here is the text that provided the inspiration for this famous carol. From this small, insignificant town shall come the one who is to rule in Israel -- "whose origin is from old, from ancient days" (recalling the glories of the Davidic dynasty, v. 2). Verse 3 speaks of waiting until the time when "she who is in labor has brought forth" -- evidently, the mother of the new king. Further emphasizing the Davidic imagery, this messianic figure will, like that greatest of Israel's monarchs keeping his sheep, "stand and feed his flock in the strength of the Lord" (v. 4). Iconic imagery abounds in this passage: David is the shepherd-king, whom the church will later identify with Jesus, the good shepherd.
New Testament Lesson
Hebrews 10:5-10
A Body To Sacrifice
Out of the long and convoluted argument in Hebrews that Jesus is the new high priest, making perfect sacrifice for the sins of the people, are plucked these five verses -- quite out of context. For proper understanding, they must be read with reference to the entire argument. This passage speaks of Jesus coming into the world and being given a body, so he can offer it in sacrifice. The concept of Jesus "coming into the world" is likely the reason for the selection of this passage as an Advent text, but it is an odd choice -- and a difficult passage to preach, because it requires elaborate background information about the overall message of the Letter to the Hebrews.
The Gospel
Luke 1:39-45 (46-55)
Blessed Are You Among Women
In order to emphasize the miraculous events by which Jesus came into the world, Luke presents the parallel story of Elizabeth and the birth of John the Baptist. These two stories, in turn, echo the Old Testament accounts of the birth of Samuel to Hannah. This episode is famous in Christian art as "the Visitation." It is the subject of innumerable paintings from the Medieval and Renaissance eras. John the Baptist leaps in Elizabeth's womb when he hears Mary's greeting. "Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb," marvels Elizabeth (v. 42). She is obviously privy to the secret of the miraculous way Jesus has been conceived. The passage continues with an optional extension, the Magnificat of Mary -- a powerful hymn extolling not only God's goodness in offering the Messiah to the world, but also upholding the cause of justice for the poor, even at the expense of the rich and powerful.
Preaching Possibilities
It's a scene that happens in the early months of pregnancy, in many an obstetrician's office: An expectant mother and father are ushered into an examining room. The mother-to-be lies on her back, on a vinyl-covered table topped by a sheet of crackly white paper. The nurse asks her to pull up the lower portion of her blouse, exposing her swelling abdomen.
Taking a plastic squeeze-bottle, she spreads a thin film of clear, conducting jelly on the expectant mother's skin. Then the nurse takes a device into her hands that looks like an oversized electric razor. It's tethered by a thick wire to a large, electronic console on wheels. Slowly the nurse slides the handheld device over the expectant mother's abdomen. It emits a soft, buzzing noise.
Off to one corner of the room sits the doctor, peering intently into a computer screen. "Aha!" she exclaims, swiveling the screen around so the mother- and father-to-be can see it. "Look there!"
The parents look -- and there, almost lost in the grainy, low-resolution image, is a tiny, beating heart. They squint, and look some more: a scrawny leg becomes visible to their eyes, then an arm. A coil of umbilical cord connects to what must be the belly. The head -- chin bent downward to the chest -- seems impossibly large.
It's a modern miracle: the ultrasound scan of a fetus in utero. Nowadays, it's the first vision most parents have of their child-to-be. That grainy, indistinct ultrasound image -- thoughtfully printed out for them by the medical office staff -- is likely to become the first image in their baby's scrapbook. Some enthusiastic first-time parents have been known to display it on their Christmas cards.
Ultrasound wasn't available, of course, to Mary and Elizabeth, those two expectant mothers in the first chapter of Luke. When Mary, cheeks flushed with pregnancy (and with the residual awe of having just met an angel), goes to visit her cousin Elizabeth, both women rely on the timeless technique of a hand on the belly to sense the reality of the child within. Elizabeth doesn't need the touch of a hand any longer: for the moment she beholds her cousin walking toward her, "the child leaps in her womb." Elizabeth's son -- the child who will one day become John the Baptist -- has, in some mysterious way, come to recognize his own cousin: Jesus Christ, Savior of the world.
Somehow, with a mother's intuition, Elizabeth and Mary can both see the promise, growing within them. Through tears of joy they gaze into each other's eyes. Without exchanging a word, each one knows the other is deeply blessed. Elizabeth does finally put that thought into words: "Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb" (Luke 1:42b). It's a handy talent, this ability to see the promise.
Where would Mary have been without it? Just think about how Mary might have received the angel, otherwise. She was only a young teenager, after all. In that society, that meant she had very little status. First, she was young. Second, she was a woman. Third, she came from a humble family of common people. Who would believe the angel Gabriel would come to the likes of her? To plain old Mary?
Who, indeed? Scripture doesn't record for us the reaction of her parents, but we can well imagine what it might have been. There she is, engaged to Joseph, a solid, hardworking craftsman. Her dowry is paid, her life is reliably spread out before her, and then Mary shows up with this news of a pregnancy. What a disgrace! She risks losing everything. Her parents must have been furious.
Scripture doesn't tell us, either, exactly why Mary goes off to visit her cousin Elizabeth in the hill country: but it may well have been to hide her pregnancy. It may have been that, when Mary's parents heard the news, they packed her off to that distant relative's home. There, they may have thought to themselves (in the tradition of parents of unwed mothers from time immemorial), she can wait out her remaining months, and quietly have her baby -- away from prying eyes and gossiping mouths.
Yet when Mary sees her cousin, she instantly knows there's a reason why she's traveled all that distance and that reason has nothing to do with keeping a secret. For Elizabeth receives her with the warmest possible greeting: "Blessed are you...."
It's not the sort of thing people typically say to an unmarried teenage mother. No, the people around such a troubled young woman are more likely to say, "Cursed are you. Cursed are you, to have brought such a fate down upon yourself, and upon this family." Elizabeth, however, has no such reservations. She welcomes her kinswoman with open arms. She blesses her.
More than that, Elizabeth treats Mary as her social superior -- despite their difference in age: "And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me?" The very fact that Elizabeth's own unborn child leaps in the womb is an early sign of what the adult John the Baptist will one day say of his cousin, Jesus: "He must increase, and I must decrease."
Mary's not the only one who can see the promise. Elizabeth does, too. Between them, they have more than enough faith to see this thing through, and to bring into the world both Jesus and John: two men who, between them, will change the world. It couldn't have happened without the faithful vision of Mary and Elizabeth; their ability not only to hear God's promise, but to see it being lived out, before their very eyes. These two need no sonogram to know what quality of life they carry within them.
It's not always an easy thing to glimpse God's promise in these days before Christmas. It's so much easier to see the things the world is fond of seeing this time of year. The promise of the secular Christmas is merrymaking, without true joy. It's a profusion of material goods, bereft of spiritual values. It's frantic, scurrying people grasping for things they don't have, all the while failing to recognize gifts of the Spirit they've already been offered in abundance.
If, as we move in and out of both the sacred and secular manifestations of the holiday, we can only ask ourselves, "Where can I meet God in this?" we may be pleasantly surprised at how often God pops up. Even the tackiest, most materialistic holiday observances have at their base a deep yearning for the good, the kind, the beautiful. Better to affirm the good that's present there, than to lose ourselves in griping and criticism. Better to open our eyes and see the promise than to close them and not see much of anything at all.
Mary found herself in quite a predicament during the early months of her pregnancy. Undoubtedly there was tension in her family. There was fear of losing her fiancé, Joseph. There was shame at the hands of a censorious and unforgiving culture. Yet Mary sees none of these things. Instead, she feels the new life stirring within her. She gives herself over to that life. Most of all, she remembers the promise she received from the angel, and she believes it.
Blessed are you, O Mary, "who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken ... by the Lord" (Luke 1:45). Blessed are we, as well, if we walk through these final days of Advent with eyes wide open to the signs of God's presence -- and God's promise -- all around us!
Prayer For The Day
God of all hope and joy,
open our hearts in welcome,
that your Son, Jesus Christ, at his coming
may find in us a dwelling prepared for him,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God now and forever. Amen.
To Illustrate
Before the onslaught of Christmas materialism, it's easy for good, Christian people to get discouraged about the holiday. We all do it: We complain. We complain about Christmas trees going up in department stores before Halloween. We complain of how "Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer" and "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" seem to drown out "O Come All Ye Faithful" and "Silent Night." We complain about giant inflatable Santas and snowmen on front lawns. We complain that the holiday seems to have hijacked the holy day.
Well, these observations are all true enough, but if we Christians let our distaste for yuletide materialism overcome the spiritual meaning of Christmas, then the materialists have won. There are two ways to get sidetracked by secularism at Christmas: We can give in completely to shallow, "Seasons Greetings" materialism, or we can invest so much energy fighting it that we lose track of what Christmas is all about. Far better to go through these few remaining days of Advent smiling with amusement at the tinseled excess all around us, while remaining attentive to the true gold that glimmers only briefly, and can be found only by those who truly seek it.
***
I know that this world is a world of imagination and vision. I see everything I paint in this world but everybody does not see alike. To the eye of a miser a guinea is far more beautiful than the sun and a bag worn with the use of money has more beautiful proportions than a vine filled with grapes. The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way. As a man is so he sees. When the sun rises, do you not see a round disk of fire something like a gold piece? O no, no, I see an innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying, "Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty."
-- William Blake, eighteenth-century English painter and poet, cited in Geoffrey Cumberledge, A Treasury of the Kingdom (London: Oxford University Press, 1954)
***
The same pattern of rebirth that I learned in baptism showed up in everything from bathing to watering plants. The same pattern of relationship that I learned in communion was available in every meal eaten mindfully. The laying-on of hands took place as I held a crying baby or rubbed the shoulders of a tired friend. With a little oil, I could even offer the sacrament of a pretty good massage. When I walked outside and looked at the smoking compost heap, I saw a sacrament of death turning into life. When I used my little bottle of whiteout to correct a mistake, I remembered that my errors did not have to be permanent. Everywhere I turned, the most insignificant things in the world were preaching little sermons to me. Everywhere I turned, the world was leaking light. All that was required, apparently, was my willingness to be a priest -- to walk through the world aware of God's presence, ready to hold ordinary things up to heaven with my own hands so that I and anyone else who was interested could see the holiness in them -- even the soiled and broken things that were just waiting for someone to come along and love them (I learned this part from Jesus).... Following the leader, I take the very ordinary stuff of my life into my very human hands. I bless it, break it so that the light comes out, and then I offer it back to God -- who, nine times out of ten, says, "Thanks, but you can have it. I made it all for you."
-- Barbara Brown Taylor, When God Is Silent (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Cowley Publications, 1988)
** *
A penny can hide the sun if we hold it close enough to the eye, and a transient difficulty can shut out from a fearful soul all life's large blessings and all the horizons of divine will.
-- Harry Emerson Fosdick
***
The master became a legend in his lifetime. It was said that God once sought his advice. "I want to play a game of hide-and-seek with humankind. I've asked my angels what the best place is to hide in. Some say the depths of the ocean. Others the top of the highest mountain. Others still the far side of the moon or a distant star. What do you suggest?"
Said the master, "Hide in the human heart. That's the last place they will think of!"
-- Anthony DeMello
***
Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.
-- Carl Jung
***
It is the heart always that sees before the head can see.
-- Thomas Carlyle
***
Every mother is like Moses. She does not enter the promised land. She prepares a world she will not see.
-- Pope Paul VI
