Fourth Sunday of Advent, December 18, 2022
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Walking in the faith of Christ
The Lord said, “Ask for a sign from your God.” But Ahaz answered, “I will not ask!”
We’re jumping onto the last week of Advent. Three weeks have passed. Have I asked God for a sign?
The Lord himself will give you this sign: the virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall name him Emmanuel.
I probably think that as a nearly lifelong Christian, my faith no longer requires signs. But I’d be wrong, thinking that. My faith is not static, rigid or unchanging. Rather, it is incomplete, endlessly changing, and open-ended. My faith is not IN Christ, but it is the faith OF Christ. Richard Rohr is teaching me this:
This is more than a change of prepositions. It means we are all participating in the faith journey that Jesus has already walked. By myself I don’t know HOW to have faith in God, but once I know that Jesus is the corporate stand-in for everybody, I know I have already been taken on the ride through death and back to life. All I can do now is make what is objectively true, fully conscious in myself, working through my varying daily degrees of resistance and consent.
What sign do you have for me, Lord? I am grateful for what vision you have shared. I look backward, and year after year the skein of life’s yarn unwinds. You make beautiful creations out of all those colors while I just watch, amazed at how it all turns out. Over and over. I don’t have to understand, just stand in awe.
Who can ascend the mountain of the Lord, or who may stand in his holy place? One whose hands are sinless, whose heart is clean, who desires not what is vain. Let the Lord enter; he is king of glory.
Good thing Jesus consents to be my “corporate stand-in.” His hands are sinless, his heart is clean, as mine will never be. I will confess my sin, but then I’ll sin again. And I’ll do that for the rest of my life.
But then I read Romans 6. As I speak the liturgical words: Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again, I remember that I can put my own name into that liturgy.
Remember, it’s God in us that loves God. It’s Christ in us that recognizes Christ. It’s the Holy Spirit, whose temple we are, that responds to the Holy Spirit. Like recognizes like. God refuses to be known intellectually. God can only be loved and known in the act of love. Love is like a living organism, an active force-field upon which we can rely, from which we can draw, that we can allow to pass through us.
I re-read today’s gospel and think of the power of God within Mary and then within Joseph, and it’s not science fiction – it’s not science proven through hypotheses, it’s not a made-up fiction story – it’s truth that surpasses our understanding. God dwells in mystery, and I either deny it or fall down in awe and wonder.
It is through the Holy Spirit that this child has been conceived in her. All this took place to fulfill what the Lord has said through the prophet. They shall name him Emmanuel, which means “God is with us.”
Joseph chose the awe and wonder. His dream was more real than his woke-ness. God poured out from every corner of Joseph, and when he returned to Mary’s side, together they rejoiced.
When Joseph awoke, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him and took his wife into his home.
They would keep on listening to the angel voices. They would find a way to get to Bethlehem, protected by the Holy Spirit. Their baby would be born, and proclaimed, and worshipped. And we walk with them. Like them, we too are born, and die, and are born again. Jesus is alive!
(Isaiah 7, Psalm 24, Romans 1, Matthew 1)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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