Description
This year Advent 4 falls the very day before Christmas. Many churches will be opening the doors several times in a few days and welcoming worshippers, seekers, servers and stragglers.
The Advent 4 texts prompt us to think about how we think God will show up. In 2 Samuel 7 King David discovers his logic about God is out of place – literally! His logic ‘I’m a king; I have a fancy house – God’s a King; God should have a fancy house’ falls over because he patterns God’s ways of ruling on his own.
God puts him in his place – and refuses to be boxed in, confined to a building.
And when Luke begins to tell us the story of God’s incarnation among humanity, we find we need multiple name tags for God, for Jesus, and even for Mary, as she is enrolled in God’s way of being with us. God – already beyond being contained by our imaginings, becomes a complex human. When God commits to being in one time and place for a season, it’s an embodied human being, not a building God chooses.
As we seek God in this time and place, it will be through complicated living beings, with many roles and names, that the kingdom is revealed.
The Advent wreath liturgy connects us to the plants of this place – living things that have been here in this place over a long time, known by many names by first nations and settlers.
