Advent 4
December 22, 2024
This week is the final week of advent. If you would like to read all of the scripture from today's reading you can find it here. Today's we are going to make a topic shift as Advent draws to a close. For the first 3 weeks of advent the scripture has focused on preparing the way for the Messiah. Last week we zoomed in on John the Baptist and his message to those who came out into the wilderness to hear him preach. This week we are go to take a deeper look not at the message of those preparing the way, or even the message of Jesus himself, we are going to take a look at the final messenger himself, Jesus. Not just Jesus the man, or Jesus the soon to be born infant, we are going to be looking at God. In this article we are going to look at the the many ways that he is talked about in the reading for today.
We are going to walk through the Gospel passage in Luke 1. We are going to take the longer route and cover verses 39-55. The passage opens with Mary, the mother of Jesus, showing up at the house of her cousin Elizabeth. Elizabeth is about 3 months farther into her pregnancy. Verse 41 says "When Elizabeth heard Mary's greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit." The Holy Spirit, is not just a mystical feeling that Elizabeth experienced, that name refers specifically to the Lord God making himself know in the world. That is the Spirit that hovered over the earth at the time of creation. It is the Spirit that appeared as fire in a bush to Moses in the desert. It is the Spirit that has inspired God's prophets for generations. But it is a not a servant of God, who does God's work and it is not a messenger of God who brings his word. The Holy Spirit is God in it's deepest nature. This is mystery of the Trinity. One God, that presents its self as 3 unique and distinct "persons" but all are God in its totality.
Now this message could very quickly take a turn into the topic of the Trinity and never return to true point of our fourth and final advent message. That is not what I want to do today, but it is a topic we will see again and again, because the nature of God, and our ability to understand It, and relate with It is the entire point. But for today lets just take a minute to talk about the Trinity, with the plan to come back and dig deeper in the future. To talk about the Trinity we have to start with one hard and immutable fact. God is one, and he is indescribable, unnamable, unchangeable and eternal. I promise that in the future we are going to look at every one of those adjectives and try and understand how they apply to God, and what that means for us. Today we are just going to list them, and know they are just the very start of the list, before returning to the fact that God is one. There is one God. We can say God or He or Him or She or It. God is not offended because God is outside of any label that we can possibly try to put on Him. I almost always default to Him. Not because I think God was a man in heaven but because that is what I grew up hearing. I don't like to use It because that feels like making God a thing. But maybe that is the best because go is not just a thing he is everything thing. God is one, and from him was all the universe and world created.
So if God is One, then what is the Trinity. The Trinity is the way the Bible and humanity has tried to understand the unknowable that is God. The Bible identified 3 primary "modes" or "manifestations" of God to the world. I hesitate to use words like modes because they can so easily create simplifications in our mind. We may begin to think that God just picks a "mode" that he needs for a task and takes it on. Then changes back to something else when he is ready. But this is for to simplistic a way to think about God. But again, for today, we are going to draw some limits around out discussion of the Trinity so lets keep moving.
The first and most often thought of form of God is often thought of in Christianity as "The Father". He is the Lord. The second is the Holy Spirit, who filled Elizabeth when Mary arrived. The third aspect of the Trinity is Jesus, the humane incarnated son. What I want to stress about these 3 aspects of God today are they are all God. They are all distinct from one another. They are all eternally existent. They are in relationship with each other. But, God is one. One God in 3 persons, that is the mystery of the Trinity.
Now back to Luke's Gospel. In Luke 43 Elizabeth shouts "And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me?" This word, Lord, is not a word a simple ruler or even a King, but for God. Here we have Elizabeth introducing us to the babe in the womb of Mary, Jesus, as her Lord. What she is declaring is the third aspect of the Trinity, the incarnate son, Jesus. To this Mary replies "My Soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior". Here we have Mary rejoicing in the first aspect of the trinity, the Lord and Father, because it was He who brought this blessing to her. She also goes on to call Him her Savior. We often speak about Jesus as the savior, and we are not wrong to do so, but here Mary is speaking about the Father aspect of God and calls him her Savior. This is part of the difficulty in understanding the Trinity. Passages like this can lead us to think God is "sometimes the Father" and "Sometimes the Son" but we have to remember that that is a simplification that may make it easier to understand but can also strip away the richness of the doctrine of the Trinity. The understanding of the true nature of God is the key to understanding the kingdom of God.
So in our passage from Luke we see Elizabeth and Mary speaking about the Holy Spirit, the Lord, and the Savior. We are shown the 3 aspects of the Trinity as a ground work for our future understanding. The end of the verse takes a turn and it starts to talk about what life is going to be like for man under the rule of the "Mighty One" that is coming. The passage speaks of mercy and strength. It refers to the humbling of the proud and the feeding of the hungry. In other words it is talking about the coming kingdom of God that we read about in the first 3 weeks of advent. And it is making clear that Jesus, the babe still in the womb, is the final messenger that is going to come and bring the kingdom into existence.
In week 2 of advent Malachi told us that the purpose of the refining fire was to cleanse the soul of the sacrifices until they were able to present offerings to the Lord in Righteousness. Malachi told us it was about the heart and soul of the sacrifice, and he said nothing about the significance of the sacrifice itself. In light of this I am going to give the last verse of today's epistle reading, Hebrews 10:10, and then give it again with an edit. It reads "And it is by God's will that we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all." However, based on the lessons from John the Baptist and Malachi, might it have simply read "And it is by God's will that we have been sanctified through the offering of Jesus Christ once for all." Only 3 words have change in the second sentence "of the body" but how much do those words change our understanding. Is it God's will that we have been sanctified because "the body of Jesus Christ" was sacrificed? Or, is it God's will that we have been sanctified because of "the offering of Jesus Christ".
I believe it is the latter. Jesus came as the messenger who was refined. Pure as any silver or gold that man could prepare. He was righteous in his very nature, because he was God. Since he was the well prepared and righteous one, that made him alone worthy of making a sacrifice to the Lord. It was his making of the sacrifice on our behalf that was enough to sanctify us. However, what could he sacrifice? He was God, in the process of making a sacrifice to God. What aspect of the creation of God could possibly be worthy to be laid on the alter before God, by God, but God himself. Jesus sacrificed himself because their was nothing else worthy to be placed on the alter, but Jesus sanctified us by the act of being the righteous one, sacrificing on our behalf.
This is why we are called to sacrifice ourselves. This is why Jesus said we are to take up our crosses as he did. The price has been paid by the One and only person who was truly worthy and righteous and could make an offering to God. That ended the call to sacrifice, that moved us beyond the Jewish system. That made us whole. But Jesus did not leave us and say it was good enough. He called us to continue to sit before the refiners fire so that we too could be purified. His expectation was that we to could be cleaned and refined and made worthy of making an offering to God. He also knew that if ever we were cleansed then we would need something to offer. We would need something worthy not only of God, who we stood before, but worthy of ourselves in our righteous condition. So he told us to prepare ourselves to make the offering and then to offer ourselves in the process.
We are in the presence of God and we have been given the opportunity to worship him for eternity. We have been sanctified by the one who was worthy to make a sacrifice to God on our behalf, but we are invited to prepare ourselves. To cleanse ourselves. To submit to the scrubbing and the refining so that we can be made ready and we can make our offering in righteousness. And if we get there to the alter, before God, standing in righteousness, we would dare not place anything less then ourselves before Him.
Thanks for reading.
David
Want to know why I am writing these articles? Look here.
You can find all of the readings for today at this link.
https://www.episcopalchurch.org/lectionary/advent-4c/
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