Fourth Sunday of Advent - A

Object: A sewing needle, a larger, darning needle, and a stuffed animal. You could use a stuffed camel if you have one, but I used a stuffed bear.

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Hello, everyone! (Let them respond.) Are you ready for our story today? (Let them respond.) Excellent!

A younger clergy colleague once shared in our ministerial group that people in his generation do not like using the phone (despite an abundance of cellphones) to communicate. They prefer text messaging or email because they do not want to have to watch their words in modern telephone etiquette. They grow weary of gender identity, definitions of what is and is not politically correct change rapidly and vary in differing communities with diverse core values.

“If I go forward, he is not there; or backward, I cannot perceive him; on the left he hides, and I cannot behold him; I turn to the right, but I cannot see him. But he knows the way I take….” (vv. 8-10)

You don’t have to be able to see something for it to be there. You may not fully understand what it is, for it to be fully what it is. And sometimes it’s a little child that leads you down a rabbit hole and onto a journey of discovery towards something you hadn’t imagined!

Theme of the Day
Taking sin seriously.

Collect of the Day
Petitions are offered to increase the gift of faith that believers might forsake the past to reach out to the future, following the commandments and receiving the crown of everlasting joy. Sanctification (worked by grace as a gift) and eschatology are emphasized.

Psalm of the Day
Psalm 22:1-14
* See Good Friday.

(See Good Friday, Cycle A; Good Friday, Cycle B; and Lent 2, Cycle B, for alternative approaches.)

Psalm 22, perhaps more than any other text in the Bible, gives eloquent expression to the loneliness and isolation which comes from experiencing God's absence. We can debate the reality of a theology of abandonment, arguing back and forth whether or not God ever actually does abandon us. But whether God moves or not, there are clearly times in life when we feel completely alone. This psalm gives voice to that feeling.

Ancient people were terrorized by the thought of God. We have to strain our minds and our imaginations to try to conceive of the confusion and fear that people of antiquity faced when trying to get to know and understand God. They looked at the weather, the storms and the peaceful days, their own lives, the times of the year, and the way nature unfolded and tried to understand God.

They did not have Jesus Christ and his teachings, so they looked upon bad things as tests and punishments by God for the behavior of their lives.

Adolph Hitler had a dream of a thousand-year empire. The years may make us forget too soon and too easily the terror that was Adolph Hitler. The terror was that this little man, not in stature alone, but in smallness of mind, had managed to do in an extraordinary degree what others had done before him, and what we are all capable of doing. What he did, says Kenneth Burke, was to make virtue vice, and vice virtue.