Hi everyone,
Welcome to worship for this 4th Sunday of Advent, landing on December 22, 2024!
The bulletin for this service can be found here. You may use it to follow along with the service, as it will have the order and words of worship as well as the full sermon. Alternatively the words you need to know will also appear on your screen and the sermon is on this page below the video.
For an enhanced online worship experience, you are invited to have a candle in your space, lit at the beginning of the service and extinguished near the end after the sending hymn when the altar candles are extinguished. You are also welcome to participate in communion if you are comfortable, by having something small to eat and drink ready for the appropriate time in the service. Further instruction will be given then.
May God’s wondrous and steadfast love shine in and through your hearts, this day and always!
May your Word, O Lord, leap up in us, that we might yearn for more of you and your love in our lives, through Jesus Christ. Amen.
You know, while I really do enjoy it, I haven’t actually done much travelling throughout my life, especially when I was younger. I know, this might bring me down a notch in some of your books, which might put me square on notch -1, but I started coming out of my travel shell more as I grew older. While I still haven’t been to a lot of places per se, I have spent most of my time abroad in Hong Kong, as you might have imagined. I mean, most of my wife’s family is there so we would get free room and board, and also a lot of our meals and stuff paid for. It just makes economical sense. But also you’d think that I’d be most comfortable there because I could mostly blend in. Like, I sort of look like the people there, I’m somewhat familiar with the culture and food, and hearing people speak Chinese all the time isn’t too much of a shock for me. But somehow I’m always able to do or say something that totally reminds me that while I might be comfortable, I’m not from there and will never be from there.
There was this one time in particular that stands out to me in my memory. We were at this tailor getting some ill-fitted clothes to fit properly, which wasn’t unusually with my more Canadian-shaped body and stuff, and then I heard it… It wasn’t something that I expected to be shocking, but it was. It wasn’t something that I thought would ring in my ears, but it did. It wasn’t something that I thought I even needed to hear, but at that moment it absolutely was something that made my entire day. What I heard was someone speaking English.
Mind you, it wasn’t the same kind of English of the locals, like with an accent or poor grammar or anything, it was definitely a North American English with poor grammar. But at this point it was maybe 2 weeks since I’ve heard actual North American English that wasn’t coming from my wife or my own mouth. So hearing this now… well it was just a sound for sore ears. I didn’t think I’d miss hearing it as much as I did until I heard it. My ears piqued, I was drawn to the source, and I felt this feeling in my heart that I was home. It was super weird.
So I did what totally made sense at the time. I walked over and started a conversation. They ended up being this not-so-friendly family from New York who couldn’t care less about me or my need to hear more of these utterances from their vocal cords, but that is beside the point. The point is, just the sound of the familiar, that comfort I got from a stranger, that connection to just anyone that I could find something in common with… well, I was yearning for that. I needed it. I was longing for it without even knowing.
Now I should say that my current circumstance of being away from Canada so long played a big role in this situation. I’m not drawn to North American English on a daily basis. It was just that at that point, I totally was. You know what I mean, don’t you? We all have these moments where we feel an instant connection with someone or something. We see or hear or somehow experience and we feel a wave of not just nostalgia, but warmth, comfort, maybe even love. We all have this yearning for connection, even when we might think or pretend that we don’t. Some more than others, of course, but it is within us all.
We see this yearning for connection in today’s gospel reading that outlines pregnant Mary’s encounter with her pregnant cousin Elizabeth. Mary of course would be carrying Jesus, and Elizabeth, John the baptizer. Two women carrying embryos that would turn out to be two of the most influential people in history. Two women finding themselves pregnant under very strange and even supernatural circumstances. Two women who don’t really seem to be from the same region, same age range, or same place in life, but find a connection to each other beyond anything they or we might have imagined.
Elizabeth’s baby leapt for joy within her womb for crying out loud. You know how happy you’d have to be to have an unborn baby squirm and kick inside their mom’s belly? Well, not a lot as a baby moving around is pretty natural, but you know what I mean. They were so excited to see each other. Ecstatic. Elated, even.
And maybe we’d can say that of course they are, because they know each other, might not have seen each other in a while, and they are family after all. Anyone would be excited to see each other after all that time. That might be true, but I think how the text really focuses on the fact that they’re both pregnant tells us it’s that what they have in common that really brings out the connection they share.
As with all of us. We all like to hang out with people that we like to hang out with. Usually it’s people that we have things in common with. Like similar experiences, similar worldviews, similar love for travel. And this kind of connection might even extend to more superficial commonalities, like what neighbourhood you come from, what high school you attended, and even what sports team you tend to root for. Different communities form online and elsewhere around hobbies, interests, and passions.
These connections we have with each other run deep. They change how we might have initially viewed people, how we regarded them, and how we feel about them moving forward. When we see these connections, we tend to trust more, support more, and love more as now we have something to cling on to in our relationship.
So really, there is something to be said about these connections that we find with each other. We can see how important they are for us in selecting our partners, our friends, our communities. We can see how they help us not just define each other for better or worse, but also define ourselves.
And so I actually think that it’s because of this importance of connection that God had decided to enter into our lives as one of us. I think the fact that God would be incarnated in the person of Jesus is the ultimate display of relationship. I think this event of God becoming a person in flesh, to be among us, abide with us, just be with us, is the act of love that we are all, deep down, yearning for.
See God wants to connect with us, have a relationship with us, reveal unending and steadfast love to us, so God became one of us. God, for us, becomes tangible, relatable, and accessible. God gives us God’s Word that is useful in teaching and building us up, but then makes it exponentially more understandable by embodying that Word in a human flesh and blood, able to feel every emotion that we feel, from the frustration toward the hypocrites, to the anger toward the corruption, to the love for friends, family, and community. And also this Word-in-flesh becomes susceptible to everything we are susceptible to, like hunger, fatigue, and even death.
This God is truly a God that we can connect with. That out of love for us this God gives us all the reasons in the world to feel that love, see that love, and intimately know that love.
Today is the 4th Sunday of Advent, the last Sunday of Advent before we move into the season of Christmas. It is the Sunday of Advent when we typically focus on the theme of love, and lift up its importance in our lives, in our stories, and in our relationship with each other and God. But I think that this theme isn’t just limited to today. Rather love is our story with God. Love is why we can ever have a relationship with this God, throughout all of Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, and that really long season after Pentecost. Love is God. And God is connected to us and all the saints and us with each other in community. God relates with us and shows us how we can relate and care for each other. And as we’ll see in a couple of days, God is with us as one of us, among us and loving us, for all of eternity.
So even in difference, we are connected with God. Even in diversity, we are connected with each other. Even in disagreement, we are all connected and brought into love.
So as we close this season of Advent and move into the season of Christmas, may we always be aware of God’s presence in our lives, connecting us with Godself and each other, and showing us all an unending and steadfast love, now and forever. Thanks be to God. Amen.