ECCLESIOLOGICAL ETCHING
December 15, 2021
Tradition around Advent has given us a single word of focus for each week. They are: Hope, Peace, Joy and Love. Why not generosity or kindness? Why those four? There are a lot of so-called explanations, but I don’t believe historians would give much credence to them. And other traditions assign other symbols and words to each of the four weeks of Advent. This Sunday is the fourth Sunday of Advent, and around Cypress Creek Christian Church, it is Love Sunday. It feels a bit strange to say, “Love Sunday” as I sort of hope every Sunday is Love Sunday. Yet our focus is awaiting God’s great expression of love in the form of a child. It provides us another opportunity to seek an answer to the question: What does love really look like? There are a lot of things serving as impersonators of love, but when you place them against the Christmas story, you realize what lousy impersonators they really are. What does it tell us about love to claim the most perfect expression of love enfleshed was born in a stable, in a no-name part of the world, in a nation occupied by the world’s greatest super power at the time. And there wasn’t even an available bed at the Bethlehem’s One Star Hotel. When I picture love on the outskirts of Bethlehem, I see vulnerability, risk, a ripping apart of social structures and norms, and an entirely new definition of power. What do you see?
Provide me eyes to see what love is and what love can be in this world. Help me to glimpse, O God of Incarnate Love, what it means to be like Jesus. Amen.
