Tonight … Advent Meditation, 12/24/2012

Luke 1:67-79

By: Amy Real Coultas

It’s Christmas Eve! We’ve been waiting and preparing and hoping and wondering and longing for this night for weeks now.

Tonight we join in Mary’s last moments of waiting. Tonight we, the church, are like young Mary – very pregnant, stretched full with impossibility made possible, full of confusion and wonder and hope and expectation. Like this young woman, we are ready to give birth.

We join Mary in her expectant-ness. Tonight the church takes deep breaths; tonight the church pushes so hard against the heavens that God slips right through and into our very own world. God becomes like us.

See, we know that humans are made in God’s image. But we’re not always particularly good at actually being images of God. So God helps us out. God decides – chooses – to give us some more information. God comes to live with us, to walk around in a body just like we have, in our world. In the life of Jesus, we’ll see how God would live life. We’ll see that it means hanging out with people nobody else likes; we’ll see that it means giving up what we want or what is easy for what is right and what is good; we’ll see that love and forgiveness and truth can beat anything. We’ll see that they can beat confusion, disappointment, betrayal, injustice, and even illness and death. And in the end, Jesus will do all that for each of us.

How do you feel in these last few hours before the big arrival?

What have you learned during Advent that helps you anticipate Jesus’ arrival?

What has God been preparing in you? How is your heart different now than it was a few weeks ago?

What new things are you about to give birth to in your own life as a follower of Jesus?

Tonight we celebrate that God chose to become human for a while.

Tonight
Mercy – being kind and forgiving – has a face.
Hope – trusting in God’s promise to be with us always – has a heart and lungs.
Love – LOVE – has hands and feet and eyes and ears.
Tonight God’s story becomes a person we can know.