Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Adam McCoy
The Fourth Sunday of Advent, Year B, December 24, 2023
Click here for an audio of the sermon
The scriptural images of Advent to this point have been large, grand, public, noisy, impossible to miss: heavens tearing open, mountains quaking, the sun and moon going dark and stars falling from the heavens; valleys lifted up and mountains laid low, crooked paths straight and rough places plain; a strangely clad prophet with a weird diet calling a whole nation to account; ruined cities being rebuilt; and an as-yet unknown savior coming to bring all to fulfillment. Entire peoples, whole nations will be cast down and lifted up and the physical universe itself will be transformed.
So one might think the entrance of the one everyone is waiting for will also be large, grand, public, noisy and impossible to miss. But No. Not. God’s chosen scene is the private domestic space of simple people. In our first lesson, God is happy to move about with the people on their journeys. It is they, not God, who need a great and grand and public house of worship.
A bit earlier in the same part of the Old Testament there is a story eerily similar to the stories of Elizabeth, pregnant with John the Baptist, and of Mary: Hannah, mother of the prophet Samuel. She is getting on in age but held up to ridicule because she has no child. Her son will be Samuel, a little boy born out of his mother’s desperation through divine intervention. This small child will become the agent of the complete political transformation of Israel. As with Elizabeth - older, barren, yet called to bear a nation-changing prophet. From such small beginnings: Who would have thought? And so Mary: a small town teenage girl, pregnant but not by her fiancé, this most extraordinary man, traveling in her ninth month to a town with no relatives or friends to take them in, will also, in these desperate circumstances, through divine agency, bear a child who will transform, not this time the nation, but the world itself. Difficult circumstances. Little children. On the road. No house or home. Faith and hope and little else. Hard times are the most ordinary things in the world. And there, there is where God is.
Such a contrast between the great and grand and the small and private! The transforming, saving Word of God, so eagerly waited and watched for, comes into the world of people of no particular distinction coping as best they can.
Tradition recommends that we apply the experience of the mothers of Samuel, of John and Jesus to our own lives. Practically all of us are like Hannah, Elizabeth and Mary. We seem to be of no particular importance. We may have been, probably will be, perhaps even now are, in desperation of one sort or another. Trouble is part of life. But we too are counseled to invite the promise of God, the Word of God, into our own lives. To let it plant itself in our troubled hearts and begin to grow. It may take half a lifetime to come to maturity and require all our skill to set it on its path, as good parents must do. But that promise, that Word, is always hoping for an invitation to enter, always hoping to find in us a home to grow great in. It does not need a public, grand and holy house, but will build for us the house we need. The sign of God’s Word’s presence is the faith, hope and love which quite ordinary, obscure people have for the future. Let us be like Hannah, like Elizabeth, like Mary. Let us trust the promise of God and set out on the paths God sets before us, confident that God is with us. Let us say yes when God’s invitation appears.
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