Maybe the message of the tenth day of Christmas, the New Year’s fallout, is that this pursuit of the divine contains all this, too. Jesus goes dark for twenty years after this event, growing and listening and questioning. As much as we wanted God to show up and make all things immediately right, apparently faith isn’t an on/off switch. Your salvation isn’t a formula.
As we gladly and mercifully move into 2021 this week, I hope that we will bring forward the spirit of deep caring, the respect and empathy we have for our shared mortality, and the examples and hearts of the many we loved and lost – into who we are and how we live in this new year. For even in the midst of this difficult year, the Word has still become flesh, and the Light has still overcome the darkness. As we enter this long-awaited, much-anticipated new year, may the incarnate light of Jesus shine through us as we become the proof of his truth.
This is the sign, in a Bible full of signs. Signs that are not meant to satisfy us, but to draw us into the ways God has come to us over time. And Incarnation is the sign in which we meet God down at the broken and ordinary end of things where we live.
There’s an old rabbi with the fabulous name of Ben Bag Bag who offers this advice on reading Scripture: “Turn it and turn it again, for all is in it; see through it; grow old and worn in it; do not budge from it, for there is nothing that works better than it.”
We celebrate the third Sunday of Advent which is known as Rose Sunday or Gaudete Sunday. Gaudet comes from the Latin word which means rejoice. As we prepare for God’s incarnation at Christmas, we are called to adopt a posture of thankfulness for everything that God has done for us and to rejoice and be glad.