Prelude
As you know, we’ve spent the last eight weeks looking at Luke 1 and 2. As Harrison pointed out in his sermon on October 27th, there’s a lot of singing in this part of the Bible. First, we hear from Mary in her song of praise, the Magnificat, when she sings of God’s steadfast and ongoing mercy—of promises kept. Then along comes Zechariah, his tongue loosed after nine months of silence, bursting into prophecy of how his son would “go before the Lord to prepare his ways, to give knowledge of salvation to his people in the forgiveness of their sins, because of the tender mercy of our God.”
In that sermon, Harrison shared the idea that Mary sings because “she realizes that the story she had heard her whole life about God being with his people is true. She realizes that God is truly with her […] Her entire life was spent interacting with this story, and what caused her to sing was that she realized she was living within the story…that God’s story was her story.”
I think it’s fair to assume the same was true for Zechariah. And I know it’s true for us.
This Sunday, December 1st, marks the start of Advent. Our friends at Third Church offer a helpful definition for this time in the liturgical year: “We imagine ourselves as the people of Israel, hoping and longing for the coming Messiah. In Advent we also remember that his Kingdom is not yet fully come, so we also anticipate Christ’s coming again to restore all things.”
It’s a time of tension, really–celebration and anticipation, joy and longing, hope fulfilled and hope yet to come.
Fleming Rutledge puts it well in her book Advent: The Once and Future Coming of Christ: “Advent tells us about our own lives as Christians, here and now. Advent is where we live, work, play, laugh, struggle, and die. Advent is the Time Between—between the first coming of Christ and the second coming, between darkness and dawn, between the kingdoms of this world and the kingdom of our Lord and his Christ. It is not the time of fulfillment; it is the time of waiting.”
This time of waiting—as ones who know of Jesus’s birth, life, death, and resurrection, and who long desperately for him to come again—is where we are taken up into the story of God.
We should follow Mary’s lead and sing about it.
So that’s what our Advent devotional will focus on this year: songs of this longing, this waiting, of the already-not-yet. We’re calling this project Songs for the In-Between. Come Sunday, you’ll see that it fits nicely with our Advent sermon series on John the Baptist, who was himself, as we’ll learn, a man in between.
Each Sunday through Advent (and on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day) we’ll send out (and post on our website) reflections from City Church members on Advent songs that are not only dear to them, but those that also show us how to navigate this in-between time where we all live our lives.
We hope you’ll read (and sing) along, finding words that help you better understand where you are in God’s story…which is, of course, your story, too.