The Fourth Sunday of Advent, December 21, 2025

Christmas is in the air. Pastors and church staff are putting the finishing touches on extra sermons, special music, and pageants. Indeed, on the Fourth Sunday of Advent, the preacher may have to balance their homily with other congregational worship and programmatic traditions. In any event, this Sunday’s scriptures are filled with homiletic possibilities and lures for feeling. There is expectation of transformation and hope for a new world order. We are promised that like Scrooge, we can embrace Christmas future with zest and love. Our hearts like the Grinch can expand. The “magic” of Christmas is real, but it is far more amazing than the final kiss of Hallmark Movie. God is with us and calls us forward in times of trouble as well as joy. That first Christmas, living in an occupied land with virtually no civil rights, Mary and Joseph knew the anxiety that undocumented parents-to-be feel in the lawless age of ICE.
Isaiah sees new life in the birth of a child. Though the child’s birth may be obstetrically routine (there is no hint of virgin birth especially if the preacher uses the more modern translation, “a young woman”) this birth changes everything. In a time of political and military crisis, Immanuel, God with us, appears in our midst. In that birth, God gives us a sign that divine love, and not earthly potentates, has the final word in history and our lives, and that word is new life, revealed in a mother’s love for her baby. Howard Thurman captures the hope for new life, as real in our troubled times as it was in Isaiah’s time and in first century occupied Judah.
All around us worlds are dying and new worlds are being born; all around us life is dying and life is being born. The fruit ripens on the tree, the roots are silently at work in the darkness of the earth against a time when there shall be new lives, fresh blossoms, green fruit. Such is the growing edge! It is the extra breath from the exhausted lung, the one more thing to try when all else has failed, the upward reach of life when weariness closes in upon all endeavor. This is the basis of hope in moments of despair, the incentive to carry on when times are out of joint and men have lost their reason, the source of confidence when worlds crash and dreams whiten into ash. The birth of a child — life’s most dramatic answer to death — this is the growing edge incarnate. Look well to the growing edge!
In expecting the birth of a child, we experience God’s growing edge. This child will be a “thin place,” as the Celtic spiritual guides say, revealing God’s ultimate triumph in the ongoing processes of historical change.
The Psalmist prays for personal and national restoration. Restoration involves our openness, but it depends on God’s initiative to bring light to our darkness and strength to our weakness. While we do not know the exact circumstances of the Psalmist’s prayers, it appears that the nation has lost its way, perhaps even overwhelmed by its enemies. In words of hope, the Psalmist prays, “restore us, let your light shine, and we will not turn back.” The powers of evil, destructive of communities and individuals, do not have the final say in our lives. God is making a way forward and calling upon us to be agents of history. With God’s light on our path, nothing can a make us turn around.
Paul’s hope is in God’s loving power revealed in Jesus’ conception, birth, and resurrection. Our salvation is in the enfleshed Christ, God’s embodied presence in our world. Paul’s words are not intricately metaphysical in nature, nor does he describe the incarnation in terms of the substantialist categories of Greek philosophy. Paul gives the Roman community and us a functional and practical Christology, that enables us to embrace Christ’s spirit and power in us aiming at new life. God gives God’s grace and peace in the embodied Christ to Jew and Gentile alike. No one is excluded from Christ’s incarnational power, companioning and empowering us in birth, death, and beyond.
The Gospel invites us to move into the realm of awe, wonder, and mysticism. Obstetrics gives birth to revelation. Although the Gospel provides no details, Mary’s child is conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit. The child embodies Mary’s DNA as well as the DNA of the Holy Spirit, and they are unmixed, flowing into one another, as the DNA of our parents. Again, we receive no explanation, no mechanics, or description of this child’s divine humanity. There is no substantialist metaphysic, wrestling with how the child can be both, human and divine; we are simply presented with a flesh and blood revelation of a “God with skin,” born to transform the world.
The Gospel writer sees the child’s birth as miraculous in my mind revelatory of a deeper naturalism and not a supernatural incursion. Yet, just as great a miracle as the divine-human conception is Joseph’s saying “yes” to what he cannot understand. When he hears the news of Mary’s pregnancy, did Joseph believe the story? Did he suspect another kind of conception than spiritual? But pregnancy via the Holy Spirit is amazing and earth shaking enough.
The Gospel writer is not talking about a divine-human consort like that of the Olympian Gods, but a birth joining humanity and divinity that is beyond medical or theological explanation.
Gob smacked or shall we say God smacked, Joseph is seeking a way to preserve his pride and reputation, and protect Mary, whose unplanned and amazing pregnancy could put her life at risk in her patriarchal society. He is filled with stress and uncertainty. No clear path lies ahead to protect both him and Mary.
Like Jacob, Joseph decides to “sleep on it.” No knee jerk or reactionary decision will solve his dilemma. And has he sleeps, an angel of God appears to him. God communicates in burning bushes, ladders to heaven, and Temple theophanies. Facing his own crisis, Joseph hears words of comfort and challenge, “Don’t be afraid,” for this child is God’s gift to humankind. This child is the embodiment of God’s presence to save and transform. For those with eyes to see, “all is miracle,” as Walt Whitman avers. Moreover, since philosophies err more in what they deny than what they affirm, as Charles Hartshorne opines, we cannot rule out virgin births or resurrection in a two trillion galaxy universe.
Mary’s purity in terms of sexual relations is noted, but her pregnancy raises a variety of interesting questions: Could a woman impregnated by the Holy Spirit be still called a virgin? By what method did this birth occur? Again, we don’t need to fret about the details of conception or whether we are in realm of miracles or theological explanation. Some scholars suggest that the concept of a virgin birth was employed to establish Jesus’ uniqueness and parity with other savior figures, such as Augustus Caesar, for which divine parentage was claimed. Nor looking beyond Bethlehem’s birth to Mary’s own birth and death, there is no need to embrace the theologically problematic notions of the immaculate conception of Mary, her perpetual virginity and sinlessness, and ultimate assumption into heaven. Such doctrines claim too much and alienate Jesus and his mother from humanity in need of divine companionship and a God who suffers and delights with us.
The miracle of Mary and Joseph is that they both said “yes” to a divine invitation defying common sense. They both embraced divine possibilities despite threats to their well-being. Flesh and blood humans, they became vehicles of God’s incarnation in the world. They experienced the “thin place” of Immanuel and nurtured the child’s divine transparency of this child from conception to young adulthood.
At Christmas, we need more than a Hallmark move to transform our lives and open us to deeper love. We need to cultivate hope in God’s future and then become instruments of health ourselves. In times reminiscent of the first century which hope is threatened by the powers and principalities determined to destroy innocence and virtue, the light of the world shows us a way forward, warms our spirits, and enables us to be God’s companions in clearing the path forward to welcome God with us, transforming our lives and our communities.

Bruce Epperly is Theologian in Residence at Westmoreland Congregational United Church of Christ, Bethesda, MD and a professor in theology and spirituality at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington DC. He is the author of over eighty books, including Jesus: Mystic, Healer, and Prophet; Creation Sings: Forty Days of Spiritual Wisdom from the Non-Human World; Messy Incarnation: Meditations on Christ in Process; and Homegrown Mystics: Restoring Our Nation with the Healing Wisdom of America’s Visionaries; and the upcoming Three Wise Wisdom: The Twelve Days of Christmas with Mary, Elizabeth, and Anna (volume seven in “The Twelve Days of Christmas” series.  He can be reached at www.brucepperly.com.