The Fourth Sunday of Advent, December 22, 2024

The fourth and final Sunday in Advent is in practice the prelude to the Christmas Season. Even the most ardent liturgical legalists are tempted to add a Christmas carol this Sunday, and frankly they should! The final Sunday of Advent is an inflection point and rightly celebrates Mary’s pregnancy, prophetic message, and the Child to come. Churches, like the one I attend, will have a pageant as a reminder that we are both Here and Not Yet in terms of the incarnation in our midst, Christ is Here and the Kindom of God is still being birthed. Since Whiteheadians believe that the world lives by the incarnation of God, then any Sunday can be a Christmas celebration in which we midwife Christ’s presence in our midst. (I add “Joy to the World” to worship services in the dog days of summer.) As the song says, “we need a little Christmas,” and our own Christian alternative to the Hallmark Christmas movies that have been screening since mid-October.
The Fourth Sunday of Advent constellates around evocative themes such as “small is beautiful,” “the power of humility,” “God’s upside down world,” “revelation when you least expect it,” and “two wise women.”
Center stage belongs to Elizabath and Mary, both of whom are pregnant in unplanned, unexpected, and amazing ways, and both of whom become channels of divine wisdom in a patriarchal world. The coming of Jesus, the word made flesh, is an embodied parable, a reversal of expectations, as John Dominic Crossan avers, in which the values of our world are inverted to make way for the coming of God’s Realm of Shalom. God’s coming realm may appear in high drama but mostly it occurs in small events and encounters only visible to the eyes of faith.
The meeting of Elizabeth and Mary is a prenatal theophany. John the Baptist, in his third trimester leaps for joy as the two women meet. Perhaps deep calls unto deep, John almost to term greets the recently conceived Jesus. Or, perhaps, Elizabeth’s mystic joy elicits a prenatal response. Revelation is universal and comes in a variety of ways. Fetuses can praise God and so can their mothers.
While we don’t know a lot about either Mary or Elizabeth, we can assume that they were quite close. Was Elizabeth the first person Mary told of her pregnancy? She trusted Elizabeth enough to share her unplanned and ritually problematic pregnancy. I suspect Elizabeth was a wise woman, someone that young Mary looked up to and from whom she sought guidance. Elizabeth knows the challenge and joy of an unplanned yet providential pregnancy. No doubt as she hears Mary’s story, Elizabeth connects the dots between Zechariah’s experience in the Temple, her pregnancy, and God’s gentle and surprising providence. Elizabeth’s blessing is ecstatic. Her ecstasy mirrors and is mirrored by the fetal ecstasy of John. For both mother and child, mind, body, and spirit are joined in celebration and praise.
In the passage from Luke, we discover that the world truly lives by the incarnation of God. All creation, including fetuses, can praise their Creator and rejoice in God’s revelation. We can affirm God’s presence in fetal life – and all life – without engaging in the divisive politics of abortion. We can remember that in this patriarchal society, the first revealing of the Word Made Flesh comes to two women, just as the Good News of Resurrection comes to the women at the tomb and Mary of Magdala.
Elizabeth’s blessing elicits Mary’s Magnificat, a hymn so radical that its public proclamation was once banned by dictators in Central America. Mary’s hymn joins personal humility and reliance one God’s power, turning upside down our capitalist values, and affirming a preferential option for the poor. The movement of God’s vision is toward wholeness for all, and the embodiment of a jubilee year in which everyone has enough and the gap between rich and poor is erased. The teleology of the universe is aimed at the production of beauty, according to Alfred North Whitehead, and the achievement of beauty requires a beautiful social order. Poverty shrinks spirits, destroys physical wellbeing, and demoralizes the poor. Feeling the cries of the poor, God takes sides with the vulnerable. While God is present among and cares for the wealthy, God’s call to the wealthy and to most of my readers is to sacrifice, simplify, and share. As Mother Ann Seton says, to live simply so others can simply live. Mary’s words are countercultural amid the glitz and conspicuous consumption of the Christmas season.
The passages from Hebrews and the Psalms can be easily overlooked but have an important message for us, inviting us to sacrificial aligning oneself with God’s will. The heart of our faith is not worship or even dogma, but faith and generosity. Psalm 80 lives in hope of God’s restoration of the nation and planet.
In the final days of Advent, with Christmas on the horizon, we are confronted with the vision of a new world order, a planet in which women are leaders, in which economics are turned upside down, and everyone is welcome. As Agents of Advent let us be Christmas people, incarnating God in a world of oppression, incivility, and anxiety. We sing the carols of Christmas, celebrate two wise women, and claim our calling to birth divine possibilities for Shalom, Wholeness, Beauty, and Justice in our world.

Bruce Epperly is Theologian of Residence at Westmoreland Congregational United Church of Christ, Bethesda, Maryland. A theologian, professor, university chaplain, and seminary professor and administrator, Epperly is the author of over 80 books, including “Homegrown Mystics: Restoring Our Nation through the Healing Wisdom of America’s Visionaries,” “Saving Protestant Theology to Save the World,” “Jesus: Mystic, Healer, and Prophet,” and “The God of Tomorrow: Metaphysics, Mysticism, and Mission in Whitehead and Teilhard.” He is also of six volumes of 12 Days of Christmas meditations, the most recent being “Once Upon a Time: The 12 Days of Christmas in Story and Film.” He may be reached at [email protected].