The Purpose and Story of Advent;
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Truth of the Spirit shares “The Purpose and Story of Advent”. During the weeks of Advent we are connected through time with ancient scriptural texts of anticipation and waiting on the Lord. God created intimacy between a man and a woman so we could comprehend the intimacy he’s calling us to with him. Patti Brunner helps you re-live the Advent story from Luke’s Gospel and shares some special advice.
Our Lady of Guadalupe Series [playlist: Our Lady of Guadalupe – YouTube ]
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As we step forward into Advent, John the Baptist gives us a key. This prophet of God fulfilled the messiah’s heralding and truly paved the way smooth through the turning hearts to repentance. Repentance of sin opens the heart to receive grace. Grace is needed to allow faith to blossom. As the feast of the Immaculate Conception takes place during the Advent season on December 8th, the people shall know that the Lord predestined the time and place for the Savior by purifying a vessel to hold and bring forth the King, the son of Man. Just four days later, the feast of Our Lady of Guadeloupe on December 12th, gives witness that mother Mary’s role continues through the ages to “deliver” the savior unto the people. It is not by her own power these things are done but by the Divine mercy of the God who loves the world, He so loves the World that He sent his only Son to redeem it. As the generations’ tale tells, the preparation was a guarded family, touched by God. David, the shepherd who became king, was blessed as was many others.
Welcome to Truth of the Spirit. I’m Patti Brunner. Today we’ll discuss “The Purpose and Story of Advent”. Advent is a busy time, preparing for the season of Christmas. The Lord calls you to prepare your heart to receive Christmas joy, peace, and grace. What better way than by spending time with Him! God is calling you to deepen your ‘family’ relationship with Him. Not as teacher, commander, monitor; not as priest, prophet, King. But as Father, Lover, Friend! Mary had an intimate relationship with Jesus for 9 months. The Church calls you to four weeks of intimacy. God created us to love and be loved. Not just by other people but by God Himself.
During the 4 weeks of Advent we are connected through time with ancient scriptural texts of anticipation and waiting on the Lord. Daily, inspired words of scripture are chosen by the Church to be read to draw us into God’s covenant plan for us. In the “harmony” of the Old Testament and the New Testament, the “mystery of Christ” is unveiled. Catechism #1095 says, “For this reason, especially during Advent and Lent and above all at the Easter Vigil, (the Church) re-reads and re-lives the great events of salvation history in the “today” of her liturgy.” The Church reminds us in Catechism #522 “that the coming of God’s Son to earth is an event (so immense, so fantastic) that God willed to prepare for it over centuries”. In our lifetime we don’t have centuries to prepare for the Lord’s coming at Christmas time, the Incarnation, God becoming man. It is so important in our lives. But the Church does give us these four weeks of Advent to prepare our hearts to receive him in a fullness and in a way that perhaps last year we didn’t. And so each year we have a fresh chance to receive him in a fresh new way and a depth in a new way. “The Holy Spirit prepares us for the reception of Christ.” The Holy Spirit prepares us for intimacy with Christ.
God created intimacy between a man and a woman so we could comprehend the intimacy he’s calling us to with him. It is part of his plan so that we can understand the relationship he wants with us. He wants intimacy. Husband and wife become one: One in thought, one in heart, one in body. God invites us to abide in him, to be one with him. Modern immorality aside, no one would be intimate with a stranger. If we want to be intimate with God, we’ve got to get to know him, through formation and catechesis. But we also have to spend time with him. We trust our spouses, we love them, and after acts of intimacy we know them in a way that we know no one else. God is calling us to that same type of relationship: to explore, to get to know him, to spend time, to be intimate with him. And once we have been intimate with him, we know him in a way that we have never understood him before. He calls us to that. He calls each of us to that.
Another intimacy is like when a mother is pregnant, and you have that living creature within you. The catechism says that motherhood, that intimacy is another example of intimacy that God has with us—Creator and creature. Mother Mary is our Advent model. Catechism #374 reminds us, “The first man was not only created good, but was also established in friendship with his Creator, in a state that would be surpassed only by the glory of the new creation in Christ.” Catechism #35 teaches that “Man’s faculties make him capable of coming to a knowledge of the existence of a personal God. But for man to be able to enter into real intimacy with him, God willed both to reveal himself to man, and to give him the grace of being able to welcome this revelation in faith.”
Thus, intimacy with God begins with God’s will to reveal himself to us and then continues as God gives us the grace to respond to his revelation of God to us.
In the Catechism, paragraph 2567, it states:
“The living and true God tirelessly calls each person to that mysterious encounter known as prayer. In prayer, the faithful God’s initiative of love always comes first; our own first step is always a response. As God gradually reveals Himself and reveals man to himself, prayer appears as a reciprocal call, a covenant drama. Through words and actions, this drama engages the heart. “
You are here today, listening, because God called you here. And then you responded by coming. All we have to do to seek the Lord, and find the Lord, is to accept his grace. You can do this. Anyone who seeks him will find him, if you seek him with all your heart. That’s God’s promise to you in scripture, Jeremiah 29:13.
In the Gospel of Luke, we get the story of the first Advent and it begins with the righteous and quite elderly couple, Zechariah and Elizabeth. Elizabeth is a descendant of Aaron, who was the brother of Moses. So she is going to be our bridge between the Old Testament and the New Testament, because her child will be John the Baptist, who heralds the coming of Jesus. Zechariah, Cousin Elizabeth’s husband, is a priest for Israel who ministered in the temple in Jerusalem. While Zechariah is praying in the sanctuary, ministering to God, an angel comes to him, Angel Gabriel and he announces the coming of the couple’s first child who will be named John. When Zechariah got up enough nerve to speak to this angel, the first thing he does is tell the angel that it is impossible! It is impossible because his wife is old and barren. Well, to make the point that nothing is impossible for the Lord, the angel allowed Zechariah to become speechless and he stayed speechless for the next 9 months. The Lord doesn’t want Zechariah’s negative words to get in the way! After Zechariah went home from the temple, Elizabeth got pregnant! And how did Elizabeth react? She goes into seclusion for five months.
Here we have these two leaders of the Jewish faith, this holy couple full of wisdom, and what do they do? They either don’t or can’t talk about it. They can’t talk about this spiritual experience that they have had. Can you imagine what’s been going through their minds during this quiet time? Even the townspeople are saying “Who is this child going to be? That something so special is going on with this couple? This awesome thing!” But neither Zechariah nor Elizabeth is talking.
Six months after the angel is finished with Zechariah, he shows up on Mary’s doorstep. We are very familiar with the story in Luke’s Gospel of the Angel Gabriel coming and announcing to Mary about the birth of the Savior and how special this child will be. The angel tells her, “Don’t be afraid, you have found favor with God. Behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and name him Jesus. And He will be great and be called Son of the Most High, and the Lord will give him the throne of David his father,” Wait a moment! David is his father? No, no, no. David is in the line of his heritage. King David, the beloved of the Lord, was the king of Israel who established the city of Jerusalem where the temple of the Lord was built, Jerusalem, where the sanctuary of the Lord was. David was promised an heir that would reign forever. Then the angel says to Mary, “He will rule over the house of Jacob forever”. Oh, wait! Who is Jacob? Jacob is the one who headed up the first family of Israel. His name is Israel! Jacob is the one who had the twelve sons, he is the one who is in the line of Abraham, who received Abraham’s blessings and promises from God. Jacob’s the one whose sons took the family into Egypt. So, here we are, we have the house of Jacob, which is the whole Jewish people, that her child will rule over. The angel tells Mary that this child is going to be someone very special, very special. In his ancestral line of David, he will be king, in the line of Jacob he will be the Patriarch, but then more than everything he will be the son of God. He will be God become man.
Mary said, “How can this be, I don’t know man?” She does not quite comprehend how this is going to take place, since she is a virgin. And Angel Gabriel says to her, don’t worry, “The power of the Holy Spirit will overshadow you, and you will conceive a son.” To help this teenager in this miracle, the Angel reminds her that her cousin Elizabeth, who was old and barren, had also conceived a son; “for nothing will be impossible for God.” Without further hesitation, Mary says “yes”. Fiat! Let it be done to me according to God’s will. Life changing answer! World changing answer!
What does Mary do after this? This little teen-aged girl hastens to her cousin Elizabeth’s to help her. Think about this, here are the leaders of the faith community, Zechariah and Elizabeth, and they are speechless and have gone into seclusion, and then we’ve got this little teenaged girl who rushes off to serve her cousin who is holy. Elizabeth is the only woman in scripture who has been called holy, righteous. Mary hastens to go see her cousin Elizabeth, a woman of Wisdom and prayer, for advice, to discuss things with her. Maybe they talked about morning sickness and that sort of thing, and maybe they also talked about the gossip that was sure to start. Even her own beloved Joseph thought about putting her out until the angel explained to him the facts.
Elizabeth is there to help her through the gossip, but also, Mary has this wise woman to help her to understand the grace of God in the wonderful, supernatural, miraculous thing that is going on with both of them. And there is a bond there between the two women, beyond wisdom, beyond circumstance, because they have both been filled with the Holy Spirit. If fact, when Mary walks up and sees Elizabeth, Elizabeth comes out to greet her and the child within her womb leaps for joy and she is filled with the Holy Spirit and she says, “Who am I that the mother of my Lord would come to me? So Elizabeth, filled with the holy Spirit, is the one first to proclaim that Jesus is Lord. And this is the embryo within Mary’s womb, a very intimate moment between the two of them, very intimate. And there is peace. Service to others can bring peace during turmoil.
As Mary helped Elizabeth and was a companion in the last few months of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, Elizabeth provided emotional support to Mary. Service to one another brings inner peace. Service to others helps you to work through anxiety as you take your mind off self. Advent gives us time to prepare for the Lord by doing service to others. We buy gifts, we decorate our house; it’s all part of the Christmas grace that helps us to prepare for others, and it’s also preparing us for the Lord Jesus and his presence. We have people that are in need that we help out at Christmas that we wouldn’t normally think about. The Church reminds us that serving others is another way for preparing for the coming of the Lord. We give our money; we want to do things for other people.
Mary also shows us that sometimes to really get to the gritty about our spiritual lives we need to change environments. She “hastens’ to her cousin’s house. While you and I are together today, we are away from the hustle bustle of everything. We’re in a different environment and it is a way that we can just pause in our lives and seek the Lord. Our prayer time can be that time for us, too. Adoration can be that. Retreats are that for us. We all need that “getting away” from our lives just to be quiet just to be quiet and listen and ponder. Changing surroundings or environments change our attitude.
To close, we want to share with you a message the Lord shared with me in Advent 2004 that I included in my book Advent Pearls about Advent preparation:
“My child, the depth of My Presence beckons to you and to all especially in this Advent season. The turning of days that mark time do so with feasts and with days of fasting and days of preparation. Spend these next days to prepare yourself as you would prepare your home for a great feast—a great party for an honored guest. Cleaning, inside and out, invitations and decorating are all a part of preparation. Decorate your ‘temple’, your ‘home’, your heart with the grace of works of compassion and other works of mercy and love. How sweet is the smell that lingers at the completing of good works for the benefit of others!
Garlands of good deeds decorate the mantle. Reading of Holy Deeds [of others] decorates the smallest areas bringing light into the corners and hidden places.
Do not forget the ‘outside’ preparation. Sweep the walk—brush away complaining and disagreement. Sweep the path littered with selfishness and harsh words. Greet your guests with kind words and loving gestures. This is the day the Lord has made.
Deep clean your ‘carpet’ –that place you walk every day. Look for the ‘spots’ that need special treatment—bring these with you to Reconciliation and they will be forever removed.
Truth of the Spirit invites you to follow the advice of Cousin Elizabeth’s son, John the Baptist: “Repent!” Find reconciliation with the Lord through the wonderful sacrament of confession. Follow the advice of Zechariah and keep silence rather than denying truth. Follow the advice of the Angel Gabriel and “Be not afraid!” Follow the advice of Mary, serve others, and say “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your Word!” Follow the advice of Elizabeth, “Blessed are you who believed that what was spoken to you by the Lord would be fulfilled.” Follow the advice of the Lord and prepare you heart, your home for the Presence of the Lord.
You’ve been listening to Truth of the Spirit “The Purpose and Story of Advent”. We invite you to subscribe and click the notification bell on YouTube. We also invite you to listen to Our Lady of Guadeloupe series to learn more about the feast of Our Lady of Guadeloupe that gives witness that mother Mary’s role continues through the ages to “deliver” the savior unto the people. And then come back for more. With the Holy Spirit, there’s always more! Amen.
