Secrets Revealed!
Dear Parish Family,
The way Christmas falls this year on Monday, we have a very short fourth week of Advent… really just a number of hours! Which means, we have fewer days to wait for the arrival of our Messiah, Jesus - the God who saves, and we have less days to prepare all the details for the big feast with family and friends.
On behalf of the whole team here at OLPH, we extend to you and yours a beautiful Christmas full of God’s presence and joy! We pray that the Lord may share one of the secrets that He has for you this season, that you can make the time to listen for His quiet voice, and that God may speak to your heart a word of comfort and peace.
Over the course of these weeks, we have been dwelling on secrets, what they are and why we keep them, and even recognizing that God has secrets for us, ready to discover especially by praying with the Scriptures. If we look to the stories that unfold the coming of Emmanuel - God with us - we see how God quietly but persistently communicates His will and His word to those who will listen.
So far during Advent, we have spent time with John the Baptist, but this week, we meet Joseph and Mary and Zechariah and Elizabeth - all people with whom God shares His secrets. On Christmas night we will meet the shepherds and on Epiphany the Magi from the East will come and pay the Christ child homage. (Each of these links takes you to the scripture of that day to make it easy for you to spend a bit of time in prayer listening for what God may want to share with you! If you do not have the links, the first chapters of Matthew and Luke are great places to begin during this season.)
Israel has been long-awaiting the Messiah, and finally He arrives. I have never been especially good at waiting. To wait from Thanksgiving for Christmas is a challenge. I want our Savior to make haste, just as it can be hard to wait to see people’s expressions when they open a gift you have picked out for them. God is much more patient. How does Peter put it? “To the Lord a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years like a day,” (2 Pt 3:8) - all in God’s time. And for generations up to the generation of Joseph and Mary, the people of Israel had waited, prepared, listened - and perhaps even gotten frustrated by the lack of God’s arrival. This is a minor current in the series Chosen, a show I cannot recommend highly enough!
But at the appointed time, God acted and made that definitive move towards salvation. It is almost like a snowball of secrets revealed, moving at speed downhill from the time of Gabriel’s announcement to Mary.
So, as followers of Christ, it is so meaningful for us to be familiar with the Word of God expressed on the sacred page, to be attuned to how God seeks to reveal Himself to the world, most perfectly in the person of the Son.
As we seek to welcome the Christ-child, the Babe of Bethlehem, this Christmas, I pray you can reserve some time to listen for His word in the quiet of your heart, to save some time for our Lord to speak with you.
One great thing to do is take up the child Jesus from your manger and hold Him close, rock Him and speak your heart to Him. And then listen for what He may say to you.
May God bless you this Christmas and always!
Fr. Wilson
