“Light one candle for JOY! One bright candle for joy. He bring joy to every heart, he comes, he comes.”
JOY. I love the word, it attracts me, it inspires me, it makes me feel happy. But what is Joy and what does it mean? The Scriptures for Sunday are COVERED with the words, “Rejoice” so I wanted to speak with you a bit about what joy has to do with advent. Gaudete Sunday is “Pink Sunday” (when we get to light the pink candle) which reminds us to rejoice and not lose hope that our waiting is almost done and Christ will come soon! To really feel and experience advent and our waiting time, we must first remember the waiting of the Jewish people for their messiah. They waited for their savior for THOUSANDS of years, so Christmas time is not just a time for us Christians to wait for Christmas to come but it is a time where we re-member our Jewish history and foundation, we re-member the struggle to continue to hope for a savior, we re-member the endurance our Jewish brothers and sisters had in waiting for the words of the prophets like Isaiah to come true. So when the savior is born at Christmas, we celebrate, we rejoice in not only the birth of Christ, Jesus, but the fulfillment of the thousands of years of waiting, the fulfillment of a promise of a loving and faithful God. You see, all of us are waiting for something. We are waiting for an answer about what to do with our lives, or how to live our lives. We are waiting to see if our loved ones will recover from sickness. We are waiting to find a job. We are waiting for our future spouse perhaps. We are waiting for God to show up in our lives. WE are all waiting for something. So Advent is a time for us to celebrate the waiting, to wait together in hope, in peace, in joy and in love. And Christmas is an answer to the waiting. HE is the answer to our waiting. The Responsorial Psalm for Mass is not taken from the Book of Psalms (like usual) this week, but taken from the Book of Luke. This is Mary’s response to the Angel Gabriel after he tells her of God’s plan for her to give birth to the Savior everyone’s been waiting for. Her response is the famous Maginificat, “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord and my spirit REJOICES in God my Savior, for he is has looked with favor upon his lowly servant.” He has answered her prayer, and the prayer of his people. What are you waiting for? What are you hoping for? This Sunday, lets rejoice in the confidence that God is faithful and remembers His promises. With the birth of Christ, we get what we have been waiting for.
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AuthorWord up. I am Stacy, the youth minister of this amazing group of teens. I have 4 kids of my own, 2 heaven babies and like 60 teens I consider very large children of my own. Archives
March 2018
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