By Katie Murray
My 4-year-old son has become rather enthralled with the hymn “Joy to the World” this month. He has taken the phrase “heaven and nature sing” as his personal mantra and sings the song all day, plays it on our music speakers throughout the house, and as a grand finale in the evening, belts it out in his room after we put him to bed. I should add that he only knows the first verse (and refuses to let me teach him the others), so I was grateful when I saw we would be singing the hymn together this morning in its entirety. I’m ready to “repeat the sounding joy” and reflect on the “wonders of his love.”
On this fourth Sunday of Advent, we turn our focus onto God’s Love made manifest in the Christ child. We are told in 1 John 4 that it was through God’s action of sending Jesus to live among us that God’s love was revealed. God’s love was nothing new, but Jesus’ birth and life allowed humanity to experience that love in new and profound ways. How wondrous!
This month many of our Sunday School classes have been studying the angelic encounters that preceded the birth of Jesus and how each one held an important contribution for the preparation of Christ’s birth. The choral anthem for today, written from the perspective of an angelic chorus, imagines what it must have been like to announce the coming of God’s Son: “Into one song compress the love, that rules our universe above: sing love, sing love, sing God is love!” What a wondrous task to proclaim such love to the world for the first time. O holy night, indeed!
How might we tap into that wonder this morning? How are we, like the angels in our sacred Scriptures, called to share the Good News? Where might you unexpectedly encounter God’s love in the days leading up to that blessed Christmas morning?