Worship Leader: Paul Whiteley, LLWL Music Director: Tim Hallman, B.Mus., B.Ed.
Fourth Sunday of Advent
December 21, 2025
“Love is the Answer”
Welcome / Announcement / Celebrations
Land Acknowledgement
Lighting the Christ Candle
Advent 4: Mary and Joseph – Love (three candles are lit)
One: Shepherds, where are you going? Can we go too?
Shepherds: We are rushing off to Bethlehem. The angels came and told us that a baby was born.
Not just any baby, but God’s baby, Jesus. This baby is God’s gift of hope and peace, joy and
Love for the whole world.
The angels will watch the sheep, but we’ve got to go. There is not time to waste.
We are so excited. We are filled with joy!
We must see this child, this baby Jesus. Yes, you can come with us, but you must hurry.
One: Thank you, shepherds, for your faith and your gift of Love. We will join you on the Advent
adventure. (fourth candle is lit)
Hymn: VU 7 “Hope is a Star” verses 1-4
Call to Worship:
One: Instead of waiting on presents and Christmas treats
All: We choose to wait for Christ
One: Instead of the way of consumerism, capitalism, and individualism
All: We choose to seek your beloved community
One: Instead of fear, hate, and complacency
All: We choose to be bold and courageous in our love
One: Instead of being bound by the pressures and expectations of traditions
All: We choose to trust in you
One: Instead of everything else
All: We choose to worship you
- Alydia Smith, United Church of Canada, 2025
Passing of the Peace
Opening Prayer:
Restore us, O God, let your face shine on us.
As you have lead Joseph, lead us.
As you have restored those
Who have been broken by the cruelty of the world
Restore us.
As you have shined on our ancestors, shine on us,
so that we may be redeemed.
Amen
- adapted from Alydia Smith, United Church of Canada, 2025
Anthem: “Hear the Angels Singing”
Scripture:
Psalm 80:1–7, 17–19 (VU 794, Part One)
Matthew 1:18–25 “Joseph’s Dream”
Hymn: VU 1 “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel”
Reflection: “Love is the Answer”
I don’t think it will come as a surprise to anyone in this room, to hear that people read scripture – even the four gospels – in different ways. One way of interpreting them strikes me as kind of circular – that these miracles must have happened because that’s the way God acts in the world, and we know God acts this way in the world because of these miracles.
And so there are those who want to look at the story we heard today as some kind of proof: Mary was a virgin when she conceived the baby Jesus, so we know that he is special. Now this isn’t the long version from Luke, which gives an ancient Mediterranean version of how conception happens - “the Holy Spirit will come to you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you”. People at that place and time didn’t see the beginning of pregancy as something fundamentally material – lacking microscopes, or the framework of cellular biology. Instead, they believed in a male “generative principle” was necessary for creation, but they saw it as more about spirit than about body. There is a reason that creation myths around the Mediterranean center on immaterial “sky gods” and very material “fertility goddesses” – those images reflected the way people understood their everyday lives.
So the involvement of a father in conception was seen to be more spiritual than physical. This may explain why, in that place and time, stories of angels or Greco-Roman gods fathering more-than-human children were, if not common, at least a well-understood narrative device. In fact, there is a school of thought saying that the “virgin birth” was added to the Gospels of Matthew and Luke in to compete with Empire – to undermine the claims of the Roman emperors to be conceived by Gods and therefore worthy of worship. And in fact, the cults of emperors remained one of the main rivals of the Jesus movement for the first three centuries or so of our faith.
Matthew’s gospel provides Jesus’ list of spiritual ancestors – through Joseph – and then says that before Joseph and Mary were intimate, he found out that she was pregnant. I don’t read Joseph’s response as outrage but a kind of quiet resignation – he doesn’t want to see Mary disgraced, and resolves to divorce her quietly. Perhaps this is one of the earliest recorded examples of “if you really love them, you will let them go”.
But now the story gets to the key moment, Joseph’s dream. Of all the figures in our Nativity sets, Joseph is the one with the least main character energy. Certainly the angels are loud and proud in the nativity stories of Matthew and Luke, and even the shepherds and the astrologers – who, sadly, will arrive when our church is closed – are given better lines in the gospel’s Christmas pageants. And so in Matthew’s gospel, an angel speaks to Joseph in dreams: first tell him that Mary’s pregnancy is divine, then warning him to leave Bethlehem to avoid the violence of Herod’s jealousy, and then a third time assuring him that it is safe to return home. Naturally, Joseph does what the angel says.
It seems to me that attitudes towards angels have varied a lot over the history of our faith tradition. In the Hebrew tradition where Christianity started, complicated hosts of angels were part of the essential furniture of faith, serving God by delivering messages, transporting prophets to mountaintops, and intimidating God’s various enemies. In Europe’s middle ages, angels were seen as reinforcing a specifically Christian world order, organized into a hierarchy just as they understood their social world. Archangels in heaven assisted God as leaders of supernatural forces, while guardian angels were just part of everyday life, doing the equivalent of finding your keys or relieving a toothache.
Modernity and the Protestant reformation weren’t always kind to angels. Cherubs became more like servants of eros – the way we see them for neo-pagan Valentine’s Day – and reformed Christians tended to become skeptical of them, same as the other magical themes of scripture. My mother, as a young woman, inhabited a midcentury modern world in the U.S., somewhere between Leave It to Beaver and Mary Tyler Moore. So she didn’t really know how to respond, at a job interview for a faith-based in the early 1960s, when she was asked about her views on angels. Angels weren’t really part of polite discussion in Methodist circles at that time.
Now I’m not known for being soft towards conservative Christianity, but one thing I think it gets partly right is its reappropriation of angels. Following Jesus may not mean what they think it means, but when they talk about angels they often capture an experience from everyday life that mainline churches haven’t always been as effective in talking about. And much as their leaders may claim to be biblical “literalists”, when they talk about angels their language mixes metaphor and the literal in a way that may actually align with our traditions of faith. When something unexpected happens, something blessed, those are what our faith has called the actions of angels; those angels can be immaterial and unseen, or they can also take the form of people we have known our whole lives.
Also, I’ve read Jung before, but I’m not willing to say that any dream is necessarily connected to the divine, or to a truth beyond the individual. But I know very well that our conscious lives come with blinders – just as our eyes can only see less than 120 degrees straight in front of us, out of 360, so our minds are only able to process a part of what we see, what others say, what they don’t say … the part that we are prepared to see by our preconceptions. And there’s a reason therapy has always been mixed with dream interpretations – dreams are one of the ways we try to process fears, and hopes, and ways of knowing that we have not been ready to see.
And so an angel comes to Joseph in a dream. And what matters in the story is what he hears the angel say. As often happens, the angel tells him not to be afraid. The angel reassures him that Mary’s pregnancy has a purpose – it’s a sign of hope. And the angel gives him permission to live with his wife, to share a life together, to raise the child together as his own. The angel gives him permission to love.
So just as last week was the story of Mary and the Magnificat, today is the story of Joseph and the dream. This dream tells Joseph to be patient; it tells him to take care of Mary; it gives him permission to love. Advent is our time of expectation and hope; it is our time of patience and desire; it is the time where we wait and wonder. And what are we waiting for? The answer is the presence of God in the world, but what does that mean? According to the angels of our dreams, the answer is Love. And for that, to God be the praise and the thanks. Amen.
Invitation for Offering
Offering Hymn: VU 541 “Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow”
Offering Prayer
Prepare our Hearts for Prayers: MV 86 “Da Pacem Cordium”
Prayers of the People / Lord’s Prayer
Our Father, who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy name;
thy kingdom come;
thy will be done;
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation;
but deliver us from the evil one.
For thine is the kingdom,
the power and the glory,
for ever and ever. Amen.
Closing Hymn: VU 61 “Of the Father’s Love Begotten”
Commissioning / Benediction
Hymn: “Go Now in Peace"
"A Village Church With A Heart For The World"
Christ United Church
12 Perth St., Lyn, ON, K0E 1M0
(613)498-0281 (Phone) (613)498-2589 (Fax)
lynunitedchurch@cogeco.net www.lynunitedchurch.com Follow on Twitter: @Ch1United