Join us at Peoria Nazarene Church for our weekly worship gathering Sunday at 10:30 AM. You can also join us online via Youtube or Facebook.
Families are welcome to worship together for the season of Advent. Busy bags that go along with the sermon are available for kids at the welcome center each week. Our Kids will also be helping lead worship by singing a Christmas Song!
On this, the last Sunday of Advent, we begin to transition from longing and waiting to looking for the nativity story. We expect shepherds in fields, keeping watch over their flocks by night. We expect innkeepers with stables full of soft, sweet-smelling hay. We expect a pregnant Mary on the brink of delivering her child. And we have come to anticipate it all wrapped in wonder, beauty, and nostalgic simplicity. Most of our nativity scenes are clean and crisp: angelic faces, resting animals, a clean stable. Even “Away in a Manger” claims the baby Jesus did not cry! Our familiarity with this story often sanitizes it, removing the messy humanity of it, like the fluids at birth, the swollen feet that come with third-trimester pregnancy, and the general noise and messiness.
We also tend to sanitize the family dynamics Jesus was born into. Matthew 1, however, is not a narrative of shepherds in the field or sweet-smelling hay. It’s not a sanitized narrative at all. In fact, it plunges us right into the messy family dynamics Jesus was born into. A betrothed and supposed virgin ends up pregnant, and the man she is engaged to finds out. This is a mess in a culture and religion that allows for the stoning of adulteresses. This is a difficult place for a man who is filled with love and compassion but also righteousness and dedication to his faith. In this mess, on this last Sunday of Advent, we reflect on love.
Maybe, despite our nostalgic feelings toward the shepherds and angels of Luke 2, this is the perfect. passage for us to talk about the love of God so great that he not only entered the world in a stable but also entered into the humanness of messy family dynamics.