Day 19
Thursday, December 14
Dorothy Saunders
I’ve always loved Christmas. I love unwrapping tree ornaments, the mementoes of fifty-two years of marriage. I love baking Christmas cookies while listening to Christmas music. For most of my life, Advent was simply the twenty-four days before Christmas day…until one Christmas Eve service at Park Street Church, around 2013. The senior minister preached on Jesus’ first coming, his birth. Then he went on to emphasize his second coming. I may well have listened to a meditation like this before, but I’d never really heard it. God’s Holy Spirit opened my ears and mind on that Christmas Eve to consider two seasons of Advent. Waiting for Messiah’s birth and waiting for Christ’s return.
Two thousand years ago, God fulfilled the prophecy he had given to Isaiah as written in Isaiah 11:1–10, “There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse [David’s father] and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit.” The Messiah was prophesied through David’s line and Jesus fulfilled that prophecy. My savior was a newborn infant, physically weak, humble, and in a cave with animals. After waiting through that first Advent season, we wait again. I await Christ’s return living in this second “Advent” season. It was not until that Christmas Eve service that I came to see my greater hope is yet to come.
Music is important to my worship, the Advent and Christmas hymns of our hope fulfilled. The simple words of “Go Tell it on the Mountain”: Down in a lowly manger the humble Christ was born, and God sent us salvation that blessed Christmas morn. And in “Lo! He Comes with Clouds Descending”: God appears on earth to reign.
I pray that I will always remain aware that Christmas is only the beginning of God’s plan to redeem me through Christ’s work.
Dorothy lives in Boston, close to North Station. She really enjoys taking friends to museums and either guiding them on a tour or simply discussing the art as they look together.