December 2024 – Wicomico Presbyterian Church

Advent Three: Will We Sing with Them?

Luke 1: 26-38 In the midst of everything else about this Christmas season, the secular attachments and the religious meanings; at the very center of it this is a story about women having babies. It’s about pregnancy and childbirth. And today we rest our minds on that. In Luke’s gospel, it is a story about two women – Elizabeth and Mary – both finding themselves pregnant in the most unexpected circumstances. Elizabeth, older cousin to Mary and wife of the priest Zechariah, is too old for having babies. For Elizabeth, those years have passed and left her empty. She is barren, the term the Bible uses, like other women we have seen in the scriptures: Sarah, the wife of Abraham; Rachel, the wife of Jacob; Hannah, the wife of Elkanah. All these women waited for their turn to come, while they watched their peers’ swelling bellies and glowing faces; they […]

Advent Two: While We Wait

Luke 1: 5-17 If you know one thing about Advent, you know it is a season of waiting. And waiting can be so hard. Last week we lit the Advent wreath in our home for the first time this year. Lena looked at all the candles and asked, “How many?” I said, “Just one.” And later she asked, “And tomorrow we get to light two?” and I said, “No. We wait a week before we light two candles.” And Lena made a little squeaky sound of angst. Because this is just one more thing she is required to wait for this season, and a week may as well be 10 years in her mind. On this second Sunday of Advent, we still wait. And on this day of our journey toward Bethlehem we are in Jerusalem. It is one of the oldest cities in the world, with a population 60 […]

Advent One: Longing and Hope

Romans 8: 18-25 Luke 2: 1-3 Of all the journeys I have taken in life, the one that stands out the most in my memory is the trip I took to Cuba with my seminary classmates. One reason it stands out was its general weirdness. First of all seminarians are weird. A bunch of people from different walks of life who all come together because they are a rare breed of individual who has heard and then responded to a call from God. All of us feeling kind of touchy and vulnerable because we don’t know where we are going physically, spiritually, intellectually. And then we are sent on this trip to a place that takes us out of whatever is left of our comfort zone. For three weeks. With zero calls or texts home. So people tended to act strangely at times. One of my travel companions turned to […]

From Empty to Full, Part 2: The Lord Makes a Way

Ruth 3:1-5; 4:13-17 There is a little story that I tell sometimes on Christmas Eve. A woman lost her most valuable possession: a diamond ring. So upset, she called her sister, who came over right away to help her look for it. They got down on their hands and knees and began searching, inch by inch over the carpet in the living room. When her husband got home he saw the two women crawling around on the living room floor, intently looking at the carpet, serious as could be. He asked what they were doing. His wife said, “I lost my diamond ring and we’re looking for it.” Well, he got right down on the floor with them to help in the search. The three of them were now crawling on the floor, inch by inch, searching for the lost ring. After what seemed like hours of fruitless searching the […]