Advent

Setting. The garden, just after the first sin. Adam and Eve are hiding.

Bridge. God curses the serpent and makes a promise in the same breath: the woman's offspring "shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel." It is the first hint of Christmas, spoken over the first sin. The rescue was planned before the exile from the garden began.

Setting. God calls an old man named Abram to leave everything he knows.

Bridge. "In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed." One family, chosen for the sake of every family. Every promise that follows runs through this one.

Setting. God asks Abraham to sacrifice the son he waited twenty-five years for.

Bridge. Isaac asks, "where is the lamb?" Abraham answers, "God will provide for himself the lamb." On that same mountain range, centuries later, God would not spare his own Son. Read this one slowly.

Setting. The last night in Egypt.

Bridge. A spotless lamb, its blood on the doorframe, and death passes over. Every year Israel retold this story. When John the Baptist later points at Jesus and says, "Behold, the Lamb of God," this is the picture in everyone's mind.

Setting. King David wants to build God a house. God answers that he will build David one instead.

Bridge. "Your throne shall be established forever." David's descendants will fail and the kingdom will split, but God does not take this promise back. Every Christmas genealogy runs through David for this reason.

Setting. A frightened king, Ahaz, surrounded by enemies, refusing to ask God for a sign.

Bridge. God gives one anyway: "the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel." God with us. Matthew quotes this verse in his first chapter. The sign was bigger than anyone in the room understood.

Setting. Galilee, a region crushed by invasion, "the people who walked in darkness."

Bridge. "For to us a child is born." Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. These are not names you give a human king. Jesus would grow up in Galilee, the very place this light was promised.

Setting. Isaiah pictures David's family tree as a stump, cut down.

Bridge. "There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse." New life from what looked dead. Then a picture of a world made right: wolf and lamb together, a child playing safely. Christmas is the start of that, not the end.

Setting. A word to exiles who think God has forgotten them.

Bridge. "Comfort, comfort my people." A voice in the wilderness prepares the way, and the gospels tell us that voice was John the Baptist. Then the promise: "Behold your God!" He comes like a shepherd, carrying the lambs.

Setting. The song of the suffering servant, written about seven hundred years before the cross.

Bridge. It is strange to read about suffering in Advent, but this is why the baby came. "He was pierced for our transgressions." The manger and the cross were always one story.

Setting. Micah names a town too small to matter.

Bridge. "But you, O Bethlehem... from you shall come forth for me one who is to be ruler in Israel, whose coming forth is from of old." When the wise men later ask where the king will be born, the scholars quote this verse. The Ruler of all things started in a tiny town.

Setting. The last prophet of the Old Testament. After this, four hundred years of silence.

Bridge. "I send my messenger, and he will prepare the way before me." Then nothing for four centuries. Imagine waiting that long. Advent asks you to feel a little of that silence before the story picks back up.

Setting. The New Testament opens with a family tree.

Bridge. Don't skip the names. There are liars, foreigners, a prostitute, an adulterer, and kings who did evil. God did not wait for a clean family. Jesus came through a real one, which means there is room in his family for yours.

Setting. An old priest named Zechariah, serving in the temple, childless and long past hoping.

Bridge. The silence breaks. An angel tells him he will have a son, John, who will prepare the way. Zechariah doubts and goes mute. God keeps his promise anyway. Your doubt does not cancel his faithfulness.

Setting. A teenage girl in Nazareth, engaged and ordinary.

Bridge. "Nothing will be impossible with God." Mary has every reason to be afraid: her reputation, her engagement, her future. Her answer is one of the bravest sentences in Scripture: "Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word."

Setting. Mary visits her relative Elizabeth, and the baby in Elizabeth's womb leaps.

Bridge. Mary sings. Her song is about a God who "has brought down the mighty from their thrones and exalted those of humble estate." Christmas turns the world's ladder upside down, and Mary saw it first.

Setting. Joseph finds out Mary is pregnant and plans to quietly end the engagement.

Bridge. An angel tells him to stay, and to name the child Jesus, "for he will save his people from their sins." Joseph never speaks a word in the gospels. He just obeys, and protects them both. Quiet faithfulness is part of this story too.

Setting. John is born, and Zechariah's voice comes back.

Bridge. The first thing he does is sing. "The sunrise shall visit us from on high to give light to those who sit in darkness." Nine months of silence, and his first words are praise.

Setting. A census forces a pregnant woman to travel to Bethlehem.

Bridge. An emperor's decree moves a family to the exact town Micah named. Then the most understated sentence in history: she "laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn." God arrived without a room.

Setting. Shepherds working the night shift outside town.

Bridge. The first announcement goes to men who could not testify in court. "Good news of great joy that will be for all the people." They go, they see, and they tell everyone. And Mary "treasured up all these things, pondering them in her heart." Do both today.

Setting. Forty days later, at the temple, two very old people.

Bridge. Simeon has been promised he will not die before he sees the Messiah. He takes the baby in his arms and says he can go in peace. Anna, a widow for decades, gives thanks. Some people wait their whole lives for this moment. They were not disappointed.

Setting. Foreign astrologers arrive in Jerusalem asking about a newborn king.

Bridge. Outsiders travel hundreds of miles to worship him, while the scholars who knew the exact verse do not walk the six miles to Bethlehem. Knowing about Jesus and coming to him are not the same thing.

Setting. A jealous king and a family running for their lives.

Bridge. Christmas has a dark edge we usually leave out. Jesus begins life as a refugee. God did not come into a safe world; he came into this one, with its violence and grief, so that he could redeem it from the inside.

Setting. Paul, likely quoting an early Christian hymn.

Bridge. He "emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant." That is what Christmas is: the highest one coming down as low as he could go. And because he did, one day "every knee should bow."

Setting. Christmas Day. John's version has no shepherds and no star.

Bridge. "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory." Everything you read this month was leading here. The God who promised in the garden kept his word. Merry Christmas.