There are several insights that the texts of prayers and readings gave to me this Advent Season.  We only celebrate the fourth week this year for one day – essentially from sundown on Saturday to sundown on Sunday when the Vigil of Christmas begins.  But the texts are strong and could take many weeks to ponder for the richness embedded there.  Let me point to a few insights that have come to me these past days as I have prayed with these prayers and scripture passages.

               I call attention first to the Collect of Opening Pray of the Mass.  For those familiar with the Angelus Prayer, said each day at 6:00 AM (for early risers) 12:00 Noon and again at 6:00 PM.  We beg God to pour forth grace (God’s own life) into our lives, who have been blessed to hear the Incarnation message of Mary and the Angel, and have walked the Passion with the Incarnate Son of God, may   be brought to the Glory of the Resurrection.”  The incarnation of the Word of God into human flesh has brought about our transformation into Divine Life in union with the Trinity.

               The first reading from the Second Book of Samuel tells of King David’s urge to build God a glorious house (more or less permanent and a sign of wealth and power) so God doesn’t have to dwell in a tent, an utterly transient place that often identifies those who are unhomed. David’s seemingly generous impulse follows on his success in wars where God has assisted the Isrealites to defeat enemies.  David is genuinely grateful for God’s care and is embarrassed to live in a palace while God’s Ark of the Covenant is housed in a tent.  Nathan, the religious prophet and leader, is pleased that David is thinking along this line.  After all a temple is a sign of power.  It gives authority to the prophet or priest who presides there, witnesses to the power of the ones who build it, and gives respect to the god it honors.

According to Samuel, God is not pleased with this idea of David’s, or Nathan’s instruction.  God wants David to allow Him to establish a living family that will follow God’s plan, and from whom will come the salvation of the whole world. This is the “house” that God wants.  God is not interested in sitting around flexing power muscles as humans think.  Rather Divine Compassion is pointing toward a MUCH bigger project, but David (and most of his descendants) don’t get it.

This passage reminds me of God telling St. Francis of Assisi to “rebuild his house.” Francis thinks God wants him to repair a dilapidated little Chapel of San Damiano.  But God wants Francis to build back up the Communion of the Church that was falling apart in the 12th Century through the pursuit of wealth and power – (sounds familiar doesn’t it?).  Too often David’s vocation to build a family of believers, Jesus’s Birth, and St. Francis’s task are romanticized by various admirers rather than realized by serious imitators.

 At this 11th hour of the Advent Season we hear the Angel Gabriel tenderly invite Mary – a descendent of David’s House, but a young uneducated woman of the marginalized of Israel, to be a house for God.  She is asked to show every human how to provide God a home among us.  God asks us, as He asked David and Mary to let him build us into a house for Him to dwell in forever.

As we consider these texts before the dawn of the Feast of God’s human coming we might ask God if he WANTS to make a home in our hearts and what He wants us to throw out in order to make that possible. May we have a blessed Christmas as we pray: ” I am the Servant of the Lord, Let it be done to me according to Your Word.”