The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah.

Yes the days are surely coming, in fact the days are here!

Advent is here, four Sundays to get our wilderness souls straightened out so that God can fulfill his promise.

Luke is going to guide us this year, as we focus upon the Advent and Christmas stories through the lens of a single writer.

Over the last three years we have had Mark, with his urgent pace and barebones facts; Matthew, with his reverence for tradition and the fulfillment of ancient prophecies; and John, with his poetic visions of realities yet to be experienced, take their turns at leading us to the night of candles and carols.

And finally we get to Luke.

And I say it that way because Luke is the one we are all in love with, the one we know best.

Luke is angels singing to shepherds, Luke is Mary grappling with her pregnancy, Luke is Politics and Religion colliding, as the distant Augustus Caesar unknowingly forces the carpenter and his lady to travel to Bethlehem, there to give birth in a stable.

Most of what we know and love about Christmas, we know from Luke who gives us a gospel of how God works in our family stories. And I’m sure that I will repeat this often over the next month, but I have long believed, with no direct evidence, that most of what Luke knew about Christmas, he knew from Mary.

Luke is full of the intimate family details, the little touches and private conversations that only someone on the scene would remember and only a family member would think to tell and they contain the loving accents of a mother.

In a prayer that I like to use, here and in private, there is a line that refers to our family relationships as “the most searching test of our character”, asking God for help, and it is true, isn’t it?

We can fool the people at work, we can fool the people here at Church or in our neighborhoods, but in our family relationships people come to see us and know us as we are, good days and bad days alike. I can think of any number of people whom I have known or heard of who were well thought of at work and Church and turned out to be abusive spouses or parents at home. Which is, I suspect, the reason that God chose to come to us within the context of a family.

He wanted us to see and know what a family could be in real life terms, flaws and all, he wanted us to realize that the holy promises are not pie in the sky bye and bye, they are present possibilities for the lives that we live together.

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will fulfill the promise I made.

And what is that promise that God will fulfill in our families?

Well, hold that question for a moment.

Before we get knee deep in the sort of sentimentality that this season brings to us, I want to let Luke remind us of what we already know and that is that family life, like most of life, is messy.

And in December the messiness takes on three distinct forms, each of which lends itself to a holiness.

The first is that Families of Faith are extended families.

Luke doesn’t start with the story of Mary and Joseph, he starts with the story of Elizabeth, Mary’s cousin, aunt or sister, we aren’t sure, and her husband Zechariah and the birth of John who would be the Baptizer.

They were very different people, Jesus and John, from very different families, Elizabeth was older than Mary, Zechariah was a priest and Joseph was a carpenter.

But Elizabeth would help Mary to understand the implications of what was happening in her life and decades later John would prepare the way for Jesus.

You see it is the differences in families that make them holy, it is through the people of our families that God provides us with interpretation and guidance and protection.

I come from a large extended family, my father was one of five who produced 20 children among them, my mother one of three who provided 10 more of my generation and we formed a several decades wide span of ages and a full spectrum of educations and vocations. Today, and I say this with no pride, and some occasional regret, I am close to almost none of them.

Life happens and age differences and career choices and a lot of other stuff, more than a little of it probably my fault, gets in the way and people and relationships can die.

Yet I know that there are core values within me that were shaped by uncles and aunts, cousins and siblings and in December I always think back and give thanks to God for those experiences and those influences, for it has been through them that God has kept his promise.

And what is that promise?

Well, give me another moment or so.

For there is another reality of families of faith that we find when we read Luke honestly. Jesus was born into a troubled family.

For which I am eternally grateful.

You see, I was born into a troubled family as were my children.

Leo Tolstoy, in the opening line of Anna Karenina, described it well when he said: Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

And I have always wanted to add to that: and every family is unhappy.

Not always, not even most of the time, but every family experiences unhappiness and trouble in deep and unique ways. Some show it and talk about it and that works for them, some handle it quietly and carefully and that works for then, but some ignore it and allow it to grow, cancer-like, until there is no family left, just a shell and a sense of loss.

We have heard the story of Mary and the birth of Jesus so often that we lose sight of the pain, the shame, the embarrassment and the scandal of it all.

We need to let ourselves imagine the gossip and the tongue wagging and the rejection, because in the midst of the pain, the shame, the embarrassment and the scandal of it all, the sort of things that we have all known at one point or another and may even be going though now, in the midst of all of that, God kept his promise.

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will fulfill the promise I made.

And I’m almost there, almost ready to tell you of the promise, but there is one more messy and holy thing that Luke tells us about families of faith where God acts, not only are they extended and troubled, but they are changing.

All the time they are changing.

Most dramatically, of course, we see the changes at the big moments: weddings, births, deaths, but the changes are constant and innumerable: a new school, a growth spurt, a new activity, a new job, a new romance, a new friendship, a new house, a new doctor, a new diagnosis, a new challenge, a new sorrow.

All of these changes contain the fulfillment of God’s promise, no Christmas is just like any other Christmas, for we are different each year, it is why we need this season, to discover and measure the changes and to find God’s promise fulfilled again. Ann Murray sings, in one of my favorite songs of the season: Thank goodness this season will never grow old.

It never grows old because it is never the same from one year to the next.

So families are extended and troubled and changing, no wonder they are messy!

And no wonder God uses them, especially in these coming days, to fulfill his promise.

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will fulfill the promise I made.

So what is that promise?

You know the answer, we’ve been singing about it all morning.

It is the one promise that God makes in this season to every person, every family, every Church: the promise of Emmanuel, the promise to be God, not at a distance, not off in heaven, but God-with-us, Emmanuel.

God with Us, in our worship.

God with Us, in bread and wine.

God with Us, in messy, extended, troubled, changing and holy families.

God with us in Bethlehem.

God with us in Clover Hill.

That’s the promise of this season and every season, that’s the reality that we can know here and now and with each other and in our homes and at our jobs, Emmanuel, God-With-Us.

Fail to find that, avoid being found by that, and you and your family will be accurately described by no less an authority than Ebenezer Scrooge:

“What’s Christmas to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, and not an hour richer . . .”

But if we find God-With-Us, if we are found by God-With-Us, we will experience a Christmas that will exceed any holiness we have ever known.

That’s the promise of the season, that’s the only promise we need God to fulfill, be with us, Emanuel.

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah.