1. Our reading presents for its readers both the anticipation of God’s Messiah and advent of God’s Messiah: Promises made and promises fulfilled.
  2. What’s the big deal about Jesus’ name?
  3. Luke shows us that when we try to fit God into our life movie, the plot is all wrong; and not just wrong but trivial.
  4. The will of the triune God is we are thankful for the goodness, grace, mercy, love, peace, and truth that flow from His works of creation and redemption.
  5. We still think we can sort own own problems with more money, more education, more resources, more techniques, more, more, more.
  6. The future has come, and the future comes in the resurrected Christ who is present with His real voice and His real Presence in His holy Word and blessed Sacraments.
  7. The Magnificat invites us to enter into, consider, and embrace the worldview of a teenaged Jewish girl and her geriatric aunt: The one bearing the prophet Elijah which was to come and the other carrying within her womb the God whom she and her nation worshipped and feared.
  8. It is the love of God that reveals Him as the promise-making, promise-keeping God.
  9. Jesus is situated at the center of world history, a history which is going somewhere, from an Alpha point to the Omega point, and it pivots on the death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ.
  10. Therefore, on the cusp of Christmas the message of the fourth week in Advent heightens our anticipation and joy, but also the unvarnished truth about the challenge of following the crucified King.
  11. More than that, as children of the One who is the Resurrection and the eternal Life, as children who have themselves been both justified and regenerated, live as if Christ has already reappeared, as if the parousia has happened.
  12. We of all people, because of Christ, can build securely on the future because the truth of Christ runs from the past to the present, establishing a most certain future.
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