Advent 4

How are you all doing, besides braving the weather? Is your health holding up? What about financially; have you suffered a great loss? Has anyone hear lost their job? 401ks have dropped, yes, five figures perhaps? If anyone has lost six figures please adopt me. We are certainly living in the midst's of financial and employment uncertainty. This is the collective punishments for the financial misdeeds of those who were in power of this nations capital investments. We aren't treated like human beings as much as we are treated as commodities. We become something less than human and are treated as an assets or liability to be employed or released from employment. It is dehumanizing. The Romans treated people in occupied Judea and Galilee like commodities. They were bought and sold into slavery, imprisoned or killed for the betterment of the Roman Empire. People were not treated as humans in Roman occupied territories but as objects to possess. The priesthood in Jerusalem wasn't any better. They put God in a box, a large guilded box, but a box nonetheless. All people were seen as sinners and only sacrifices could take away sin. Sacrifices required money to pay for the sacrificial animals, so those who could not afford the sacrifices were seen as sinners and outsiders. These outsiders could lose their land, possessions and families. This is why Jesus' message of the forgiveness of sins is so important to us and controversial to the Temple priesthood. In the midst's of all this uncertainty, the angel Gabriel, whose names means "warrior of God" appears to Mary, a social nobody to say that she will bring The Savior into the world. She, as meek as she is, boldly asks questions. Zachariah was struck mute when he disbelieved Gabriel, in contrast, Mary's questions are answered. Mary is treated as a human, and Jesus makes us all humans. God is often viewed as some sort of mystical gas, which floats around us and in the universe. God is real and God matters. We are created in God's image and are re-created in God's spirit through Jesus. We are human and we count. We matter. In all the talks and debates concerning the bail-outs, in just a matter of months, people began to matter again. People we seen as needing help not as commodities that employers use for their own benefit. How much more important do we matter to God and to one another in Christ? We need to treat people as being fully human as God treats us as fully human. Because we are seen as something that matters to God.