Sermon
The Fourth Sunday of Advent
Sunday, December 21, 2025
Well, the fourth Sunday of Advent is very different from the other three. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the readings for the fourth Sunday of Advent, which is today, are very
Christmassy. I know someone was apologizing for wearing too much Christmas today. And I said, “No, it’s very appropriate. Even the readings sound like we’re already in Christmas. We hear about the story of Mary and Joseph and baby Jesus. We hear about the prophecy of Isaiah to the king Ahaz, the prophecy that a child will be born.” So all of this all of this is kind of shifting us. The church shifts us from the themes of last things and future events which we heard of in the first three Sundays of Advent now to consider the celebrations of Christmas, Christ’s birth. And the overwhelming theme for me in these all these readings is something that helps us overcome a common challenge we all have.
I think this is a challenge that we all struggle with from time to time. The whole world
including us who are followers of Jesus. The common mistake that is made that makes everything worse. What is that mistake? We forget about God. That’s the mistake. And we see that this is not something new. This has been a challenge for humanity all the way back to the Old Testament. In the first reading from Isaiah, we have King Ahaz who was a good king by all accounts. He tried to protect the people. He was making alliances with nations to make sure that the Babylonians would not invade the south
and take over the kingdom and take people into slavery. But he made one key mistake and that was he forgot that God was with him. You see, he tried to do it alone. Unlike all the other kings, the kings of Israel, of the chosen people of the Old Testament, had one unique difference. God was with them. And the prophet Isaiah comes and reminds Ahaz and says, “Why are you troubling your people? Why are you troubling God with your lack of faith that God is with you? Why do you try to do it all yourself? Trying to fix everything by making worldly alliances with godless nations. Why not remember that God is with you? And this reminder was key to the Jewish people in those times of difficulties to
know that God is the one that they are to follow. God is the one that they have
to rely upon. What was the prophecy of Isaiah? It was a simple prophecy.
God will come. A woman will come and bear a child and the name of the child will be Emmanuel. Which means God is with you. The very name of God who comes
is to help you remember what you have forgotten. God is with you.
Joseph in the gospel reading today, the righteous man of God is also struggling.
He has found that his wife with whom he had no relations yet according to the ritual of the Jewish right of marriage that she is now with a child. She is expecting and he’s struggling. Fathers of the church have different interpretations of what was going on with Joseph. Why was he so overwhelmed by this new reality on a human level? Yes, we could say, well, he’s having doubts maybe about what is happening and how he’s
supposed to res respond to it. On the one hand, he’s stuck. On the one hand, he wants to follow the law of God, which means that if your spouse is pregnant with someone else, you must divorce her. You have to follow that law. And he’s a righteous man. He’s a religious man. He wants to do what is right according to the law of Moses. But he’s also a man of God. He’s also a good man and so he knows the consequences. He
wants to do the right thing quietly so as not to harm Mary in any way.
Oh, how we need people like that today.
How we need people like that today. How we need to be people like that today to want to do the right thing but always with a desire never to harm someone in the process to be the righteous person to be a man a woman of God.
Who was Joseph? Who was Joseph? Everyone will say, well, he was a carpenter. But very few of us remember that he comes from the lineage of David, the great king.
In other words, Joseph was the rightful king of Israel in hiding. Herod was not the rightful king. Herod was the evil king. He did not have
the lineage from David. Joseph did. So that Jesus would be born to fulfill the prophecy in the lineage of King David. Joseph is the chosen one of God, the righteous man who strives to do what is right. And once he knows what God wants of him, as impossible as it sounds, he takes it on. He takes it on. The Christmas theme for us that I would like to propose is twofold. Number one, to remember that God is with us. that God is with you. Whatever struggles you’re going through, whatever difficulties we’re trying to overcome, whatever frustrations we may have in our families, in our nation, in our geopolitical situation, whatever is happening in our world, we cannot solve it alone just simply by making alliances with worldly realities. We must come back to the truth.
Emmanuel, God is with us. A gift of faith and trust in God.
And number two, our desire should always be the same as the desire of the people of God that we read about in the Bible. Isaiah the prophet all he all he wanted to do was to speak God’s word as unpopular as it was as challenging as it was. I mean think of
Isaiah. He is a nobody. He’s a prophet of God who has no money, no power, no prestige. He lives in the desert and yet he goes to the very kingdom and speaks to the king of Israel and tells him that he’s wrong in the name of God. He has no fear because he knows that God is with him. The same with Joseph. Joseph, the great protector of the Holy Family, the one who saves the life of Jesus twice according to scripture and how many more times that we don’t know about the one who wouldn’t leave Mary by herself in Bethlehem out of fear that something would happen to her. Even as she’s nine months pregnant, he takes her with him to Bethlehem. He takes her because he would not leave her unprotected. Once he knows what God desires of him, he marches on. He wants to do it. As impossible as it seems to be the protector of the very son of God, Jesus. He doesn’t know how he’ll do it, but he knows God is with him and he knows what God wants of him.
What about us? Do we believe that God is with us? Do we believe that the impossible that God asks of us to preach the good news, to share the message of Jesus, to bring
compassion and love and hope in the very areas of our world that seem lost? That that is our mission. that should never be lost or even very locally our little congregation here. Do we believe that God is with us? Do we believe that God wants us to survive? Do we believe that we have a mission that is bigger than us? If we remain faithful to God, if we remember that God is with us and God will make things happen for those who remain faithful to him.
On this fourth Sunday of Advent, as we enter into the themes of Christmas, let us never forget that God is with us.
Amen.
Father Wojtek Kuzma