With Advent we look to the past in wonder, to the coming together of God and man in the person of an infant, Gloria in excelsis Deo! And we look to the future, when the Lord returns in His glorious majesty to judge the quick and the dead and raise up the faithful. Likewise to the present, Christ dwells in us and we in Him, Advent is here and now.
With that in mind, I find this helpful, from Austin Farrer's Essential Sermons:
None of us can be let off being Christ in our place and our station: we are all pygmies in giants’ armour. We have to put up with it: it’s the price (how small a price!) paid for the supreme mercy of God, that he does not wait for our dignity or our perfection, but just puts himself there in our midst; in this bread and this wine: in this priest: in this Christian man, woman, or child. He who gave himself to us as an infant, crying in a cot, he who was hung up naked on the wood, does not stand on his own dignity. If Jesus is willing to be in us, and to let us show him to the world, it’s a small thing that we should endure being fools for Christ’s sake, and be shown up by the part we have to play. We must put up with such humiliation of ourselves – or better still, forget ourselves altogether. For God is here: let us adore him.
Here endeth the Lesson,
LSP
