daily

Give us this day our daily bread

Purify our conscience... by your daily visitation

The Daily Office

This Sunday tells the beginning of the most important story in human history.  God chose Mary to carry His Only Begotten Son who would live and die as one of us, yet without sin, and then be resurrected on the third day so that the gift of grace might be truly free.  This really is the begining of the best news of all time.

And yet today I'm sort of fixated on the mundane - the daily - especially as it relates to the Collect for the 4th Sunday of Advent.  On a day that is so pivotal in salvation history why do we pray for the everyday?

I'm jumping ahead in my studies to the 1st Sunday after Christmas Day and loving that the Episcopal Church said "no" to the RCL and kept the Prologue to John's Gospel as the lesson for that day and thinking that we pray for the everyday because the Incarnation brought God back into the mundane.  As a man, Jesus knew what it is to be bored, to work, to be hungry, to be frustrated, to wish, to dream.  He knew daily chores, he knew grocery runs, he knew dust and dirt and rain.  His daily walk made possible God's daily visitation in the midst of all the stuff we do each day.  Not that God wasn't involved in the lives of his people before the Incarnation, but his involvement was made new in his knowing.  Yes, I do think God learned something in the Incarnation, he learned what it feels like to be created, to be flesh and blood.

And so, as we hear the beginning of the great story of the Incarnation we pray for the everyday knowing that the great and the mundane are not mutually exclusive because Jesus of Nazareth was fully God and fully man - fully great and fully mundane.