We feel new life growing within us and want to make a loving home from which to share our new life with the world. The Psalmist and the prophet Isaiah write about their love of the “house of the Lord.” We are advised to make our house just like the “house of God.” A most important tool is letting the “Lord instruct us in his ways.” A different Lorde, Audre, cautions us about taking homemaking instructions from Isaiah’s Lord – he is a patriarch. The Black feminist author asserts we cannot make loving preparations to bring new life into the world “when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used.” She suggests that “we cannot build a new house with the master’s tools.” “Only the most narrow perimeters of change are possible and allowable.” New house making as well as new homemaking require new tools to bring forth new birth. Tools such as “mutuality,” “shared support,” and “interdependence.” These tools enable “us to descend into the chaos of knowledge and return with true visions of our future, along with the concomitant power to effect those changes which can bring that future into being.” Making loving preparations for a home together, being community together is “redemptive, and it is within that knowledge that our real power is rediscovered.” “Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable… (are) learning how to stand alone… and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures… (to make) a world in which we can all flourish.” Every new birth, whether a child or a society, flourishes around the moral hearth we make together. Our friend Jesus, Mary’s son, tells us to “stay awake then and not let this (new) house be broken into.” We “must be prepared, for at an hour (we) do not expect, the (new life growing within us) will come.”
Prayer: Beautiful Spirit, together we create a new home where all are welcome.
Question: What new life am I preparing for this Advent?
November 30, 2025 Gospel Matthew 24:37-44 First Sunday of Advent