An excerpt:

It’s not a coincidence that the Church in the northern hemisphere has traditionally chosen to read and remember these prophetic stories of the light coming into the world at the time of the year when the darkness of the night around us reaches its fullest extent.

This is the season of the longest nights of the year for us. The darkness is close behind and before us, with the day between the moments of dawn and dusk disguised by the milky gloom of a Winter Sky. It’s at such a time as this that we hear the exultation of those who waited so long and who are just seeing the Light made manifest before them.

If you pay attention to such things, it seems that many of the stories of God’s faithful acts of salvation happen when there is no reasonable expectation of relief. God uses the disposed and the downtrodden to bring justice into the world. It happens again and again in Scripture, and I think you can reasonably read the whole story of Israel, the small nation with its borders surrounded by the great warrior nations of the day, as part of that surprising tradition: it’s from Israel and House of Jesse that the Messiah came.

Maybe that’s the way God chooses to act – in the darkest moment, when Hope seems so unreasonable – so that we will recognize it is God who is acting and not us. It is God who saves, not us.

But, the more I think about that, the less it makes sense to me. Why would God let things get so dire and the suffering rise so much just so that God got all the credit for saving us? That seems a very flawed human way to behave, not the Way of the Word. 

What if it isn’t that God is waiting until the darkest moment, but rather that it is only in the darkest moment that we can see God at work. Sometime we can only perceive things when the conditions are just so. The sun or the moon in the sky make it impossible to see the faint stars of the night. But when they are hidden, we can see the great company of stars, of lights spread across the dark blue heavens. The stars are always there, but we can only perceive them when the darkness is great and the great lights of sky are absent.

If that’s so, then it’s meet and right that we should hear the voices of the greatest company of prophets that have ever spoken and sung of God’s Justice and Rectification on a Sunday when generally only the most faithful are present in the churches, and when the bulk of us have our attention focussed on the lights of the trees and coming songs of Joy.

The Prophets are always there. God is always active and at work. But like the stars of the night, we creatures seemingly can only perceive that Good News when we aren’t trying to find it and instead let it appear unexpected in the rhythm of our daily lives.

You can hear more here.