Lessons and Carols
December 19, 2024
Advent, which is Latin for “coming” or “arriving,” is a season of waiting upon Christ. At Christmas, we remember His coming as an infant child to earth. As we wait, we join with these five women who came before us, who were waiting on a future hope they may or may not have fully known at the time. Jesus could have come to earth in another more spectacular way, yet He chose a humble human story, with a family history, with many of these women as ancestors. How wonderful that we see the full story! He now invites us to be a part of His family, joining a lineage of believers who held out tenacious hope.
All year we are invited to be Advent people. We know that Jesus came and will come again with the fullness of His Kingdom.
So we can live today just like the ancient women, waiting and believing in Jesus, experiencing the gift of His presence with us now and holding out hope in His promise to return.
We invite you to help others in need this Christmas season as we support some of our local Trinity Serves Partners.
Thank you to everyone who continues to give to God’s work at Trinity. As you may already know, we usually receive a significant portion of our giving in these last couple months of the year, so we humbly ask for your prayers for our Church and your continued generosity as we head into year-end.
In-Person & Online:
Trinity Westchester – 4 p.m.
Trinity Greenwich + Darien Together – 4 p.m.
Trinity Online – 4 p.m.
This guide is intended to go alongside Trinity’s 2022 Advent series, “Waiting & Believing: The Unexpected Family of Jesus.” This year, we will focus on five women in either the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew 1 or the story of Jesus’s birth found in Luke 1 and 2:
Rahab, Ruth, Elizabeth, Mary, and Anna
Each of these women had a unique experience and yet each found herself part of a single story much larger than her individual chapter. This is quite a diverse group of women—Rahab was a Canaanite prostitute living in ancient Jericho; Ruth was a Moabite widow arriving in Bethlehem; Elizabeth and Mary were Jewish cousins both of whom were integral to the arrival of Jesus; and Anna was a widowed Jewish prophetess living in the temple, awaiting the Messiah. Each had a heart that was soft, each believed the truth of God, and each was ready to obey what He asked.
As we enter into their stories, our prayer is that we would discover new facets of God’s heart, the way He sees each person and uses the most unlikely to accomplish His great purposes. What sets these women apart? Why did God choose them? How might we be formed into people with similar hearts?