When God Comes Down: An Advent Study for Adults

By Rev. Dr. James A. Harnish

When God Comes Down is a five-week study, providing one lesson for each week of Advent and one for Christmas. Each lesson includes a key Scripture, a brief reflection, discussion/reflection questions, a brief prayer, and a focus for the coming week. In this study, Harnish explores the meaning of the incarnation…God with us in human flesh. 
     Often our Advent/Christmas journey is focused on us – our memories, feelings, relationships and experiences.  This study puts the focus on God’s action in Jesus Christ.  It encourages participants to think more deeply in terms of the biblical, theological, and spiritual meaning of the Nativity and to apply it to their own life experiences.
    The study looks at the stories of the primary biblical characters in the birth stories through whose lives the miracle of incarnation happened: Zechariah, Elizabeth, Joseph, Mary, and Jesus. Harnish also looks at a traditional character in nativity plays, one who is not mentioned in the Bible, the innkeeper.  Through all these characters, he helps us claim for ourselves the reality of God's presence with us.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Abingdon Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781426765155

Rev. Dr. James A. Harnish

The Rev. Dr. James A. Harnish retired after 43 years of pastoral ministry in the Florida Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church. He was the founding pastor of St. Luke’s United Methodist Church in Orlando and served for 22 years as the Senior Pastor of Hyde Park United Methodist Church in Tampa. He is the author of A Disciple’s Heart: Growing in Love and Grace, Earn. Save. Give. Wesley’s Simple Rules for Money, and Make a Difference: Following Your Passion and Finding Your Place to Serve. He was a consulting editor for The New Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible and a contributor to The Wesley Study Bible. He and his wife, Martha, have two married daughters and five grandchildren in Florida and South Carolina.

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Introduction

Scripture: Read John 1:1-18; Genesis 1:1-5

Star-watching began as a hobby for Robert Owen Evans. He grew up in a Methodist family in Sydney, Australia. In 1967, he was an ordained minister in the New South Wales Conference where he served as a pastor and studied the history of evangelical movements in the Pacific Islands, Papua New Guinea, Australia, and New York. He retired in 1998 and might have drifted into pastoral obscurity except for his talent for spotting supernovae.

A supernova occurs when a giant star at an incomprehensible distance from the Earth explodes in a spectacular burst of light estimated to be equal in energy to 100 billion suns. That’s a lot of light! By the time that light reaches us, it is an unexpected twinkle at a particular spot in the sky that would otherwise be left in darkness.

Pastor Evans began supernova hunting in the 1950’s, but he didn’t make his first official discovery until 1981. It takes a lot of patience to see something most people don’t see. By the end of 2005, he had made forty discoveries. In A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson records the star-watching pastor saying, There’s something satisfying, I think, about the idea of light traveling for millions of years through space and just at the right moment as it reaches Earth someone looks at the right bit of sky and sees it. It just seems right that an event of that magnitude should be witnessed.¹

Pastor Evans has trained his eyes to watch empty spaces in the sky so that at just the right moment, by looking at just the right place, he observes a burst of light that the rest of us—too busy to wait, too anxious to watch, too immersed in the present to peer into a light coming from the past—are unprepared and unable to see. He watches and waits for just the right moment when he can be the witness of that moment when a light that has been coming our way for millions of years finally appears.

The writer of the fourth Gospel never could have imagined what Pastor Evans knows about supernovae. Take a moment to look again at John 1:1-18 and Genesis 1:1-5. Compare the use of the word light in these Scriptures. How do the Scriptures and the image of light speak to you? John’s Gospel bears witness to a light that shines in the darkness, which the darkness has never been able to extinguish. It was, in fact, the light that burst forth in an amazing explosion of light hundreds of millions of years ago on the first day of creation (Genesis 1:3). It was the light through which the world and everything in it came into being. Most of the world, preoccupied with the darkness, didn’t recognize the light when it came. But there were some who, like Pastor Evans, became witnesses to that light. They believed it was nothing less than the light of the glory of God in human flesh, leading John to declare, No one has ever seen God. God the only Son, who is at the Father’s side, has made God known (John 1:18).

Advent is the season in which we watch, wait, and prepare to bear witness to the coming of the true light of God’s presence in Jesus Christ. Through worship, Scripture, and prayer, we train our eyes to see what the world never sees so that in the hubbub of the holidays, we are prepared to celebrate a holy day—the day when God came down among us in human flesh.

Charles Wesley celebrated the coming of Christ in the Christmas carol Glory Be to God on High. Lines from the first verse of the carol capture the central theme of this Advent study: Now God comes down . . . God the invisible appears . . . And Jesus is His Name.²

The stargazing pastor said, "It just seems right that an event of that magnitude