This Sunday is the first day of Advent, a time of preparing and waiting for Jesus to come. In this act, we both remember the waiting of all those longing to see the Messiah and recognize our current state of waiting as we long for Jesus to come back and bring God's Kingdom in its fullness. God has been making himself known long before all of this. Christmas just becomes the realization of what all these moments were pointing to.

This Sunday we pour over the ways in which God made himself known in fire - like the burning bush, the pillar of fire and smoke, and the blazing furnace. In this, we will see who God is, how he is acting for us, and finally how he wants to use us. What we will see is that God always planned on becoming incarnate and ultimately now, he wants to make himself known through our flesh. God's mighty fire wants to become incarnate in us.