A homily for the Fourth Sunday of Advent, December 21, 2025
Isaiah 7:10-14, Romans 1:1-7, Matthew 1:18-24
We imperfect humans ask a lot of questions about our perfect Deity.
Many of them compare God’s persons and unlimited … everything … to our own limitations.
Nope; God is unnnnn-limited
Many of those ponderings are downright silly. Does it really matter if God can create a rock so big even s/he can’t lift it?
Many questions are profound, timeless, age-old, and often not fully answerable, boulders notwithstanding.
Here’s a question I have no qualms about declaring a definitive answer to: Does God ever make a mistake?
No.
Absolutely not.
No, nay, never.
Don’t even think about it. Don’t ever think about it.
God makes no mistakes, not in Creation, not in the laws of the universe, not in history or timelines, not in anything. God, a hundred percent pure goodness and wisdom, gives only what’s good and right.
Mistakes are human, and even the ability to make them is part of our humanness. And that ability in itself is not a divine mistake.
God’s first presents to us were Mother Earth, Mother Nature and every living creature, including us.
The same gift box that held women and men — batteries included — also included free will and God’s trust that we’d use it wisely. In other words, to not make mistakes.
We’re mistaken if we think God made a mistake in giving us the ability and the right to make mistakes. Again, far from it. Our ability to choose rightly makes God happy every time we do.
When we choose poorly, choose evil, choose the opposite of what God wants for us, then God sheds a tear or a million.
Scripture tells us that the first humans, the first palindromes (“Madam, I’m Adam.” “Eve.”), made the first big mistake when they chose wrongly, ate the forbidden fruit, thereby committing Original Sin and damning their billions upon billions of descendants to imperfect lives. Damning our world to be less than Eden.
Yeah, the biggest misteak in human existence.
So it was no mistake that God sent Emmanuel to be human, to be with us, to shine a light in the darkness of ignorance and fear and letter-of-the-law existence, and to rescue anyone who ever lived or ever will live from eternal pain.
It was no mistake that Jesus preached the Good News of peace, justice, charity, fairness and equality. It was no mistake that Jesus healed the sick in body, mind and spirit. It was no mistake that Jesus saw the beauty of God’s Creation in every person he met. Every eye that his saw into.
It was no mistake that the Nazarene willingly surrendered himself to excruciating ridicule, torture and execution to clean up the figurative donkey dust that generations of humans’ mistakes had layered upon God’s little blue marble.
It was no mistake that the Son of God and Son of Mary would deputize a cohort of followers to preach and live the Gospel after he returned to the Father who — correctly — dispatched him on his terrestrial mission.
We 21st-century descendants of Adam and Eve are still making mistakes that make God cry.
We are wrongly — terribly, brutally wrongly — assuming that God has made and is continuing to make mistakes in Creation.
God.
Don’t.
Make.
No.
Junk.
Every living creature, especially people, but everything that has God-given life, reflects God’s Grand Plan. Height, weight, skin color, physical skills and talents, intellectual skills and talents, curiosity, creativity, philosophy, worldview, energy, differing abilities, ability to love … they and we are what God wants.
Every one of us is an accident of birth, a mathematical near-impossibility that delivered us to our unique bodies in our unique place on Earth at God’s predetermined time to weave our unique thread into the greatest tapestry ever known.
It’s no mistake.
Not a single thing about any of us is a mistake.
We’re sadly mistaken if we think anyone — let alone ourselves — could be a mistake, even a tiny error or a teensy glitch somehow.
And our most mortal of all mortal sins is treating anyone as if they are.
As far too many people who claim Christ seem to be doing.
Too many people who claim Christ these days are failing to see Christ in the eyes of the people they meet. Every single person they meet.
Far too many people these days are ignoring the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 25, Verses 31 to 46.
Far too many people in authority these days are grinding the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 25, Verses 31 to 46, into the pavement.
Big mistake.
That’s no way to welcome our Newborn King, our Emmanuel, our Prince of Peace.
Fully divine, fully human. Perfect.
