Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness—on them light has shined.”
NL Daily Devotion for Sunday, November 16, 2025
by Rev. Dr. Miles Hopgood, Clergy Stuff
Main Idea: Hearing a “Christmas” passage outside of the season helps us see that God’s promise to enter our world and act is not relegated to the past or the future alone. God promises to come and act in our lives, here and now.
Each year, Christmas seems to come earlier and earlier. I used to be one of those curmudgeons who complained about anything Christmas related before December 24th; now, I am just relieved when I can make it through Halloween before I start hearing Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas.” Normally church is the one place where I as a pastor can halt the early arrival of Christmas, which is perhaps why I enjoy the Advent season so much. And yet today, the Narrative Lectionary seems to have brought Christmas Eve crashing in. Our passage from Isaiah this week is traditionally the Hebrew Bible reading on Christmas Eve, and we haven’t even begun to thaw our Thanksgiving turkeys yet.
Before I start hearing Marley’s chains, let me take off my Scrooge hat for a moment to note what a value there is in encountering these words from Isaiah outside the context of the Nativity of our Lord. For while we might feel tempted to let these words transport us to the Christmas season the way the smell of chestnuts or taste of fruitcake might, hearing these words in isolation from the birth of Christ helps give us better focus on what Isaiah is actually saying. I am not saying that these words can’t or shouldn’t be read as a prophecy of the birth of Christ. Rather, when we think about what it means to wait for the Lord, for God to come and act, it is too easy for that imagination to get swallowed up by the manger. Hearing these words outside of Christmas allows us to hear what they have to say, not about the first coming of Christ but of the second.
For most, the mystery of faith where we confess that Christ will come again is one of the most challenging. It conjures up images of Revelation and, for those of us from a particular generation, the abysmal Left Behind series. The reason for the difficulty is that so much of what scripture has to say about what to expect from the second coming of Christ gets cordoned off as pertaining only to the first. These words from Isaiah are not merely about the birth of Christ—they are about what it means for God to break into our lives and world to act.
Just as God’s promise to act cannot be relegated to history, so too the promise of God to break into our world is not reserved for the second coming. It is also a promise to come into our lives today. We live in what St. Bernard of Clairvaux called the third or middle coming of Christ, the one in which the faithful experience the coming of Christ into our very own lives.[1] It is this middle coming that defines our lives as Christians, not only in the Advent season but in all times and places. Passages like today’s coming “out of time” (so to speak) draw us into the eternal now of God’s coming and activity.
[1] Sermo 5, In Adventu Domini, 1-3: Opera Omnia, Edit. Cisterc. 4 (1966), 188-190.
