What Is Greatness? What Greatness Are We Waiting For?

Rev. Erik Swanson
December 14, 2025

You can watch the entire sermon here.

One part of my year at the Taizé monastery that I rarely talk about is what happened just after Christmas. We celebrated Christmas with a morning service, and then almost the entire monastery boarded buses to Stuttgart, Germany, to prepare for what is known as the European Meeting. Months of work had gone into welcoming nearly 60,000 young people for a week of prayer, teaching, and shared life. Local churches organized housing, food was coordinated through the army, and civic centers and churches across the city were transformed into places of worship. It was a staggering effort, all undertaken so people could pray together and experience unity, even if only for a short time.

What Are We Preparing For?

That experience always brings me back to a simple but important question, especially as we move deeper into Advent: what are we preparing for, and how are we preparing? Beyond the gifts, the food, the travel, and the family obligations, what kind of spiritual preparation are we engaging in? Advent is fundamentally about preparing the way, and every year I hope we take seriously what we are actually hoping for as Christmas approaches. Do we expect Jesus to truly show up? Do we imagine something will change within us, or are we simply reenacting a familiar story?

The Model Of Preparation

The Church gives us John the Baptist as the model of preparation. John is not performing or seeking attention; he is pointing beyond himself. His life is shaped by the conviction that something greater than himself is worth living for and worth preparing for. Yet too often we are taught that correct belief alone will somehow fix everything — that if we believe the right things, God will magically intervene. We can even fall into the trap of hoping that this will finally be the Christmas when everything gets resolved.

Emmanuel — God With Us

But Christmas is not just about a birth long ago. The Church places it in the darkest time of the year to proclaim the coming of divine light into the world. At Christmas we celebrate that God and humanity are radically connected, that God is Emmanuel — God with us, not distant or detached. That is what we are meant to prepare for.

Preparation Requires Intention And Practice

Just as important as what we prepare for is how we prepare. John’s harsh life in the wilderness shows us that preparation requires intention and practice. It opens space within us for new life. One of the failures of focusing only on the historical Jesus is that we neglect what God is doing now, within us. Belief alone often isn’t enough. Preparation requires interior work — daily practices that make room for light to enter and remain.

Over the years, especially in pastoral conversations around the holidays, I’ve seen how many people struggle without any sense of spiritual practice. When I ask how they are preparing inwardly, I often get blank stares. We are rarely taught how to do this work. Yet practices like silence, prayer, imagery, or mantra help ground us, quiet competing voices, and open us to what God longs to birth within us.

Preparation is about creating space. As we approach Christmas, I continue to challenge us to ask: what are we preparing for, how are we preparing, and what kind of space are we making within ourselves for Emmanuel, God with us? May we be guided well as we learn to prepare a way for the light. Amen.