It is a quite Sunday afternoon in space between the last morning Mass and the 5:30 pm evening Mass. Outside the people of Northern Virginia are attentively watching emails and text messages to see if their place of work, their children’s school, or their plans are on hold while the stream of closures begin to digitally arrive. A winter storm this way comes. It brings back memories of the “traffic armageddon” in Northern Virginia during this first week of January 2022. It was a perfect storm of events: (a) rain preventing salting the roads, (b) suddenly turning to snow, coupled with the (c) extremely hilly area around Quantico (Occaquon to Rappahannock Rivers) and (d) a super-heavily traveled truck route – and the back up was 65 miles with people stranded 15-24 hours.

The first readings for these beginning days of Advent are all taken from the Book of Isaiah. It is a complex book in many ways and it is one of the most cited books of the Old Testament by New Testament writers indicating the importance and esteem it holds in the scriptural imagination. You can read a short introduction to the book here.

Today the first reading is taken from Isaiah 2:1-5, whose opening is duplicated almost exactly in Micah 4:1–3. Like Isaiah, Micah was an eighth-century prophet of the southern kingdom. Both prophets held Mount Zion to be a sacred mountain, the center of the earth, and important for the whole world  – the same sentiment expressed in Psalms 46–48.