When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leapt in her
womb. Elizabeth, barren and too old to conceive, Mary, unmarried and too young
to have a baby, both of these child-bearings are inconceivable. Our response to
this inconceivable conception calls forth some Holy Imagination. I turn to one
of my favorite writers, Madeleine L’Engle, when I ponder these things. She
writes in a book called Bright Evening Star, “It is not that in believing the
story of Jesus we skip reason, but that sometimes we have to go beyond it, take
leaps with our imagination, push our brains further than the normally used
parts of them are used to going.” She goes on to write “I had to let go all my
prejudices and demands for proof and open myself to the wonder of love. Faith
is not reasonable because it wasn’t for reason, but for love that Jesus
came.”
It is for love that Jesus came, and we need to respond like
Mary, like Elizabeth. We need to respond with shouts of joy, with dances of
gladness. This Good News changes us forever; it changes our world forever. It
is as inconceivable and unreasonable that each of us is a God-bearer as it is
that Mary is a Christ-bearer. It is inconceivable that God has burst into our
world. And yet, all of Advent we wait in active anticipation of the moment that
God bursts into our world as a baby, and that God bursts into our world to
bring our history; our lives, to fulfillment. We cannot continue to respond to
this Good News with business as usual. We cannot respond to the sacredness of
each other the same as always. Just saying Merry Christmas is not enough. The
Good News is Our King and Savior now draws near: Come let us adore him!
This inconceivable conception that God bursts into our lives
must change us. It changed Mary, it changed Elizabeth, it changed Zechariah, it
left him speechless, it changed Joseph, he had to defy the law in order to love
and support Mary, it changed a community, it changed an entire people. Mary
responds to this inconceivable conception first when the angel Gabriel comes to
tell her, and it is reported that Mary says “let it be to me according to your
word.” My hunch is that maybe it took her a little while to come to this kind
of brave acceptance, initially she probably said something a little more like
“no way, I can’t have a baby, I’m too young, I’m not married.” By the time we
catch up with her in the story we read today, Mary is singing “my soul
magnifies the Lord.” Mary’s response to this inconceivable conception
progresses from brave acceptance to joyful praise. I wonder if Mary needed some
time to get used to the idea that she is the Christ-bearer so that she could
move from brave acceptance to joyful praise. I wonder if Mary didn’t have a
little advent waiting of her own.
When Mary and Elizabeth meet, the baby in Elizabeth’s womb
leaps and Mary is filled with such joy and hope that she sings and dances. Mary
and Elizabeth lived in a dark time under Herod the Great, whose casual
brutality was backed up with the threat of Rome. And yet Mary’s song is a song
of freedom, a song of liberation for her people, it is subversive and it is
revolutionary. It is joyful and it is hopeful. Advent waiting calls us into
this paradox, the paradox that Mary embodies, that finding involves losing;
that hiding involves revealing; that birth involves death.
While our culture has been celebrating Christmas since
Halloween, we continue to wait. This fourth Sunday of Advent is oh so
difficult, we just want to be there, we just want to have it now, and it is so
hard to resist the pressure to just say Merry Christmas. But Advent waiting as
Mary shows us, forms us and shapes us, so that the inconceivable conception can
take hold of us, and can give birth to the Holy Imagination that bears God into
this world.
Mary spent most of her life waiting; from the moment the
angel Gabriel comes to her and announces do not be afraid, through the final
moments as she waited for her son’s death on the cross, and the hours up to the
inconceivable resurrection. Mary waits. I think Mary’s waiting can teach us
that Advent is a time that summons us to embrace waiting as a way of life.
Advent summons us to practice waiting, and by doing so to put down the
foundations of a life shaped by waiting, so that when those times come when we
have no idea what to do, those times of sadness, times of joy, times of
difficulty, times of division, we fall back on that deep, still waiting in the
present moment that opens up a space for God’s interruption in our midst.
We wait in this present moment with Mary, with Elizabeth. We
wait with quiet and confident expectation for this inconceivable conception to
come to fruition and fulfillment. In the waiting we may be changed. We may be
filled with hope, hope that God indeed is turning the world around. But we also
know that waiting is not doing nothing, so we must act with justice and mercy,
knowing that indeed with Mary we are bearing God to this world. In this present
moment God turns each of us around.
It is no coincidence that the way that God interrupts our
world is to be born into our world, it is no coincidence that God interrupts
our world to live and love, and suffer and die just like each and every one of
us. Being human means being born to die, and only a God who is willing to share
that can actually help us face our own mortality and that of those we love, and
to help us live every present moment fully alive. It is in the waiting for the
births and the deaths, and in the moments in between, that God breaks in and
surrounds us and lifts us with love.
I am reminded of my own pregnancies during Advent waiting. I
am reminded of the joy and hope and dreams of bringing a baby into the world. I
am reminded of the fear and trepidation of bringing a baby into the world. I am
reminded of the blissful ignorance of what the future would hold. As I look
backward to that time I am filled with nostalgia at its wonder, I am forever
changed and cannot respond to the world with anything less than compassion and
hope. And I look with hope to the possibility of what the lives of our sons
will bear. But it is the present moment that is pregnant with possibility, the
present moment that bears God in their lives, in my life, in our lives.
Do not be afraid; listen for God to be born in this present
moment. Do not be afraid; act with justice and peace and kindness. Do not be
afraid; find the people who need your works and actions of assurance that they
are loved as you are loved. The world is about to turn. Our King and Savior now
draws near: Come let us adore him.
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