Leaping for Joy

Reflection on Advent: Encountering Hope, Joy, and Peace

Today I reflect on the Advent season, focusing on the themes of hope, joy, and peace as we prepare for Christmas. We delve into the beautiful encounter between Mary and Elizabeth, highlighting the profound intergenerational exchange and the relational aspects of their meeting. This visit underscores God’s presence in our everyday lives, especially in the mundane and marginalized places. As we journey through Advent, let us find joy in simple moments, seek wisdom from others, and recognize God’s transformative love in our relationships and daily experiences.

00:00:00 If we ponder a whole lot of different things as we prepare for Christmas, how do we actually encounter this whole experience of hope? You know, what does it mean to be people that are infused with that sense of longing, that sense of purpose? You know, we kind of look at how do we live in peace? What does it mean for that declaration of shalom? You know, how do we actually encounter peace when our world is so turbulent? There’s so much trauma that we experience around us. And last week, there was that call to joy to discover, you know, this bubbling sense of of how we actually move through that reality. And we realized that it was by being faithful to John the Baptist’s call to live in justice, to live in that right relationship, to consider ourselves in that long line of prophets, that long line of of people who would call us to be faithful to that teaching. And now we see this joy expressed in the meeting of two women. The crowds that we had last week, they’re all gone.

00:01:23 It’s just these two women, the younger Mary, probably still a teenager, and the older Elizabeth. So maybe three times the age of of Mary, a woman, probably in a late 40s, perhaps. And so Mary goes to Elizabeth. Yes. To serve her to to help her older cousin through this last stage of a pregnancy. But I suspect a lot of what Mary is also wanting is, is just that wisdom that Elizabeth will be able to share with her. So it’s a meeting not just of two women, but of multiple generations. That sense of the the wisdom, the the capacity to to make sense of things that a young teenager isn’t able to do. But also the joy and the delight. And remember that Mary, when she is told that her cousin Elizabeth is with child, that she goes not just slowly. When she goes with haste, she goes determined to to be of service to, but to experience, you know, the joy of knowing, hey, I’ve got someone that I can go through this journey of pregnancy together.

00:02:44 That whole experience of of being in solidarity, of, of camaraderie, that where they’re able just to to be together and to share those experiences. And it reminds us of the way that God is, you know, the God is is not someone who just dumps us in the experience and says, okay, we’ll just make the best of that. And the whole reality of what we believe is, as Christians of what we celebrate at Christmas is that the God who created everything, the God of the universe, the God of all glory, the God of all wonder becomes one of us, becomes vulnerable like us. And so when Mary travels around, she carries within her the growing life of God. So that when Elizabeth is there, you know, John, who was making those great declarations last week, is silent because he’s all he does is leave for joy. All he does is express that reverence within the womb of Elizabeth, and that sense of that encounter that we’re able to experience. If the God indeed does draw near to us, just as Mary brought the child Jesus to Elizabeth and to John.

00:04:04 So also we get to experience that reality of a God who is with us, a God who is part of our every experience, a God who knows what we go through, a God who experienced all of the craziness and busyness of of festival moments in Jerusalem and other places. He was able to. To be annoyed by the crowds kind of pushing around him. He was able to experience what it was to be hungry, to be tired, to be frustrated. He knew what it was like to be betrayed. All of those different experiences Jesus offers to us. And perhaps a lot of that comes from the openness that Mary had to that desire for God, the openness that she had to to be of service, the reality that she wasn’t anyone significant or important. They go to places that are marginalized, places that are not significant, places that aren’t the center of anybody’s world, any reality. And yet it’s there on the edge, there in the margins, there in the nothing places the God is choosing to dwell.

00:05:22 And in this encounter between these two women, one younger, one older, that together they make this experience that opens both of them more deeply into the reality of God. So as we come to the the close of this advent season, let’s remember that that is the way that God continues to be present before us. Not in the bright, shiny lights, not in the magnificent and credible events, not in the staged moments, but in those simple encounters. The simple times when we choose to go with haste, in those times when we offer our service, when we seek the wisdom of somebody else, that all of these are opening us to those moments when we can discover the reality of the God who is dwelling within us, the God who wants for us to experience that joy, and in that joy that we find the love that God is so wanting desperately to pour out upon us. So let’s indeed be people in these final days that open ourselves to the joy and wonder of God and know that he’s there in the little moments.

00:06:29 He’s there in those vulnerable places. He’s there on the edges. He’s there opening us more deeply into the reality of his life and love.