I’ve been intrigued to discover as I study Luke this time that the language in the Magnificat of the mighty being brought down from their thrones and the lowly uplifted is a recurring motif throughout the book. John the Baptist changes the scripture he quotes from Isaiah to talk about every valley being filled and every hill and mountains made low. Jesus always comes down from the mountain to preach on a plain, and Luke even has the Beatitudes delivered on a plain instead of a mount. God is at work making all things level – bringing down those who prosper now and uplifting those who suffer now. A message that we sometimes can accept at Christmas with its reminder that the Savior of the world was laid in a lowly manger. But in Lent it is far more unsettling.

This is a season of penance and sacrifice, but often only of the personal kind. We give up pleasures or habits for the sake of drawing ourselves closer to God. For many the discipline of such sacrifice is simply a means of reorienting their worship and devotion to God so as to strengthen that commitment overall. The discipline prepares one for deeper relationship with God. But as John proclaimed, preparing the way of the Lord involves bringing down and lifting up. And as Mary asserts, one magnifies the Lord because God has and is in the process of continuing to bring down and lift up. But how often do our Lenten practices participate in this sort of leveling out?

Pietism that relies solely on personal sacrifices that affect us and us alone can serve to draw us emotionally closer to God, but our faith is not something that concerns just us. We exist as a body and as members of the body of Christ the disciplines we engage in should always work towards the good of that body. While being personally closer to God might serve the good of the body in some ways, it is rare that Lenten practices are conceived in such a way. The recent popularity if the images included here attest that at least in popular perception Lent has nothing to do with working for the good of others, of righting relationships that are unbalanced, but is instead merely a selfish (and therefore) pointless practice.

What if our acts of repentance and confession instead served to care for the body as a whole? What if we confessed the ways we have uplifted the mighty (ourselves included) and brought down the lowly? What if our penance and sacrifice involved reversing that imbalance and preparing the way of the Lord by leveling out those relationships? Yes, it is far more difficult to sacrifice a position of privilege and power than it is to give up chocolate or coffee for a few weeks, but it seems to far better reflect the ways God has called us to worship and follow after him. Sacrifice just for the sake of ourselves misses the point. The reminder to bring down and uplift pushes us beyond ourselves to acts of love, repentance, and worship that serve the entire body and not just our particular part.

So while Magnificat is not normally a Lenten text, my meditation on it this year is teaching me that perhaps it should be.

Advent is the breaking-in of the promises of God into the world. But it isn’t simply God as an attachment. Hope isn’t an option tacked on as an afterthought available for whoever feels like applying it to their lives. Advent is the ushering in of a new creation – a transformative reality that allows us not simply to have hope but to live in hope. It is the establishment of an utterly new way of being in the world that grants us the opportunity to become the very people we were created to be.

It is in accepting that vocation that we find our rest in God.

There are so many ways to think about resting in God. We take Sabbaths from work, we let go of the need to fix the world by ourselves, we stop placing systems of busyness, ritual, and performance between us and our worship of God – but I’m slowly coming to believe that all of those ways find their roots in our accepting who God made us to be. It is hard to live a façade, to pretend to be something we are not. Our frantic schedules, our pursuit of success, our masquerades of worship are all us trying to live up to expectations of our own creation. And it’s exhausting. But in this world transformed by hope, learning to be comfortable in our own skin and pursuing the passions God has placed on our hearts feeds our souls because we are doing the very things God intends for us to be doing. Replenishment is rest – it is the revitalization of who we are.

Resting in God doesn’t mean doing nothing. To do nothing means I have forgotten who I am, I have stopped living into the hope of the new creation. To do nothing is to say no to all expectations regarding who I am – even the very ones that will give me life to the full. Finding our rest in God means being exactly who we are at our core. It isn’t a rejection of all compulsions, merely those that divert us from our path of fulfillment. We stop trying to be something we are not, but we are still at work spreading the transformative way of hope by living into our callings. Rest is never static; it is rather the active pursuit of our God-given place in the world.

So during this season of Advent as we are encouraged to pause from the busyness of life in order to anticipate and hope, I wish the message we would hear would not be simply “do less” (although that is often needed) but a more revitalizing and hopeful “do what is fitting.” Stop pretending. Stop exhausting ourselves with the false expectations of life. But instead fit – perfectly and restfully – into our own lives as we accept the transformative advent of the new creation.

“On every world, wherever people are, in the deepest part of the winter, at the exact mid-point, everybody stops and turns and hugs. As if to say, "Well done. Well done, everyone! We're halfway out of the dark." Back on Earth we call this Christmas. Or the Winter Solstice.” – Doctor Who, A Christmas Carol

Christmas. Halfway out of the dark. This is my new favorite definition of Christmas. On one hand it connects the celebration of the birth of Christ to the natural patterns of the world – an affirmation of the physical that mind/body dualistic Christianity has attempted to hide in embarrassment. But it is also an affirmation of the paradoxical space that Advent calls us to live into.

The light shines in the darkness but the darkness does not understand it. In fact even those that claim to follow the light, keep the light at a safe distance as they wrap themselves in darkness. The coming of light into the world, the birth of the incarnate God, is for some simply a reminder of a far off promise. The light will eventually shine someday chasing away all shadows, but for now we must put up with the darkness as we dream about the light. The darkness doesn’t understand that the light has already broken into the world, not simply as a tantalizing glimpse of the future, but as an illuminating hope shining in the now.

I recently heard a women from Cuba share about how waiting for this light, this promised hope someday, is the only thing that people there have to help them make it through the day. Then she added how blessed she felt that the government is now not only allowing Bibles to be distributed and evangelical churches to gather so that people can have access to this comforting hope, but that the Cuban government is funding such things. The communist government knows the power of light. To allow it as an ever-receding hope in the future turns it into the subduing opium that they need. To allow light into the present would be dangerous, for light can’t help but chase away darkness. So of course they pour money into systems that convince people that liberating hope is only something for the sweet by-and-by. It allows the darkness to thrive.

The darkness always resists the light. If it can convince us that all we should do is perform half-hearted incantations to the idea of light while we ourselves shove the advent of light off into the future, then the darkness will have won. We distract ourselves with complaining about a so-called “war on Christmas” while it is our own theology that hides the light under a bushel. We shrug at the poverty, oppression, and injustice of the darkness as we mumble about God imposing his kingdom someday all the while hoping that the darkness continues to hide our involvement in those very injustices.

Someday, yes, the light will shine in its full brightness. The Kingdom will come in full and the darkness will be no more. But the paradox of Advent is that this light has already broken-in; the light might not be fully apparent yet but we are halfway there. The light is not just to come; it has arrived and is there to help us see. So to await the advent of the ultimate illumination means to live in the light in the now. It means having hope that the shadows of injustice and oppression can be chased away. It means not letting ourselves be subdued into reconciling ourselves with the darkness. It means not simply talking about the light or defending an impotent idea of light, but seeking it out, basking in it, and taking it to where illumination is needed. It means remembering that Christmas is situated at the turning of the seasons, at the time when light always returns and the darkness never ultimately triumphs.

Darkness abounds, but light is shining in and we are halfway out of the dark. That is the meaning of Christmas.

Living into the expectation of the incarnation is not a passive endeavor. Anticipating Advent is not about quietistic waiting but living into promised hope and freedom. It is letting the breaking in of Christ into our world release us from systems of fear that entrap us and patterns of sin that deny the very hope of the incarnation. Traditionally in the Western church Advent was a time of prayer, fasting, and acts of service (it still is in the Eastern Church). One did not wait simply to wait; one prepared oneself to meet the coming Christ by disciplining oneself in the very liberating ways of Christ. The advent of Christ in the past and the promised reconciling advent of Christ in the future are remembered and anticipated by living into the advent of Christ in the present through these acts of discipleship. Christ suffered so that we could have this freedom and hope, so we therefore accept this freedom from fear and sin by disciplining ourselves into becoming ever more Christ-like. It is not a tedious waiting around, but an embodied anticipation that consumes every moment of our lives.

So it is curious that during this time of year that instead of anticipating Christ by accepting our freedom from fear and sin by imitating Christ and doing likewise for others, we instead use our freedom to create systems of fear for others. Advent is less about preparation and discipline these days as it is forcing others to live in fear of Christians. For some their freedom in Christ has become justification for insisting that all people orient their lives around catering to them. A culture of fear is created where their freedom is upheld at all costs, even at the expense of the freedom of others. Freedom becomes for some less about Christ’s redeeming and reconciling work and more about ensuring their freedom by insisting that everyone else become exactly like them. Christ’s offer is therefore repeatedly cheapened each time they insist that their freedom isn’t real unless, for instance, atheists, Jews, Muslims, and commercial centers fearfully sacrifice their freedoms and acknowledge a certain interpretation of Jesus as the reason for the season.

Instead of accepting the freedom Christ offered through his suffering by accepting a life that embraces even suffering (or simply the mild inconvenience of exposure to the other) in order to do the same for others, Christians are insisting that others suffer for them. But insisting that others proclaim what should be the liberating and reconciling name of Christ by threatening to boycott their businesses or bringing lawsuits against them isn’t to live into the expectation of the incarnation. Can one truly have witnessed to hope and embraced release from fear and sin if one’s visible response to such is to in turn force others into a place of fear devoid of hope? As in the parable Jesus tells of the unforgiving servant, it does not represent the kingdom of God to accept ones freedom and forgiveness by then turning around and oppressing others.

The breaking in of Christ into the world changed everything. We actively await the advent of Christ by accepting the gift of Christ’s first advent. But what Christ offered was the gift of a new identity, of new creation. Living into that identity takes work; it takes discipline. New creations do not repeat the fearful patterns of this world by pushing them off onto others while hoarding the supposed blessings of freedom for themselves. To anticipate the gift of advent requires radical change of those that wait. As Jürgen Moltmann wrote of this promise of advent past, present, and future,

Every gift involves change. When unjust men and women are justified, the consequence is that they are sent out to work for more social justice. When peaceless men and women are reconciled, the consequence is that they are sent out to make peace in the conflicts of this society. There can be no other response for Christians to their experience of God.

If we expect God we have to respond to God as God calls us to respond. Releasing us from our fears and sins is never a call for us to bind others with the same. Waiting for the breaking in of Christ in this world is not a sanctioning of actions that oppose the very way of Christ. Maybe it would therefore be helpful to return to Advent as a disciplined period of prayer, fasting, and good works. Perhaps then we could anticipate the incarnation by actually incarnating Christ in the world.

Advent heralds the arrival of a new way of being in the world. The Divine has broken into our world, shattering the boundaries of the limits we assumed defined our existence. Hope was incarnate in the most unexpected of guises – giving testimony in its very form to the freedom it delivered. Freedom from the fear that this is all there is – that the patterns of this world hold the only answers available to the questions of our souls. Freedom from the oppressive lie that in a world of scarcity all we can do is secure whatever we can for ourselves by whatever means necessary. Freedom to have hope that there is a light shining in the darkness.

This Advent of hope ushers in a life-affirming freedom that is ours to live into. And yet we continue to act as if we are afraid to claim that freedom – or more precisely to allow others to claim access to this limitless way of life. Even the very proclamation and remembrance of the incarnation of hope gets subjected to our fearful limits, forcefully sheltered from being transformed by the very boundary-breaking hope that it is. We await the precious birth and then promptly place Jesus in prisons of our own making – ostensibly to serve him, but in truth to ensure that we can control his message and dictate who is allowed access to it. Therefore it becomes hard to think of Advent without also recalling to mind the words of Frances Croake Frank’s poem “Did the Woman Say?” –

Did the woman say,
When she held him for the first time in the dark of a stable,
After the pain and the bleeding and the crying,
“This is my body, this is my blood”?

Did the woman say,
When she held him for the last time in the dark rain on a hilltop,
After the pain and the bleeding and the dying,
“This is my body, this is my blood”?

Well that she said it to him then,
For dry old men,
Brocaded robes belying barrenness
Ordain that she not say it for him now.

It is far easier to turn the woman into a spiritual metaphor of ideal submission than to let her be free to physically participate in the life of Christ (then and now). The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness refuses to open its eyes and let it chase the shadows away. But Jesus came to set his people free.

Paul Ricoeur defines freedom as “the capacity to live according to the paradoxical law of superabundance,” or in other words, to embrace the surplus of meaning in the already and not yet of the eschatological event of the new creation. Hope broke into the world and redefined everything. We are no longer bound by the limits of scarcity which persuade us that to share our food or power with another is to deprive ourselves in some way. Hope opens up the possibility of living into the Kingdom of God, of letting go of limits in order to embrace abundant life. It is the living hopefully into the much more promise of Romans 5:15 – “For if the many died through the one man's trespass, much more surely have the grace of God and the free gift in the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for the many.”

Advent is about abounding grace at work setting people free to live into this limitless hope. It is about agreeing with Mary that already in the past, present, and future I AM that I AM has “brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly.” It is about recognizing the upside-down sense of a King being born in a stable. It is about letting go of the fearful power-plays we have imposed upon the breaking of bread. It is about realizing that it is only once we share what we have (be that our resources or even the space where our voice gets heard) that we find there is a surplus leftover even after we have all had our fill.

Advent is about expectantly anticipating the freedom Christ promises by living into that very freedom now. It is about shattering the constraints we have shored up around ourselves in order to let the light in.

We somehow seem to have forgotten the earth-shattering reality of that which we await. Advent is more than just a coming; it is the breaking in of the divine into the everyday patterns of this world. It is the hope of the future incarnate in the present making all things new. To live expectantly into the incarnation is to affirm the eschatological hope of the future while at the same time be transformed by that very hope already at work in the present. To observe Advent isn’t simply to reenact a memory of the past or look towards a second coming someday, for both would implicitly assume a present absence of the divine. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, forever transforming possible modes of being in this world. To anticipate the fulfillment of this hope is to accept the new way of being that broke into our world with the incarnation of the long expected Jesus.

It is safe to in remembrance await the coming of a powerless child or to simply tinker with the language and rituals that comfort us with the promise that the liberating hope of Christ is something we can only await. What is seemingly far more difficult is to actually live into the alternate reality that the advent of Christ ushered into the present. To anticipate hope by actively going out to meet it. To await the coming of the Kingdom of God by living in it right now. To declare that the status quos of injustice, oppression, and suffering have no place in the transformed new creation of Christ.

We are not the ones creating hope, but neither are we the ones simply awaiting a future hope. Advent reminds us that hope in the form of Jesus has already broken into our world. To live in expectation of that hope is to live into it – to embody the alternate reality Jesus made possible. The world and even the church may resist this subversion of the status quo even as they incant the very refrain “Come thou long expected Jesus,” for they have safely bracketed off hope in the past and future. Expecting to encounter the transforming and liberating hope of Jesus in the present is the far more difficult aspect of the incarnation to await.

Jesus was not born to the elite or the powerful. He was born to an oppressed people suffering under the taxation of empire. His family was lower class. He was born in the muck and mire of a stable and laid to sleep in a feeding trough. A hero might have humble origins, but not this humble. God showed up unexpectedly (for some at least) amongst the poor. While the words Mary uttered rejoicing in the social reversal that the birth of her son inaugurates, there are still those who struggle with God showing preference to the poor.

And so they write songs saying that if they would have know it was God being born in that manger then they wouldn’t have let it happen. That sort of thing is okay for some backwater girl with a suspicious pregnancy, but apparently not for God.

Maybe we need to get past the sweet baby Jesus and listen to the words of the adult Jesus telling us that whatever we do to the least of these we do to him. It is true – a manger isn’t good enough for God. But therefore then it isn’t good enough for any of God’s children. The poor shouldn’t be left to suffer or merely survive on the leftovers and stable corners the world generally allows them to have. If we are angry about Jesus having to be born in the dingy conditions of a stable – unwanted and rejected by society, then we have better be just as upset by the fact that babies all over the world are born in similar (or worse) conditions every day. Some 20,000 women get sick from childbirth everyday – mostly from unsanitary birthing conditions and lack of access to clean water and medicine. They too are Jesus. How we treat them is how we treat Jesus.

It was unexpected when God showed up amongst the poor in that stable in Bethlehem. But what is really unexpected for most Christians today is that God continually shows up amongst the poorest of the poor all over the world today. Responding to the advent of our Lord shouldn’t end with playing with plastic nativity sets as if the unsettling reality of the event has been thoroughly domesticated. Hearing about the unexpected breaking in of God into humble conditions should not numb our souls but instead open our eyes to seeing all the places God shows up – even the unsettling and the horrifying – for God is already there.

It can be easy to despise Advent. I don’t mean the period of waiting in hopeful expectation itself, but the actual trappings of the season. It is easy to despise the commercialism – to condemn the frenzy and the greed and see it as an obstacle to entering into a meaningful discipline if waiting. It can be easy to despise those that jump straight into Christmas – those that deck the halls in red and green and blast Christmas carols during what should be a time of building expectation. It is easy to despise those that leave Christ out of Christmas (or to despise those that get offended when Christ gets left out of Christmas). From tacky decorations, to pushy sales clerks, to religious wars – the hustle and bustle and the secular trappings of the season often stand in the way of our hopeful anticipation of the Christ child. And so we despise it all, letting Advent become a time of spite and condemnation.

I’m one of the first to question the all consuming ways of empire and consumerism, but I’ve had to humbly realize that all too often I let my animosity towards such things turn my experience of Advent into a twisted period of judgment instead of hope. And in standing in that judgment I prevented myself from encountering Jesus in the very things I despised. I found myself hoping to draw near to a Jesus of my own creation – a Jesus that liked the things I like and ran in the same circles as I did. This was the Jesus I lit the candles for in hopeful expectation during Advent.

But of course, my image of Jesus was a poor reflection of the real Jesus. Jesus was the one who was out there in the world, hanging out with the uncouth and common members of society. He was accused of being a drunkard and glutton because he enjoyed being with and feasting with people. Sure, he delivered challenges to his culture and found moments for retreat, but he didn’t shun it because he despised it for getting in the way of his contemplative spiritual journey.

The Messiah showed up where no one expected him to. Born to a poor family in the unexpected dinginess of a stable, he subverted all cultural expectations. I’ve had to learn that my narrow expectations about Jesus do not give me the right to define the modern American secular Christmas as God-forsaken. Even there – subverting expectations – Jesus is at work. If I desire to draw near to Christ this Advent, I need to let go of my judgment and condemnation of such places and be willing to see how Jesus appears unexpectedly even there. My narrow conception of Advent should not lead me to a place of bitterness and hate, but instead allow me to find hope in the redemption of all things wherever it may be occurring.

Scholars aren’t certain, but tradition holds that the Magi were the actual historical Magi from Persia. Followers of the teachings of Zoroaster, they looked to the stars for wisdom. If they were official Persian Magi, then their tradition would have had access to the religious writing of the Israelites. For after the exile when the Persian emperor Cyrus permitted the rich and elite Jews who had been exiled by the Babylonians to return to rebuild Jerusalem, many of them chose not to go. They were the elites of the land – the royal families and the scholars; the comforts of an established society that valued their wisdom was far more enticing that roughing it in a backwater province that had been left in ruin. So it is a near certainty that these scholars of Judaism interacted with and shared their knowledge with the educated elite among the Persians. Even if the Matthew gospel included the story only to convey the idea that all nations will worship Jesus, it still suggests the same meaning – God shows up in other cultures and religious groups.

That is the part that freaks people out a bit and why the revelation is so unexpected. In our modern attempts to domesticate the story, we either ignore who the Magi were or we explain them away as converts to Judaism. We have allowed our expectations of how we assume God to work to remove the power from this story. God showed up unexpectedly not just to those who were told that an anointed one was coming, but also to those truth-seekers following a different path. Truth was revealed through their culture and their religious practices – and this is part of our Christmas story.

To even talk about this is unexpected. The exclusivity of Christianity has become a totalizing thing for most Christians. Insisting that Jesus is the reason for the season often has less to do with a commitment to Jesus as it does a rejection of other cultural practices. Hearing how God shows up in other cultures is unexpected because it is the last thing people often want to hear. But God does not play by our rules (thankfully). God shows up where God desires to show up. We have the testimony of the Nativity story to affirm that truth, perhaps we should stop letting it unsettle us so.

God Showed Up
(to be read by two readers, like slam poetry)

A: Unexpectedly
B: Intrusively
A: Undeniably
B: God showed up
A: In the least likely of places
B: Where no one thought God would ever go
A:God appeared
B: Fear not, I am with you, Be not dismayed
A: For unto you this day is born, a savior
B: A baby
A: A child for the woman who thought she could bear none
B: A child for the girl who was not yet wed
A: A child to change their lives
B: A child to change the world

Elizabeth's Story

I was, how do I put this nicely, well advanced in years when God showed up. You would think with a priest for a husband that I would be ready for God to appear in my life, but I think God likes to show up where we least expect him.

You see, my husband served in the temple, we were good folk, but that doesn’t mean that I never heard the rumors. The whispered questions wondering how Zechariah could be approved to serve as a priest when God was so obviously withholding his blessing from us. The questions that echoed the cries I had uttered to God for years. Why God can we not have children? Why are we not granted this joy? Eventually my cries had turned to reluctant acceptance. At the age when other women were getting a rest from their labors as daughters and daughter-in-laws assumed the brunt of the day to day chores, I finally had to accept that I would never have what I had spent so many years longing for. That doesn’t mean that my heart didn’t break everyday knowing that the dream was lost to me forever, but I had no choice but to accept that my body had long since passed the point where children were a possibility.

So the last thing I expected was for God to send an angelic messenger to my husband to tell him that we would soon have a child. Thankfully I didn’t laugh out loud like my foremother Sarah did when she heard similar news. But I do admit to a moment, okay, maybe a few moments of incredulity. Me, have a child? At my age? It seemed impossible. But I soon learned that the words “God” and “impossible” don’t go together well. God showed up and turned my world upside down.

I barely knew what to do with myself. How I ached and the confinement nearly drove me crazy, but I rejoiced in every moment of it. This blessing was so unexpected and wonderful at the same time. I think I started even seeing the world differently. When God shows up in such a dramatic way in one area, it was hard to expect God not to show up in similar ways in everyone’s lives. So I think it was this impact of the unexpected blessing of my pregnancy that prompted my exclamation of joy when my cousin Mary showed up for a visit. I took one look at her and felt my babe leap inside me. Out of nowhere I exclaimed, “You're so blessed among women, and the babe in your womb, also blessed! And why am I so blessed that the mother of my Lord visits me? The moment the sound of your greeting entered my ears, The babe in my womb skipped like a lamb for sheer joy. Blessed woman, who believed what God said, believed every word would come true!”

I think I scared the poor child. She heard me say those words and immediately burst into tears. It took a while to work it out but apparently God had shown up a bit unexpectedly in her life as well. Young and not yet wed she too was with child. And she was beside herself with fear. She knew she carried the hope of our people inside her, but who in the world would ever believe that the child was of the Lord?

We needed that time together, helping each other see the joy in the unexpected. Sharing in those few months our special bond, a secret that shouldn’t be so secret, but somehow always is – that God can show up in the most unlikely of places. That God can shatter every preconceived notion of how this world should work. That God uses even ordinary folks like us to turn the world upside-down.

Sending Blessing
May God enter your life in unexpected ways. May you see God at work in even the busyness and commercialism of the season. May you always be discovering that your box for God is too small. May you be impregnated with possibilities you never dreamed were possible. May God turn your world upside down. Go in peace and expect the unexpected.