Local Twin Cities pastor and writer, Meta Herrick Carlson writes in her holiday book “Ordinary Blessings for the Christmas Season:
“If God wished to be born
Into perfection and peace,
We’d still be waiting on a savior of the world.
God knows families are messy,
That our generations are full of characters,
Our stories told slant with time.
And so the Word of God
Is tangled up with DNA
Of those familiar and forgotten,
Heroes and villains and ordinary folks.
Heartache and faithful promises
Tales of courage and cowardice
Woven through a patriarchy
Interrupted by four women
Trusted by God to break the rules
When rules were wrong
To act for liberation and love
That made a way for even more.
If I am being honest, the season of Advent is how I make sense of who God is. And, this writing from Pastor Meta encapsulates what I love most about the season of Advent.
God is subversive and chooses people the world does not choose.
That Jesus comes to a broken world, again and again. That the world we are navigating maybe, just maybe isn’t so different from that world where Mary heard these words so many years ago.
That during Advent, we get to joyfully celebrate that nothing is impossible through God. That when rules are wrong, they must be broken for the good of the marginalized among us because Jesus’ birth broke all of the so-called rules and assumptions of the time.
That Advent is a reminder that we are beautifully imperfect and loved by God all the same. That God believes in us and did not wait for us or for the world to without flaws or pain or strife to come to us.
Join me in fast forwarding just a little bit to the image we will soon see of the celebration of Jesus’ birth. So often the image of Christ’s birth that we are presented with is the sweet, docile white baby Jesus, in a clean, glowing manger, with his humble parents and a menagerie of animals surrounding him. I invite you to let that image go. To imagine instead what it would have been: a barn, maybe a cave, and probably a cold barn or cave at that. I may not have been a farm kid but enough of my friends were and from the several times I was tasked to assist them with after school chores, I feel pretty confident in assuming that it would have smelled….not good.
Mary and Joseph would have been utterly exhausted and frightened after making this long journey from Galilee to Bethlehem. And then when they got there, they were turned away again and again, only for Mary to give birth in the midst of all of this exhaustion and fear. And very shortly after, they would be forced from their homeland of Palestine to Egypt, seeking refuge from a brutal king who wished them harm. This may have all been thousands of years ago, but each Advent we remember just how present this all is. That the world the angel is coming to Mary to share this great news is not so unlike ours today.
Those thousands of years ago, God decided to enter the world through a poor, young, peasant woman, in the far removed, middle of nowhere hamlet of Galilee. God entered the world amidst the mess, the tumult, the fear. And today, God enters the world amidst those same circumstances. While we are traversing frightening terrain, unable to see through much of this murkiness, we are reminded that the liminal and the darkness is holy and that God has been here before and God is still here.
Wil Gafney is one of my favorite Hebrew scholars and recently shared on social media, “I have come to appreciate Advent so much more without the light/dark binary. Rather, I see darkness as the generative space in which light is conceived and from which it is born. Both holy, both life-giving.
But before any of that could happen, Mary had to contend with an angel talking to her. I am admittedly kind of picky about Christmas music. Maybe I’ve spent too many holiday seasons working retail, and while it is not at all my intention to wreck a favorite Christmas song if this is one of your top picks this time of year, but I admit that Mary Did You Know has always made me stop and wonder. Because, there was so much that Mary knew.
She would have known a lot of things. Mary would have known how babies were made which the author of Luke reminds us of as she wonders how she could come to bear a child. She undoubtedly would have known young girls her age to die in childbirth or lose their babies. And, she would have known all too well what it was like to live in a small, removed part of the world, occupied by the brutal rule of the Roman State, with ever increasing taxes and land acquisitions. She would have seen rich Romans not paying their fair share of taxes while her loved ones were squeezed tighter and tighter financially.
She would have known what this pregnancy would do to her social standing. That while her cousin, Elizabeth’s pregnancy was also unexpected in her advanced age, at least there was biblical president for that. A young, poor, woman in occupied Palestine? Well, that would have been a new one.
She would have known so many things. And through all of that knowing, she was still brave enough, with more faith and hope than I can imagine, to say yes.
Mexico City is one of my most favorite cities in the world. Very high on my list during my last visit was making a visit to the Mexico City basilica to see the depiction of the Virgin of Guadeloupe.
The legend goes like this:
In 1531, Mary appeared to a young, indigenous peasant named Juan Diego. She told him, in his native dialect, that she wanted her church to be built on the spot she appeared to him. So, Juan Diego, went to the Spanish Fransiscans to share the news of his vision. They essentially laughed him out of the room. Why would Mary, long venerated by Christians, appear to this peasant and not to them?
So, Juan Diego returned to the spot he initially saw her and shared their rejection. She told him to go back and try again. He came and went several times, and on the final time, December 12th, 1531, she told him to bring red roses to the friars, wrapped in his tunic. It was December, and there were no roses growing, but all of a sudden, they appeared. Juan Diego wrapped these flowers in his tunic, and when he opened his tunic to the Franciscans, his tunic held a depiction of Mary. And here’s the thing. She was not shown as a meek, white young girl. She was depicted as an indigenous Aztec.
The 1530s were not only the height of the Protestant Reformation happening in Europe, but they were also a time of heightened imperialism in central and South America. Important to note is that right around this time, the Spanish Franciscans destroyed the ancient Aztec city in the center of Mexico City and used the stones to build their cathedral.
And yet, Mary showed up to an Aztec peasant, mirroring the angel coming to her, a pushed aside Palestinian peasant all those years before. Throughout these past nearly five hundred years, so much study has been done on her image that is depicted on the tunic which is on display in the basilica. There have been countless analyses done of the materials and many attempts to recreate it using materials that would have been available at the time, and materials that even weren’t available then, and no one can figure it out. It is not a painting and it is not a weaving. It is simply there.
More than twenty million people visit this site each year. Tourists come to visit and Catholics from central and south America and beyond make pilgrimages to stand under the tunic and to offer prayers to her.
And while all of this is awe inspiring, the thing that really got me when I was there was seeing all of the migrants who make pilgrimages to her to ask for her intercession as they begin and continue their perilous journeys north. These displaced and weary people go and pray to another who knew all too well what it felt like to be weary and displaced.
In these waiting and expectant days of Advent, I invite all of us to think about all the places in our broken world God is entering again and again. All of the places the world expects God to be while ignoring the marginalized, gritty places God has showed up time and time again.
May we look to Mary to mirror the immense faith and hope she had to say yes. The hope and faith necessary to sing boldly O Come O Come Emmanuel .
In closing, I share a favorite Advent prayer from the Reverend Michael T. Ray.
Jesus, the impoverished refugee, you showed up in the mess, and the crap and the stench. You told us to look for you in prison, on the streets, among the thirsty and hungry, naked and alone, those who are sick. And yet sometimes, we do all we can to avoid every one of those places and people. Convict and compel us to stop trying to get you to show up where we want to go, and instead start showing up where you told us you would always be. Amen.
Vicar Karla Leitzman