I am traveling over the 4th Sunday in Advent. So far this month I have offered an on-line weekly zoom meditation but the travel we have planned will keep me out in the world and not near my computer during the time I normally open up the Zoom conference window. Of course I sent an email out to the handful of folks who have indicated an interest in the meditation and I called the weekend “Quiet 4th Sunday” on the subject line without a lot of thought.
And now I’m thinking about it.
If we went to worship, we’d probably hear the Luke text about Mary’s journey to her cousin, Elizabeth. Both are pregnant in unexpected ways. Elizabeth is too old to be pregnant and Mary carries the impossible within her. Elizabeth’s child leaps about in Elizabeth’s womb as Elizabeth greets her cousin and the child with a prophesy of salvation. Mary responds with the Magnificat, the speech that claims that God is restoring hope and righteousness for all of God’s creation.
That’s a lot of talking for a quiet 4th Sunday in Advent.
Its safe to say that I’m the one looking for the quiet when the church is busy proclaiming this weekend.
Or even more honest to say that I’m looking for a different kind of quiet.
I am traveling for two reasons. The first is a day trip in and out of Passau to meet a woman who is also passionate about the old ways of creating textiles and buy a new-to-me spinning wheel from her. The trip is by train along the Isar to the Danube and will run 2 hours each way. I love train trips. Like riding in a car, I just sit and watch the land go by. Sometimes I bring a book or a notepad thinking I’ll do work-like stuff but I don’t. Witnessing the journey seems to be too important, even on routes I’ve traveled before.
The second trip begins the next day. We are leaving quiet, constrained Munich for Berlin where there remains open Christmas Markets with all the bright, shiny lights, smells, and tastes. The food and wine we don’t see the rest of the year. The light and festival that holds back the pre-solstice darkness. All of that was cancelled for the second year in a row here in Bavaria last month and the streets and the people are all a bit, dark. Depressed. Worn out. The markets are open in Berlin, it appears to be a city where people are successfully navigating the both the virus and a life that includes community experiences. And I need to claim this for myself.
I wonder why Mary traveled to Elizabeth. It must not have been an easy trip but one Mary wanted to take. Or needed to take.
Mary went to her cousin and with her cousin as witness, Mary sang a song we still sing.
It a song of impossible hope.
It is a song where the wealthy are already brought down from their abusive wealth and the hungry are already fed.
It is in the perfect tense, an action in the past which is now done.
In Mary’s song, God’s work to restore justice is already completed
And we know that God’s work is still unfinished.
We know that the hungry are still here among us and the powerful are still making really bad decisions against the rest of us. Heck, we’re making bad decisions against ourselves and people and places we love. We know That troops are building up along several borders. We see that along other borders men, women, and children are being used as political chips in the winter cold. We know that homes and people are shattered and scattered for miles by wind and that viruses and cancers just keep killing for lack of medical access. It is still all a huge mess and still looking like we’re all at the mercy of our fear, our grief, our isolation, and our greed. A place not well known for mercy.
I am struggling to see God in this right now. I’m trying to look to Mary’s faith, Mary’s song of God’s work already completed.
So many centuries ago and Mary is singing in the past tense.
I don’t know why unless it is her deep, passionate commitment that what God intends is as good as done so we should be ordering our lives accordingly. If God lives beyond the confines of time and space then perhaps verb tenses in general do not apply when speaking of God doing anything. So how do we live if God has already restored the world?
While past tense perfect might be God and Mary’s context, you and I are still living within this moment in this time and space bounded existence and we are still limited to what we experience right now and right here. Which is sometimes great and sometimes unbearably awful and sometimes both. So how do we live with tragedy and comedy living side by side in our lives and our world?
Or how do we live as if God has already made the world good?
Mary went to her cousin where her song could be sung in a community of leaping babies and Holy Spirit infused women.
Where do we go when we need to sing?
What do we need to sing right now?
Where is God in this?
I am going to Berlin. I don’t know if this is a good choice or the right choice. I’m going. I hope to be reminded that whatever it is that I am experiencing in my own Right-Now and Right-Here in Munich is not the Everywhere and Every-When experience. That there remains in our world places of joy, times of community, and lots of light with shiny flashy objects. I am looking for the quiet of festival. A place and a time where I hope to find God even in all that too. Possibly pouring out the gluwein.
For Beloved and I – this is a time to travel and see what is to be seen.
To sing the song we are given – to sing the song we were given to sing.