If John the Baptist helps us begin our Advent season, it is Mary who helps bring it to the end.
Advent as a season waiting, faithful, patient waiting, is a season to sit with Mary the mother of Jesus and ponder this pregnancy. Announced by the Angel Gabriel, proclaimed by Mary in her song, the Magnificat, it is a pregnancy that would bring redemption and change to the world.
I think of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a pastor who sat waiting for redemption & change to come in the midst of the Nazi terror of WW II, who said this about Mary.
“Mary, filled with the Spirit and prepared. Mary, the obedient handmaid, humbly accepting what is to happen to her, what the Spirit asks of her, to do with her as the Spirit will, speaks now by the Spirit of the coming of God into the world, of the Advent of Jesus Christ. She knows better than anyone what it means to wait for Christ. He is near to her than to anyone else. She awaits him as his mother. She knows about the mystery of his coming, of the Spirit who came to her, of the Almighty God who works his wonders. She experiences in her own body that God does wonderful things with the children of men, that his ways are not our ways, that he cannot be predicted by men, or circumscribed by their reasons and ideas, but that his way is beyond all understanding of his own will.”
Mary in many ways helped Bonhoeffer who waited in prison for a release that was never to come. But he understood her song and the perspective of her life.
“Who among us will celebrate Christmas right? Those who finally lay down all their power, honor, and prestige, all their vanity, pride, and self-will at the manger, those who stand by the lowly and let God alone be exalted, those who see in the child in the manger the glory of God precisely in this lowliness. Those who say, along with Mary, “The Lord has regarded my low estate. My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.”
It is such a perspective from prison that guided Bonhoeffer’s last years. “From a Christian point of view, a Christmas in a prison cell is no special problem. It will probably be celebrated here in this house more sincerely and with more meaning than outside where the holiday is observed in name only.”
As we sit with Mary and wait. As we ponder what God has done. As we await the glory as Bonhoeffer once did, may we know that God’s will continues to break forth all around us, if we have ears to listen and eyes to see.
Let me end with a poem written by Bonhoeffer in a Nazi prison camp at Christmas, 1944.
By Benevolent Powers (Dietrich Bonhoeffer)(Amen.)
Faithfully and quietly surrounded by benevolent powers,
wonderfully guarded and consoled,
- thus will I live this day with you
and go forth with you into another year.
Still will the past torment our hearts
Still, heavy burdens of bad times depress us,
Ah, Lord give our startled souls
the grace for which we were created.
And if you pass to us the heavy, the bitter
cup of pain, filled to the brim,
we will accept it, without trembling
from your good and beloved hand.
But if you wish us to rejoice once more
in this world and the brilliance of its sun
then the past too we will remember
and so our entire life will belong to you.
With warmth and light let flame today the candles
that you have brought into our darkness.
If it can be, bring us together once again!
We know your light is shining in the night.
When the silence spreads around us deeply,
let us hear that full sound of the world
stretching out invisibly around us;
let us hear the children's praising song.
Warmly protected by benevolent powers,
with confidence we wait for what may come.
God is with us at evening and at morning
and most certainly at each new day.
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