What God Has Done
Advent 3
Matthew 11:2–11 (NRSV)
When John heard in prison what the Messiah was doing, he sent word by his disciples and said to him, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” Jesus answered them, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.”
As they went away, Jesus began to speak to the crowds about John: “What did you go out into the wilderness to look at? A reed shaken by the wind? What then did you go out to see? Someone dressed in soft robes? Look, those who wear soft robes are in royal palaces. What then did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet. This is the one about whom it is written,
‘See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you,
who will prepare your way before you.’
Truly I tell you, among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist; yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.
Luke 1:46–55 (NRSV)
And Mary said,
“My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.
Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
for the Mighty One has done great things for me,
and holy is his name.
His mercy is for those who fear him
from generation to generation.
He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.
He has helped his servant Israel,
in remembrance of his mercy,
according to the promise he made to our ancestors,
to Abraham and to his descendants forever.”
Lately, I have been giving myself permission to feel.
For a long, long time, I have stifled my feelings, bottling them up and placing them haphazardly in the cellar of my soul. All the feelings we call “negative” like anger, sadness, hurt—I’m so far removed from the feelings that I don’t even have more than simple words for them—I have kept locked away and “under control” for years.
There is a guilt I feel at letting myself experience these emotions, and even that guilt is something I have kept locked away. I feel guilty because experiencing my emotions feels sensual. I feel it with my senses. I feel the anger in my chest when someone wrongs me. I feel the sadness sitting in my throat when I hear of the tragic-ness of life. I feel the stab of pain when I am cut and hurt by words and deeds. I am viscerally and physiologically experiencing these feelings, even when I don’t have words for them. That activation of the senses is what feels sensual to me… and sensuality, the experience of the senses, has somehow been ingrained in my neural pathways as wrong.
But I’m not doing anything wrong!
In allowing myself to feel, I am allowing my body to speak to me, allowing my self to receive the messages myself is trying to tell. I am listening more to what my body needs to express, listening to my experience of life more and more.
I didn’t let myself feel for a long time, because I was afraid of what I would find. Would my anger hurt others? Could my sadness swallow me whole? Would the hurt jade me, making me callous and uncaring.
No matter how much I suppressed these experiences in the name of “under control” and “calm,” they continued to express themselves in ways I couldn’t control, in moments when I couldn’t be calm. I’ve been blowing up at my family specifically, my experiences creating a pressure that has no release valve, so it erupts like a geyser pointed at those I love.
This isn’t something I’m proud of, it’s not something I want, but it is the reality of what happens in my life when I numb my own bodily experience of emotions to the point of cutting off the very language, I need to help me understand what I feel.
The other uncomfortable truth is that running from my feelings—indeed, that’s all that bottling up the experiences actually is—has led to me being cut off from the experience of the divine.
My language around the divine has been theological and idea-oriented for quite some time. Sure, when I talk or write about it, I can sprinkle in some poetics, but the truth is, I haven’t felt the reality of the divine in I don’t know how long. I haven’t felt the landmarks of God: peace, gentleness, curiosity, love of enemy, stranger, and neighbor. Yes, I’ve been going through the motions because I know they are the right things to do, but where has my heart been? Buried under layer upon layer of metastasized emotion. And all that calcified experience has led me to one major thing: fear.
I don’t like being afraid. Fear makes me feel vulnerable and exposed. I do everything I can to wall those feelings off so I don’t feel in danger. But walling off feelings has the same effect as bottling them up: we end up cutting ourselves off from all feeling.
I need to feel my fear, to feel my way through my fear.
I think John the Baptizer and Mary, the mother of God, were both afraid. I see them both feeling their way through fear in different ways, but that doesn’t change the fact that they were afraid.
We all are afraid. Some of us have more to be afraid of in the socio-economic-political landscape that surrounds us.
Fear of unmarked terrorists kidnapping and deporting you.
Fear of being outed as queer in spaces that aren’t safe to be queer in.
Fear of having to give up your gender-affirming care because some people want to debate your very existence.
Fear of not being able to pay rent despite having worked overtime the past two weeks.
Fear of having food on the table for you and your loved ones.
Fear of a Christmas alone because you have either been cut off or had to cut yourself off from family for being who you were created to be.
All these reasons to fear swirl about us, landing on our shoulders with the weight of all our trauma. We are afraid.
John and Mary were afraid because they were human.
John was shackled in a cell after speaking truth to power. He had believed that Jesus was going to bring about this fiery kingdom of God, with judgment on the broods of vipers that stalked the halls of power. John believed that this was the time of Israel’s glorification, their restoration to power beyond what Rome could take away. John had put all his hopes in the ring with Jesus… and Jesus was meek and mild.
Where was the kingdom? Where was the liberation? Where was the Messiah?
Underneath those questions lay another, deeper one. A heart question. A question that ge’s to the heart of John’s fear, the question that led him to feel his way through the fear in search of an answer.
What John wanted to know was this: was I wrong?
The entirety of John’s life had been devoted to becoming this fiery madman spouting prophetic truth. He was the voice in the wilderness. John was something no one else could ever be. With his camel hair clothing and the wild honey locust diet, John was not beholden to the comforts, ways, or regulations of society. He was a free man.
And he was called by God—at least that’s what he thought up to this point. John was someone special. God had chosen him from before birth to call the people to make straight the path of the Lord. To bring down the lofty mountains and raise up the deep valleys so that the King could come quickly, swiftly arriving in judgment and might.
But now, in a cell, all that had been stripped from him. John was simply a man, a human that was being ground up by the machines of power and domination that the powers and principalities of this world control. Everything John had worked for, every message he had proclaimed, every deed he had done in the name of truth, all of it didn’t matter because in the end he feared he had been wrong about Jesus.
John felt his way through his fear with that question: “Is it you we’ve been looking for, or is there someone else?”
This is not a question of theological clarification.
John asked this question because he got vulnerable with himself, discovered what fear was at his fore, and brought that fear into the light of Jesus.
John did the emotional work. John did the self-examination. John did the hard thing of letting himself feel.
We’re not told how John reacted to what Jesus told John’s disciples to take back to John. All we know if Jesus went on to give a testimony about John to the people, so that the people would know and remember the mighty voice that was John the Baptizer.
Whatever John’s reaction was, what we do know is that he shows us how to feel through our fear, get to the core of ourselves, and how to be honest before Jesus.
John shows us honesty.
Mary shows us wonder.
Mary, chosen by God to bear Godself incarnate into the world. There had to be fear in her voice as she told her parents of the wonderful news the angel had spoken to her. Were her parents going to believe her? Would they shun her? Would they think she was possessed? The unknown is a terrifying place to be, and Mary was firmly in the unknown.
What would happen if the neighbors found out that she was with child—no matter how special the child is—while being betrothed to Joseph?
Full of fear and the unknown, Mary was sent by her family to stay with her cousin Elizabeth in the hill country, away from the city, away from prying eyes, away from whispering tongues. Away from friends. Away from family in a tender time of transformation. Away from visibility.
Some might have said Mary was the family’s secret shame that they wanted to keep hidden.
Mary didn’t know what was going to happen. Would she be allowed to return? Would she be completely shunned? Would God save her from shame?
All these fears began heaping up inside Mary. She had willingly, faithfully said yes to God’s invitation to be a part of the incarnation of liberation itself. But now, as the angel wings faded into the distance of the past, Mary was left with the reality of being a young, unwed mother.
That must have been terrifying.
Mary felt her way through that fear. She didn’t deny the fear and uncertainty, be she continually said yes to the Spirit and God’s plan.
And God said yes back to Mary.
Mary entered the house of Elizabeth with a greeting. A simple ritual of welcome. And Elizabeth recognized her.
Elizabeth saw her.
Elizabeth knew she was the one.
At the moment of Mary’s greeting, Elizabeth (who was about six months along in her own pregnancy) felt her child jump, possibly for the first time. There was joy in the darkness. In the stillness, there was life. There was rejoicing and exuberance where before there had been quiet hope.
Elizabeth names Mary as blessed, just as Jesus named John as blessed. Elizabeth knew Mary was the mother of the Messiah, and that confirmation did something in Mary that nothing else could. That confirmation of everything the angel had said and the Spirit had done brought Mary out of fear and into wonder.
And it is from wonder, from awe, from rapture that Mary sings a song of prophetic praise that displays not only her experience of God’s actions, but that we, post resurrection, hear as our expectation of what liberation looks like. It is in the wonder that rushes to her head that this prophetic verse comes forth.
Mary sings out loud of the mighty brought low, and the lowly raised up. She sings of scattering the proud and filling the hungry with good things.
Mary sings with her whole pregnant being of liberation, of a reversal of the greed and dominance and violence of this current world system. She sings all of this in relation to her wonder that she is blessed because of what God has done.
And that’s the crux of it.
The fears that we have to feel our way through should bring us face to face with what God has done.
John was reminded of God’s actions when he asked if Jesus was the liberator.
When Mary erupted in song, bursting from fear into wonder, she sang of the things God had done.
What God has done is where our fears are met, where we can enter into honesty and wonder. In the face of the deeds of God, what he has done through history, and through our personal histories, we can honestly say this is my fear, my doubt, my terror and trauma. And from a place of honesty, we can enter into the wonder of God’s response to all the shit we carry.
This is where Advent matters to us. In front of the world, we can testify to what God has done for us, how Jesus’ liberation allows us to begin living a new way, a new life full of love and strength.
It is God who has acted; we are just witnesses to those actions.
In the presence of God, allow yourself to feel, to doubt, to fear. Let the reality of things exist this Advent as we wait in the dark. Then remember together the light has come, we are not alone, and let praise utter forth from our lips.
Look what God has done.
I am in the process of becoming a community chaplain with The Order of Hildegard. This program is designed to help form people into spiritual leaders that lead and serve from the margins. It’s for the people who don’t quite fit with the traditional church because of trauma, disability, or identity. If you, as my community, would like to help me fulfill the financial obligation this chaplaincy program has, you can give at the link below. Thank you for the myriad ways you support me.
If you’re aching to listen for God in the real stuff of life—grief, wonder, doubt, desire—I offer spiritual direction as a space to breathe and be heard. We listen together for the Spirit moving in the ordinary, the hidden, the in-between. No fixing. No formulas. Just presence, honesty, and room to be fully human before God.
If that sounds like what your soul needs, I’d love to walk with you