Reflection for the Advent Service for the Catholic Charities Volunteer Service Corps here in Buffalo.
(Dumps garbage on the floor)
What a mess!
Who’s going to clean this mess up? Marion’s looking at me like…well, I’m not that’s for sure.
But don’t we often end up in a mess? And it starts out from birth…we come from our mothers in —let’s face it, a messy way. And then comes the spit up and the dirty diapers and the bloody noses, the broken bones and the heartbreaks.
What a mess life can be.
And nobody knows about messes better than Joseph.
His betrothed is found to be pregnant and he had nothing to do with it.
I wonder how Mary tried explaining that one …
What a mess.
And Joseph decides to divorce her quietly. What the gospel doesn’t tell us is that Joseph had the right to stone Mary according to their custom.
But Joseph can’t do it. In fact even divorcing Mary quietly doesn’t sit right with him and when he goes to sleep that night he can’t even sleep soundly. And he dreams. And when he wakes up he awakens to the new possibility that God may just be calling him to something both unexpected and wonderful.
But it all doesn’t happen right away. No Joseph has to have faith and wait for this child to be born. How hard must that have been to wait. With the neighbors gossiping and with morning sickness and the guy’s down at the carpenter shop razzing him…
After all that waiting, Jesus is born into one of the messiest of all places—with cattle droppings and mites and ticks and oh yeah the smell of barnyard animals.
Joseph sees what must have been hard for others to see. That God has chosen to enter into the messiness of our world.
We often don’t want to face the mess–like Joseph we ignore the mess. And that’s when God starts to work on us.
And that’s what Advent is really all about. Advent is God’s hope that we wake up and realize that life is indeed a mess and that we are in need of a savior. But God also embraces the messiness of our lives and can we have ever imagined that when we find that savior, he’d be in a smelly barnyard as a helpless little baby. God doesn’t avoid the mess at all. He even embraces the messy death of the cross.
No matter who we are, we all end up in a mess from time to time. Sometimes we even make a mess of things ourselves. These past four months I’m sure have been filled with messiness in both of your houses.
There’s the mess of being confused–of wondering what is next for you?
The mess that comes with living in community–where people don’t always get along and have different preferences and needs and quirks.
There’s the mess of feeling powerless over social inequities where we can’t always change the situations that those we are serving too often in.
There’s even the messes that sometimes develop when we try to live simply and life gets inconvenient.
And of course, the mess that we make when we hurt one another.
Tonight and for the next few weeks of advent, think about the messes you have had to overcome and the messes that you have a hard time facing. It might be a relationship that needs healing or a situation that’s uncomfortable. It might be the fear that God is calling you to a place that you’d rather not go—to serve those who sometimes come to us with very messy situations and want us to fix them.
A final story: On a mission trip, I sat with a little girl named Elvira almost every morning. She had severe spina bifida and really couldn’t do much of anything. She couldn’t play, she couldn’t talk much, all she could really do was smile and feel my touch. I felt helpless. In the developing world in a shack-like chapel I sat and wondered why this was all such a mess–and more importantly why would God have sent me here where I felt so helpless. And in the eyes of a little baby, helpless and alone, her simple smile offered me five simple words: You are enough for me. It was indeed a beautiful graceful messy moment.
This Advent may you all be able to look at your lives, at what you have been in your work placements, what you have given each other in community and what you are moving forward to become for your world and be able to say a simple prayer:
God bless this mess.