I love what follows next. When Mary hears these words from Elizabeth, she does not claim her own worthiness or come up with a first century version of Maria’s “I feel Pretty” of Westside Story. Instead she confesses her own unworthiness, thanks God for what God has done, and views her own experience as a sign of God’s compassion to the lowly and the hungry.

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.

Come, Lord Jesus.

Come in might, and yet bearing the marks of utmost humiliation. Come in glory while stooping to wipe the tears from our eyes. Come bearing judgment, yes, and yet also bearing the very scars of our deliverance. For only you can turn us all into your people again. And so we hope against hope.

Come, Lord Jesus, come.

With great might come among us and, because we are sorely hindered by our sins, let your bountiful grace and mercy speedily help and deliver us (BCP 212).

The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.

And we are invited to seek a different perspective, so that we might recognize it as a reality and live as if it were so.

This is what it means to repent, to go deeper –to seek the very roots of our sorrows and afflictions and to upturn them, to take them off, so that we might see with new eyes the wonders of His love. So that we might know that we are not separate individuals running the rat race of life, playing our own individual games, but that we are one with all, connected to the true vine, Jesus Christ. And so that we might abide, in our deepest and most vulnerable places, in this truth: we are seen, loved, and forgiven.

Repent, the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.

What signs of our redemption will we experience this Advent? Advent invites us to rachet it down a few notches just as our culture is kicking it up. But just like the paradox of Jesus’ words in today’s Gospel and the both/and of Van Gogh’s Starry Night, we can live with an Advent mindset during this time of holiday glitz, looking expectantly for signs of God’s inbreaking everywhere.

If Jesus is truly our Lord, he belongs in the room when we encounter a neighbor in need, when we enter the polling place or the board room, balance our check books, or enter the work place. We need to acknowledge Christ’s Lordship, not in an ostentatious way—for Jesus has something to say about that—but as a fixed part of our lives.

Apocalypse is about revealing; revealing that which our current judgment impairs us from seeing and understanding. Revealing the ways in which our social, personal, and political realities are undergirded by a divine, spiritual action of God. It’s a perspectival realignment from earthly existential anxiety to cosmic hope in God’s providence. It’s about heaven being made real on earth even as we speak, even when it is obscured from our eyes and our better judgment rightly tells us that for many there is hell on earth.