Seems to me Jesus, by his example, prefers a table at the back of the restaurant. He prefers the obscure. The small places. The small people. The small things. So, he works his plan through a carpenter named Joseph. A teenager named Mary. Some Shepherds working in the fields. A little town called Bethlehem. An atmosphere of poverty, powerlessness, and oppression. He prefers the simplicity and the humility of a baby.
These are the actors and the factors in the Advent story. Not a random or meaningless group of details. Rather this is the Jesus way and God did it this way because this is who he is, and this is how he works. He is found in the small places. He dwells in the unspectacular. He sneaks in the back door. He prefers the shadows. We find God on the back roads, off the beaten path. So, we find God in children. We find him in the elderly. We find him in the Forgotten. We find him amongst the hurting. He's a community theater God, not a Broadway God, we might say. Big and flashy and loud and impressive are not his way. He can be found there, but often the big and the flash and the loud are distractions that keep us from seeing and hearing and encountering the humble God, who puts on flesh and shows us God's heart.
The story that Luke chooses to begin his telling of the coming of Messiah with, is the story of a couple waiting. And sure, like with everybody else, they are waiting for the coming of the Messiah. Like everybody else in the Jewish Community was in those days. But more personally, Zachariah and Elizabeth are waiting for something else. They're waiting for a baby of their own. And as those who have experienced it know, infertility is a special kind of waiting. When you're waiting in infertility, it's not like waiting in a long line at Costco, where you know eventually it will be your turn. Waiting to conceive, it's waiting for something that you really, really, really, really, want but there is no guarantee that you're going to get it. And there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. Oh, I know, there's lots of options for fertility treatments out there. There are tons of things that you can try. But for all our fertility treatments, have only served to further prove the point, getting pregnant isn't something you can control. And so you wait. Of course getting pregnant isn't the only kind of waiting that fits that category, right? There's tons of things that fit the waiting for an uncertain outcome list.