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The third week of Advent is about Joy. Joyful expectant waiting. Pheonix lit our Advent candle for us, reminding us of this week’s Advent theme. It’s suppose to be a pink candle this week to represent joy, but we only had purple ones, so we had to imagine it being pink.

On a joyful note, Ron let us know that his granddaughter had just delivered healthy happy twins this past week, he now had three great grand children!  
Silas did the teaching this week, talking about scandalous love. We looked at the Magnificat, Mary’s song of celebration found in Luke 1:46-55. Silas pointed out that Luke writes his gospel story in a Hellenic narrative style. If you’re familiar with Hellenic art and architecture you know it’s big and bold. Did I mention big? Big, big, big. Hellenic narratives start off big. The writer usually starts by presenting the main characters; larger than life, big, important people doing big important and impressive things. Luke plays with the Hellenic convention by embracing it, then inverting it. Luke starts his story with a small unimportant place populated by unimportant people doing seemingly unimportant things. From this small quiet beginning the gospel story ripples outwards. 
We talked about how upside down Mary’s story is. As young woman she has little power. As an unwed mother, she has no power and no rights. Yet, as we see in Luke’s account, Mary the poor powerless girl, is exalted, and she sings about how God “lifted up the lowly." When God, who is love, brings love to the world, he does it in this upside down way. The opposite of big, bold and brash. 
We talked about how love, quiet patient love, can be disruptive. Like a stone in a stream. The stone sits quietly and it’s calm presence disrupts the usual flow. 
We talked about going into the world and being a loving presence that disrupts the usual flow. May our Christmas season be one of joyful disruption! [Yep, twins are going to be disruptive joy.]
We celebrated communion, as we do every week. Communion is always slightly more special when Marvin makes bannock for Communion, but this week he outdid himself making special mini Communion bannock. As always, the locus of our community is this shared time of coming to the place we most belong, to the table with Jesus, loved and accepted as we are.