A Blanket of Snow

A Blanket of Snow

A Blanket of Snow

Jubilee Preaching Aid for December 14, 2025

Where do we find joy in the campaign for debt cancelation?

By the third Sunday of Advent, we are in the darkest time of the year. Sometimes, the longer nighttime experienced in Canada can be a metaphor for uncertainty and disorientation, like stumbling around in the dark. But nighttime can also represent a time of much needed rest. Like the land in a “sabbath year,” it can be good for our bodies and our communities to “lie fallow” for a time. Where is the joy in the darkness?

The third Sunday of Advent is known as Gaudete Sunday, from Philippians 4:4, “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice” (Gaudete in Domino semper). For communities that light a traditional advent wreath, this Sunday stands out with its pink or rose-coloured candle, which represents joy. Psalm 146 gives voice to joy as it envisions God executing justice for the oppressed and lifting up all who are bowed down. And in Luke 1, Mary echoes the Psalm with her own song of deliverance. But is this joy premature? As Psalm 137 poignantly asks, “How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” How can we rejoice when we’re not there yet? When the journey isn’t complete?

In his commentary on the Psalms, the late great Biblical scholar, Walter Brueggemann, argues that the praise of God when separated from historical experience or memory risks becoming mere idolatry or ideology. Anna at OMG shares this quote:

“It is very difficult to engage liturgically in celebrations of God’s extravagance and yet to remember and affirm that in the midst of such extravagance there are hungry people who need food, prisoners who need release, and blind who need sight. I submit that the very accumulation of words about abundance diminishes the likelihood that the social reality of need and scarcity will remain visible to Israel. Such a psalm reflects a singing community which continues to hold on to the old recital of transformation, but which is increasingly preoccupied with the goodness of the present order, a goodness experienced with benign gratitude, without context, without memory, without critical awareness. In the end, the massive rhetoric of present well-being overrides the memory of another needful time. And when one’s own memory of a needful time is nullified, one is not likely to notice a present needfulness that contradicts one’s own present abundance.”

(Walter Brueggemann, Israel’s Praise: Doxology against Idolatry and Ideology, 1988, p 102.)

Perhaps this week, then, the themes of Matthew 11 and James 5 feel more appropriate. Jesus, upon hearing that his cousin John had been imprisoned, asks “what did you expect?” And James urges us to be patient and to strengthen our hearts while, like farmers, we wait for the life-giving rain to come. Yes, there is still a lot of construction left to do before Isaiah’s highway of safety in the wilderness will be complete. This is not easy work, and there will be pain and loss along the way.

Even so, the prophet Isaiah directs our eyes to a time when the dry places of the world blossom like flowers, when the caked and baked riverbeds become swampy pools, and when life suddenly bursts out of the desert. The wadi is a key source of this week’s imagery. For most of the year, the wadi is a dry ravine, the domain of jackals and lions and ravenous beasts. Like the forces of global finance and debt, they prey on the weak in order to devour them. Yet, when the seasonal rains arrive, the wadi becomes a rushing river, washing away both the predators and the carcasses and leaving swampy, grassy pools behind. John the Baptist likely practiced his ministry in a pool created by a wadi. It is this sort of rain for which James encourages us to wait patiently, as the water collected in the pools becomes a source of agricultural life.

In Canada, the season of Advent arrives in the winter, and we are more likely to associate it with snow than rain. Most of us have never seen a wadi. And yet, perhaps we have experienced a similar joy and wonder when the first thick blanket of snow falls and our world is completely transformed. When the world becomes one unbroken whole, without division, without competition. And so perhaps, in this snowfall, we can also catch a glimpse of God’s Jubilee and we can truly rejoice.

Kevin Guenther Trautwein is a member of KAIROS Prairies North who lives in Edmonton, Alberta, subject to the promises and commitments made in Treaty 6, by the grace of God, by the gifts of the land, and by the faithfulness of the First Peoples who have kept and cared for this land since time immemorial.