As usual, Peter is very much like many of us. We often try to talk our way into understanding, trying to process an experience so that we can absorb its meaning and make that meaning part of who we are.

What does it look like to "strike out into the deep," when we're tired and convinced that there are no more people interested in the good news we offer, especially when our popular culture offers such enticing invitations in other directions?

Perhaps the most moving--and therefore transformational-–way to read this text is to let it read us.

The poor, then and now, represent not only those in economic poverty but those who live on the margins or the outside of our communities, physically or spiritually. Jesus' ministry, as its intentions are laid out in this passage, would reach out to exactly those who have been rejected, for one reason or another.

How will the changing times we live in shape the ways we serve and witness? What hidden abundance lies within our sacred traditions, ready to be transformed like the water in the great stone jars?

Blessing. Beloved. Fire, wind, and water: life is utterly mysterious and yet, here in the unknown, here in the midst of all that might make us afraid, God is near to us, just as God was near to Jesus as he stood there in the River Jordan, with so much still ahead of him.

Our reading from the Gospel of John is one of the most familiar and yet most transcendently beautiful passages in the Bible.

It seems to be part of the human condition, in navigating the difficult passage from childhood to adulthood, to experience a tension between family and "the world out there," between safe nurture and broader horizons, between a circle of care and a strong sense of self.

Advent is indeed a time of waiting and preparation, a time pregnant with hope. On this Fourth Sunday of Advent, Mary and Elizabeth are two ordinary, pregnant women in the most extraordinary time and circumstances, on the brink of greatness but first tending to their relationship with each other and with God.

John jars us with his message into looking afresh at our lives, our priorities and preoccupations, our style of living. We don't seem to mind doing that so much in a few weeks, in time for New Year's resolutions, but what if we looked closely right now, here in Advent, as we prepare for the One who is to come, the One to whom John turns our attention?

Jesus and the disciples are approaching the end of their travels. They're at Jericho, on the edge of Jerusalem, on the edge of suffering and death for Jesus. As they've traveled along, the disciples have been busy figuring out where they want to sit when their dreams of triumph and success come to realization.