Grace and peace from God our Creator, hope in our Redeemer Jesus the Christ, and the promised gifts of the Holy Spirit are with you always.
At our staff meeting this week, I said something about us inching toward Christmas, and someone chuckled and said “aren’t we more like barreling toward Christmas?” I wonder which it is for you, this morning. How is your advent season coming to a close? As this is the fourth and final Sunday of Advent, Christmas Eve is just five days away! Perhaps you are wondering why I have mentioned this, as you are now panicking, running through the never-ending holiday to-do list in your head. Or worrying about how you’re going to make it through this week, with all the emotions it dredges up.
Christmas is the most widely-celebrated festival in the world, and one trillion dollars is spent every year in its celebration. One trillion. With a T. Especially here in the US, we build it up to be this massive consumerist thing, taking on too much, hoping to make it “the best Christmas ever” year after year. Afterward, we crash in a pile of exhaustion and unmet expectations and sugar cookies.
With less than one week to go, it is perhaps a little late for you to completely reorganize the vibe of your Christmas celebrations. Or, perhaps, it is just the right reminder to enter these final days of anticipation with something more like the hope, peace, joy, and love we’ve been naming aloud in church this month.
What we have in our scripture this morning, one last story before the story of Jesus’ birth, is of course a story of Mary’s pregnancy. In this Gospel text, we hear from two mothers of the church, Elizabeth and Mary, who bore two of the greatest prophets the world has ever known.
They are pregnant at the same time, through similar but different miraculous means. Elizabeth is quite old, Mary is quite young. Neither of them expected that their life would take this precise turn, but both had deep faith in the God of Israel, and knew that “impossible” and “unlikely” and “wonderful” and “miraculous” things are just…how God works.
Something you may not have learned about me yet is that I am a deep and abiding fan of musical theater. Classic, modern, Broadway, high school, good, terrible, I’m in.
It is possible that you have followed my train of thought and are now humming a tune from Fiddler on the Roof along with me, because of the (sung) “wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles” taking place in the lives of Elizabeth and Mary. Or maybe you’re a Rodgers and Hammerstein fan, and (sung) “impossible things are happening every day” comes into your head from their great Cinderella.
I don’t suppose that Mary’s song, heard here in the Gospel According to Luke, has quite the same catchiness as a Tony-award-winner, but it has touched the lives of millions all the same.
In my Lutheran tradition, we are less devout in our theology of Mary than our Catholic siblings and perhaps you dear Episcopalians. We do have a sung version of the Magnificat, though, from a liturgy called Holden Evening Prayer by Marty Haugen that also rings in my ears throughout the Advent season.
(sung) “My soul proclaims your greatness, O god, and my spirit rejoices in you. You have looked with love on your servant here and blessed me all my life through. Great and mighty are you, O faithful one, strong is your justice, strong your love. How you favor the weak and lowly one, humbling the proud of heart. You have cast the mighty down from their thrones and uplifted the humble of heart. You have filled the hungry with wondrous things and left the wealthy no part.”
I appreciate your humoring my singing this morning, though I presume that is atypical from the pulpit. But Mary’s song—the content of which we will get to in a minute—lifting her voice to God, always inspires me to do the same. I can scarcely read this text without humming along.
Martin Luther wrote that those who sing pray twice. He didn’t say that those who sing well pray twice, so if singing is not your spiritual gift, you are still invited to make a joyful noise to the Lord. Beautiful is not required.
That aside, we return to Mary’s Song. She has been told by an angel from God that she will bear in her body the savior of the world. In a panic, one presumes, she runs to an older woman in her family, one who might counsel her about what is about to happen to her body and to her relationship with Joseph; what it will mean to be a mother and to be The Mother of God.
In the Gospel text, we get a fairly sanitized version of this period in Mary’s life, because the focus of the story is on her willingness to serve in this way. The author of Luke was not particularly attuned to the inner life of a teenage girl, it turns out, and so skips over what I assume was a lot of questions and a lot of pacing and hand-wringing.
We instead arrive at Elizabeth’s door where John the Baptizer leaps for joy in her womb, knowing in his soul, somehow, the truth of who the Christ child will be. Elizabeth blesses Mary, and comforts her with the knowledge that it is all going to be okay, somehow. Hers will not be a normal life ever again, but God will be with her through it all.
And then Mary sings.
“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….the mighty one has done great things for me….he has brought down the powerful from the their thrones and lifted up the lowly….he has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.”
Her pregnancy is miraculous, impossible, and world-altering. Her song, her claims of what God has done, is doing, and will do is miraculous, impossible, and world-altering. How could it be that the powerful will be brought down and the lowly will be lifted? How could it be that the hungry will be filled and the rich emptied? These are not just changes in Mary’s personal life, but changes to the whole of God’s world. This small thing—a baby—will turn the world upside down.
But not in the way that we might expect. Our scripture tells us that this miracle of miracles will be different than anything the world has ever seen. God will come to dwell with us.
Two thousand years on this side of the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth, it is perhaps less scandalous to us to think that this could happen. That the God of the Universe could come to earth, a mortal child, carried to term in the womb of a woman, birthed in a messy and painful labor, just like so many billions of other human beings.
The Son of God did not spring to earth as an adult, fully formed in a shiny God body, impervious to harm. Jesus came among us as us. Son of God and Son of Mary, Jesus of Nazareth was anticipated by his mother for several long and uncomfortable months.
That whole time, she knew what was coming—she sang a song about it—but was also perhaps overwhelmed by the unknowing.
What would it be like to birth this child, nurse this child, hold this child, soothe this child, discipline this child, educate this child, raise this child to be a gangly adolescent, and send this child off into the world, a prophet and a savior.
On this side of the first Easter we can recount the stories of Jesus’ birth, his ministry, his miracles. We know the whole story and so we can tell this part of the story with assurance that Mary lives through childbirth, and Jesus lives into adulthood, and all the things God promised the messiah would bring truly come to pass.
But in this Advent season, we have stepped outside of time. We have gone from the “already” to the “not yet” with Mary and Elizabeth, whose wisdom and song tell us that they know what is coming, but still they wait for it.
These are the only weeks of the year in which we confess our salvation through Jesus the Christ while simultaneously praying for his life to begin.
This final week before Christmas we are as deeply in the paradox of Advent as it is possible to get. We are standing on the precipice of something so incredible, it changes the course of human history forever.
It is not only Mary and Elizabeth’s rejoicing that sings this song. Our psalmist calls desperately for a savior. Theologian John Buchanan writes that “There is no triumphalism here. The God of incarnation, whom Advent anticipates, will come to redeem and save. It will be in a manner nobody expects and few recognize; old political and military scores will not be settled on the battlefield or by revolution that reverses the established social order. Some of that may happen, but the divine intervention Psalm 80 pleads for will happen modestly, quietly, in a stable behind a crowded Bethlehem inn as a child is born. Wonder of wonders! The shining face of God for which we hope and long and pray will come in the tiny face of a newborn.” [1]
Wonder of wonders! Miracle of miracles! Impossible things are happening every day. There are wonderful, miraculous, impossible things to come. Just you wait.
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[1] John M. Buchanan, “Fourth Sunday in Advent” in Preaching God’s Transforming Justice: Year C, 26-30.