You are welcome to use parts of this sermon, but if you do, please attribute them properly!
In
my home, when I was growing up, we were not allowed to play Christmas carols
until Thanksgiving. However, once
Thanksgiving morning rolled around, before the turkey was in the oven, before
the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade had ended and the football games had begun,
Christmas carols blared out of our stereo, and the familiar melodies and words
did not cease to dominate the airwaves at our house until December 26th.
Carols
and songs are a very old part of Advent and Christmas preparations. They are so
ancient, in fact, that we can trace the very first one all the way back to
Mary, the mother of Jesus.
As
the story goes, an angel named Gabriel had recently snuck into the kitchen and
told the young woman who was standing at the sink doing the dinner dishes that
she would become pregnant in a strange and mysterious way that neither Mary nor
her soon-to-be-husband, Joseph, would ever fully understand.
And
lo, it came to pass, just as the angel had said. Joseph was not too happy about it, and his
relationship with Mary was undoubtedly strained for a while until he had a
dream that set it all right again.
Mary,
for her part, was completely discombobulated by it all. Her mood, like that of pregnant women before
and since, would swing from weepy and demanding of pickles and ice cream at all
hours of the day and night to excited and joy-filled by the mere thought of a
child growing inside of her – whoever the father was.
We
do not know what whim of pregnancy caused Mary to take off one afternoon and
skip town. Eventually though, she found
herself not all that far away knocking at the door of her cousin, Elizabeth.
I
have often wondered if Mary’s spontaneous departure from her own village was
because the two women were drawn together in some mysterious way. After all, they had found themselves in a
similar circumstance – both mysteriously touched by God – both of them pregnant
- Mary so young and unmarried and Elizabeth feeling like a senior citizen most
of the time – and barren to boot.
At
any rate, Elizabeth welcomed Mary, which was a grand gesture on her part. After all, as Episcopal writer, Judith Jones
notes, “By greeting Mary
with honor, Elizabeth overturns social expectations. Mary is an unmarried
pregnant woman. She might expect social judgment, shame, even ostracism from
her older kinswoman.
Yet Elizabeth
knows from her own experience the cost of being shamed and excluded. In her
culture a woman’s primary purpose in life was to bear children, so as an
elderly infertile wife she had endured a lifetime of being treated as a
failure…..She sees beyond the shamefulness of Mary’s
situation to the reality of God’s love at work even among those whom society
rejects and excludes”. Surely both women
sensed that God was coming. The time was
now. Salvation – the ultimate healing -
was at hand.
When
Elizabeth answered the door in full-on maternity garb, the child inside her, we
are told, “leapt in her womb.” That
first flutter of a kick reminded Elizabeth once again that, yes, God does work
in wondrous if incomprehensible ways.
For
her part, Mary, who was just beginning to show, burst into song. That was quite unlike her as well. After all, we never hear of her doing it
again in any of the Gospel narratives.
And so it was that the first Christmas carol – Advent song really – came
to be.
We
call it Mary’s Song (or, if we are high brow enough to quote the Latin, it is
“The Magnificat”), and, come to think of it, we really do not sing it very much
these days in any language. At least, it
is certainly not one of the old standby carols.
But
– not to worry - because we always try to live a bit on the edge around here in
our church, and so we will sing not just one, but two, versions of it this
morning – one after this sermon and the other as we end worship.
But
that begs the question: Why is it that
Mary’s song has not become one of the old beloved yuletide
chestnuts? It could scarcely be the
melody because we do not know what tune came out of Mary’s mouth that afternoon
millennia ago. Therefore, it must be
something about the words.
I
think we tend to push Mary’s Song aside during this season of Advent for a
couple of reasons. First, its words do not fit our compulsion to make these
weeks before Christmas blissfully happy even as we build up the balance on our
credit cards with all of our gift purchasing and wear ourselves ragged with
entertaining, decorating, and baking.
The words of Mary’s Song do not fit our image of what we think we should
be focusing on in our preparations for Christmas – making our days both merry
and bright. Instead the words confront
us with a vision of God’s dream for the world, a dream that can make us feel
mighty uncomfortable.
Second,
the words of Mary’s Song challenge our counterweight to the busyness of the
Advent season as well. They do not fit
in with our sometime quest for quietude and meditation, our need to remove
ourselves from the red and green rat race that characterizes the season. The words are too, well, too harsh and
disagreeable and not the least bit peaceful in tone – even implying that we
ought to be a bit more activist than we are comfortable with.
What
in heaven’s name then is Mary singing about that we would prefer to shelve it
rather than sing it joyfully and loudly as she did? When everything else is stripped away and
particularly in this excerpt from her song that we read this morning, she is
singing about change. She is singing
about transformation. She is singing about reversal and the world
being about to turn. She is singing
about toppling the rich and lifting up the poor. She is singing about feeding the hungry even
if it means that the affluent have to do things differently. She is singing about something that, in the
end, we cannot stop because it is of God, and with God all things are possible.
She is singing with immeasurable joy, and yet we are fearful of her words,
choosing instead to bury them away in the midst of all that red and green.
In
short, Mary’s Song announces God’s revolution – as scary a word as that
is. Mary’s Song is God’s core document -
a sacred philosophy or holy vision set to music. It is God’s charter that, as Christians, we
know in our heart of hearts is the only way that the peace of God’s kingdom
will come. And her song is not just
directed to first century Palestine.
Mary knows that, and so she can sing that these fundamental principles
are for all generations – down through the ages even to us.
As
Lutheran pastor Edward Marquart writes, “God totally changes the order of things. God takes that which
is on the bottom; and God turn everything upside down, and puts the bottom on
top and the top on the bottom. God revolutionizes the way we think, the way we act, and the
way we live. Before God’s revolution, we human beings were impressed with
money, power, status and education. We were impressed with beauty, bucks and
brains. But God revolutionizes all of that; God totally changes all of that;
God turns it upside down. The poor are put on the top; the rich are
put on the bottom. It is a revolution; God’s revolution.
(Mary’s song) clearly tells us of God’s compassion for the
economically poor; and when God’s Spirit gets inside of Christians, we too have
a renewed compassion and action for the poor. Our hearts (as well as
our heads) are turned upside down.”
Church of
Scotland pastor William Barclay calls Mary’s Song “a bombshell” filled with
”revolutionary terror”. Methodist bishop
Marshall Gilmore claims it “fosters revolutionaries
in our churches,” but adds that “the Church needs the leaven of
discontent.” Mary’s Song is a bold song
of liberation, liberation from all those things (Bah! Humbug!) that Ebenezer Scrooge centered his
life around.
And
the fact that Mary (of all people) is singing this song that signals that God
is itching for a change is evidence in and of itself that things should not –
and will not – be as they have always been. At the outset of her song, as blogger Joe Davis wrote, “Mary describes herself as God’s humble,
lowly servant. She had very little power as a young virgin in the world she
inhabited….When Mary says she’s “lowly,” she’s not just making a pretty
metaphor – she is actually low. It’s ridiculous, completely preposterous, for
someone like to her to even imagine singing a song like
this. But God had remembered her.”
Mary
sings of God’s promises, the ones God made way back when to Abraham. Her song embodies the hope of Israel for
hundreds of years. She sings of God’s
mercy for the poor and the marginalized. She sings that God is not partial to the
rich, the powerful, or the proud – the ones most likely to substitute their
wealth and power and pride for the Holy One.
She sings of what will happen when we build walls, break up families,
fan the flames of hate and fear.
It
is interesting to me that if you were to read all of Mary’s Song, you would
find that it ends rather abruptly, and the Gospel writer hastily finishes up
this chapter of his narrative by telling us that Mary stayed with Elizabeth for
the next three months. It is almost as if the Gospel writer knew
that, although Mary might have stopped singing, her song did not end. There were more stanzas to be written, and
they would be written in the years and millennia yet to come.
Some
verses would even be left for us to write.
You see, the song is still not over.
We, as Christians, are called to continue to sing it. Each one of us is part of the song. And the only way we can sing it is by
modeling what Jesus did in his own ministry - lifting up the lowly, writing
graffiti message of peace and love rather than fear and hate, building bridges
and not walls, filling the bellies of the hungry, and welcoming home the
marginalized. And the reason we must sing Mary’s Song all these thousands of
years later is because it is the only way that peace –real peace - will ever
happen on this earth. The politicians
may not think so, but we as Christians do.
Canadian
blogger Jennifer Henry raises these difficult questions for us to consider:
“What does it mean for us, people with privileges, securities that the lowly
will be lifted up? Good news for the poor, but what does it mean for the
comfortable? What does generous welcome and radical inclusion mean for
those of us who are comfortable with (our) way of doing things?’
She
goes on to note: “That’s the thing about
the turning, there’s an open, unsettling, free falling time, when the old comes
apart and the new has not quite established its place, when the temptation to
hold on, to hold back, is there almost as much as the momentum towards the
unknown future. How do we live into the turning, or even throw our weight
forward and help God’s wheel to turn? How do we put our hopes in others’
dream, confident that God’s liberation is ultimately good for us all? How
do we work towards a future we cannot see, we just must believe?”
That
is the great challenge of Advent, you know:
To understand that salvation is less about us personally and much more
about the transformation of the world – the whole world - right now. To be open to the significant changes that
must occur if such a restoration is to become a reality. To do what we have to
do to heal – and be healed, our families and communities, neighbors and nations
mended and reconciled.
Advent
is about the invitation that we receive year after year to better know God, to
participate in the present-yet-always-future kingdom of God, and to always –
always – work for justice and peace. Mary’s
Song is about the fact that God has not given up on us but rather has come to
be in the muck and mess we have made of the world and to show us the way to
begin to straighten it all out. Mary’s
Song is about understanding that redemption comes not as a result of the wealth
we may accumulate, often at the expense of others. Redemption comes from realizing the joy and
love that comes from sharing in God’s abundance.
As
UCC pastor Kate Matthews wrote, “We hear this text not only in a time mired in
conflict, discouragement and war but in a new season at the beginning of a new
church year: Advent, the time of waiting, and so much more. While the world
around us ends the year hoping for one more burst of consumer spending and
waiting for annual reports on profits, so in need of healing, fearful of what
next year could bring, the church has already stepped into a new time, daring
to "hope and wait" for something much better than the news is
reporting. We begin this new time remembering who is really in charge of
everything, and setting our hearts on being part of that plan. As beautiful as
these verses are, they paint a very clear picture: God is the One who brings this dream to
reality, but there's work for us to do, too, in re-shaping the instruments of
war, violence, hatred and destruction into instruments of peace and provision
for all.”
So
- this Advent, I pray that you will not bury Mary’s Song under the trappings of
the season. In fact, I pray that you
will hang on its every word. I pray that
you will sing the words of Mary’s Song and ask yourself what in your life needs
to turn and change and be transformed. I
pray that every phrase will begin to haunt you because Mary’s Song is so
relevant. It is a song for now. It is a song for our time. It is a song that the world desperately needs
to hear. It is a song of revolution and
a song of hope. It is a song to remind
us that, in the end, Christmas is not about gifts and decorated trees and quiet
times of meditation. It is about “ lifting up the ‘lowly,’ filling ‘the hungry with
good things’ and ‘sending the rich away empty.’
Bah! Humbug!? No – not now, not here. Mary’s Song: It is truly THE song of the
season.
By Rev. Nancy Foran, Raymond Village Community Church U.C.C., Raymond, Maine
By Rev. Nancy Foran, Raymond Village Community Church U.C.C., Raymond, Maine
