39 Mary got up and hurried to a city in the Judean
highlands. 40 She entered Zechariah’s home and greeted Elizabeth. 41
When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb, and
Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. 42 With a loud voice she
blurted out, “God has blessed you above all women, and he has blessed the child
you carry. 43 Why do I have this honor, that the mother of my Lord
should come to me? 44 As soon as I heard your greeting, the baby in
my womb jumped for joy. 45 Happy is she who believed that the Lord
would fulfill the promises he made to her. ”
46Mary said,
“With all my heart I glorify the Lord!
47In the depths of who I am I rejoice in God my
savior.
48He has looked with favor on the low status of his
servant.
Look! From now on, everyone will consider me highly
favored
49because the mighty one has done great things for me.
Holy is his name.
50He shows mercy to everyone,
from one generation to the next,
who honors him as God.
51He has shown strength with his arm.
He has scattered those with arrogant thoughts and
proud inclinations.
52He has pulled the powerful down from their thrones
and lifted up the lowly.
53He has filled the hungry with good things
and sent the rich away empty-handed.
54He has come to the aid of his servant Israel,
remembering his mercy,
55just as he promised to our ancestors,
to Abraham and to Abraham’s descendants forever.”
56Mary stayed with
Elizabeth about three months, and then returned to her home.
Today is the Fourth Sunday of
Advent. It is December 23, tomorrow is
Christmas Eve, our time of waiting with pregnant expectation for the birth of
Jesus is almost over. You can feel the
excitement and the anticipation just building.
Our music is making the shift from the somber and penitential hymns of
Advent - and let’s be honest, the church has only a few good, singable Advent
hymns - to the more familiar and joyful music of Christmas; we’re almost there,
but not just quite.
While the culture around us has
been in the throes of Christmas, we in the church have resisted the urge to run
to the manger too quickly, taking the season of Advent to prepare. You know that when parents are preparing to
give birth or adopt a child, they take some time preparing room in their home
for the child. They get a room cleaned
out, fixed up, and furnished so that when the child comes, there will be a
place prepared. If you are a parent or a
grandparent, just think of the joy and excitement you felt in anticipation of
this child that was going to come into your life. Remember what that felt like, when you first
held that precious little person and looked them in their beautiful little scrunched-up
face and thought, “You’re finally here!
I have been waiting so long to meet you!”
During Advent, we in the church
want to do the same thing. We prepare
our hearts and our homes and our church for Jesus to be born within us yet
again. The season of Advent is a time
for us to pray and reflect, to get ready by preparing for hope, and peace, and
joy, and love to be born.
Just as parents start nesting
before the baby comes – you get the nursery set, you buy the car seat, you pack
the hospital bag, you baby-proof the house – so too do we need to make
preparations that are both just as serious and joyful to prepare for the coming
of Christ. My hope is that you have used
these four weeks of Advent to do just that - that you have opened your heart wide
to receive Jesus in your life, that you are saying with every fiber of your
being, “Welcome to my life, Lord Jesus!
Make yourself at home! I’m so
glad you’ve come to our world, I’m so glad you’ve come to me! I’ve been waiting so long to meet you!”
Parents always claim that the
moment they welcomed a child into their lives, their lives were changed forever
for the better. All of a sudden, their
values, their priorities, their resources, their energy were re-aligned around
the new life in their midst. The same is
true when we welcome Jesus into our lives - our lives are changed forever for
the better. All of a sudden, our values,
our priorities, our resources, our energy are re-aligned around Christ. When we welcome Christ, we are changed. A deep an indescribable joy plants itself
deep within us, that joy fills us up to overflowing, it can’t be contained but
bubbles out of us and touches others.
So it is for those who have Jesus
within them, as it was for Mary, the mother of our Lord, in the Scripture we
have read today.
Mary was one of the Hebrew people,
who had been preparing for the coming of the Messiah, the Christ, for
generations, and the song she sings in our Scripture today is the culmination
of all those centuries of expectant waiting, yearning, groaning for the
promises of God to be fulfilled. Like an
underground spring, you can feel the unbridled joy bubbling out of Mary as she
lifts her voice in song. As expectant
mothers before and since have said, “It’s time!”
Mary finds herself smack in the
middle of God’s plans to reconcile and redeem the world, and we who read this
story from the outside know that the child she bears is a gift not only to her,
but to the whole world.
In December, our Scripture
readings use the words of angels and relatives to describe Mary - blessed,
highly-favored, exalted among women, full of grace, and to be sure, she is all
of these things. We hold her up as a
model of faith, a paragon of virtue, an example to follow; after all, don’t we
pray for these things in our own lives?
“God, shine your favor upon me!”
“God, lift me up!” “God, bless
me!”
Friends, we need look no further
than the life of Mary, however, to realize that these are dangerous things to
pray, because God may actually answer our prayers and give us what we’ve asked
for! Bishop Will Willimon says that when
an angel appears to you, when you find out you’re blessed and favored by God,
if you’re smart, you’ll run the other direction as fast as you can, because
your life is about to change, and that doesn’t equal easier for you.
In short, God blesses us to be a
blessing to others. Receiving God’s
blessings didn’t make Mary’s life easier or more pleasant. She ended up an unmarried pregnant teenager. Mary was exalted by God, and she ended up the
source of gossip and finger-pointing and ridicule among her peers because of
her unbelievable and unlikely story about how she became pregnant in the first
place. Mary was full of grace, and it’s
a good thing, too, because she was going to need it throughout her life. It was going to take all the grace she had to
deal with a son said things that embarrassed the family in front of the
neighbors, who got in trouble with the law - she was going to need all the grace
she had as her heart broke watching him be executed as an enemy of the state.
When Mary was blessed, her life
didn’t suddenly become sunshine and roses.
What it did become, however, was a channel through which God was working
to redeem the whole world. And at the
end of the day, making herself available to God was more important than her
personal comfort.
So be careful and be clear about
what you’re asking from God. If you
really just want a comfortable life, don’t disguise that in psuedo-holy
language and ask for a blessing. Only
ask for blessing if you are willing to give it all up and put yourself in a
position where God can use you and shine through you.
Historically, the church has
focused its chatter on details about Mary like her age, or her virginity, or
her obedience, or any number of things that, in the grand scheme of things, are
sort of inconsequential. The thing that
should really stand out to us is that Mary just kept pointing to God. Her soul never stopped magnifying the Lord,
her life itself became a song of praise and worship and rejoicing before
God. Her life was full of ups and downs
- honestly, far more downs than ups, so far as I can tell - yet her soul just
kept right on magnifying the Lord. Her
soul - her heart, the center of her being - magnifies, multiplies, glorifies
the Lord.
Blessed is she among women. Blessed is the fruit of her womb, the child
who will usher in God’s reign and govern with hope, and peace, and joy, and
love, the child who is none other than God-come-to-Earth, Emmanuel,
God-with-us, Jesus the Christ, God’s only-begotten and most-beloved Son.
The early Greek-speaking
Christians called her Theotokos,
literally “God-bearer” or “Mother of God.”
Mary is bearing God’s very presence, in the person of Jesus, into the
world.
She is blessed, and we know by now
that didn’t make her life easy. Even by
the time she breaks into song in today’s reading, life is already hard for
her. It’s not going to get easier for
her, and yet she keeps right on singing God’s praises, her soul just continues
to magnify the Lord. Her joy is not tied
to her circumstances, indeed there is hardly anything in her circumstances,
from a worldly point of view, that would make her happy. Rather, her joy came from the presence of God
within her, and she anticipated the abundant life that child would bring to
all, the resurrection, even, of all that was dead and broken and destructive in
the world.
Mary sang because through the
child in her womb, God would be doing a new thing - toppling the mighty from
their thrones, humbling the proud, shaming the arrogant, filling the hungry
with good things.
Mary sang because she looked around
at her world - a world addicted to injustice and oppression and exploitation, a
world in which the wicked seem to prosper, where hopelessness, and hate, and
violence, and despair seemed to rule the day - and just as parents know that
their world is never going to be the same once their child is born, so too did
Mary catch a glimpse that through her
child, the whole world was about to
change.
Mary sang because God was setting
us free from ourselves, our own misguided devices, from our paths of
self-destruction; God was instead coming among us as one of us to redeem us and
set us in the path that leads to abundant life.
Mary sang because God would get
the last word - and the Word is Jesus.
Despite the circumstances of her
life and her world, dark and hopeless though it must have often seemed, Mary
kept singing. Today, we are invited to
join our voices with hers, to learn her song, to raise our voices in a song
that continues to glorify God in all circumstances, trusting that whatever
seems lost now will someday be redeemed.
We are called to sing her song because so many in our world desperately
need an encounter with the healing presence of God. In the words of Meister Eckart (1260-1327),
“We are all called to be mothers of God, for God is always waiting to be born.”
We have prepared for the coming of
Jesus through this season of Advent.
Christmas is almost upon us. It’s
almost time! May the birth of this child
bless us, maybe not as we expect, but most certainly as the world needs, for we
ourselves are pregnant with the promise of God’s glory. So it was for Mary, and she hasn’t stopped
singing since.
Mary sang, “My soul
magnifies the Lord! With all my heart I
glorify the Lord! In the depths of who I
am, I rejoice in God my savior!” But,
she’s not meant to sing alone. Mary’s song
isn’t a solo performance, it’s a song for all God’s people. Jesus is coming, and when he does, let’s be
singing a song that’s music to his ears.
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