December-21-2008-click-here-to-play
Preached by Winton Boyd on December 21
Luke 1 (text at end of sermon)
In our recent Tuesday night prayer class, we had a session on prayer and music. We shared music and talked about music’s role in our lives. I was sharing with the group that one time early in our marriage; Tammy and I were driving to her grandmother’s farm in southwestern North Dakota. In the cassette player was a tape of Ladysmith Black Mambazo. I was struck as we drove through the rolling, golden wheat fields of that remote region in this country about the juxtaposition of South African freedom music and Midwest farming. I wondered if music such as this had ever been played on these plains. An arrogant thought perhaps. But I also thought there was something fitting about music from one end of the world being played at the other end – survivor music in among survivor farmers and ranchers.
Maybe music has always had the power to do just that – bring disparate worlds together. What is otherwise foreign and distant often connects with our hearts through the sounds and rhythms of music.
In some ways, these Christmas’ stories are like ancient songs. These texts present us with an ancient version of bringing disparate worlds together. Power and poverty. Imperial expectation and lowly women. A God called the “Mighty One” in the shadow of the human ruler called “divine.”
As we reflect on this text, we remember that primarily it is a statement of faith. Less about history and hardly an attempt to describe an actual event, it is a statement about the beginning of our faith, and one of the key characters in its emergence as a vital force within the ancient world. We read it not to learn history, although that is intriguing, but to learn faith for our own day.
As a song, or story with with powerful symbols that feed our faith, William O’Brien writes in The Progressive Christian, that this story about ‘peace on earth’ is filled with powerful and potent clues to the real nature of the emerging faith community following Jesus. The language of the story is a continuous signal and reminder of the gap between the imperial power of Caesar and the story of Emmanuel – God coming to us.
Phrases from Luke – good news, peace on earth, a savior is born – are all “brashly plundered” from the Roman imperial lexicon. What was obvious to the original hearer of the story may be missed by us. Good News referred in the Roman world to a military victory or the birth of a new emperor. The emperor himself was the ‘savior of the world’ or a ‘son of God’ who brings peace and prosperity. A ‘host’ as in angels, was a military term for a formal guard that might accompany the emperor. Here in this story the “audience” is not the socially powerful but all kinds of socially marginalized people – shepherd, young virgins, old barren women.
In that light, we look at the actions of Mary upon hearing this news, in today’s text. Mary questions how this could be, is told that she should check things out with her old and barren cousin Elizabeth. In the verses between last week’s “annunciation” and this week’s “magnificat”, Mary visits to Elizabeth. The text says that she (Mary) set out to a small town in the Judean hill country to visit Elizabeth and upon arrival, Elizabeth’s child leaps for joy (in utero).
What about that journey from Nazareth – through the hills? We know that just to get out of Nazareth is a climb, as the town is surrounded on all sides by rugged hills. It doesn’t indicate if she traveled alone, or Joseph is with her. It is such a contrast to the “host” that would announce the arrival of the ‘real savior’ Caesar that it seems ridiculous.
Two women – a young virgin and a old barren woman, off it some country town in the back hills of Galilee. Two women who in the their own families and cultures would have been likely to have been scorned, who both have these literally unbelievable secrets, who live in towns that as Garrison Keilor says, “time forgot”: it is to these two that the announcement of the Christ’s coming is made.
Two women in a town not far from the imperial power by today’s standards, but light-years away in their own lives. Two women with no status. Someday, about 30 years later, their sons (Jesus and John the Baptist) would claim center stage in a mostly unknown power struggle with an outlier governor in the Roman Empire – but at the point of this story, they have no power or no influence.
It is at this point in our reflection, that we have stop and remind ourselves that the story of this birth was written AFTER Jesus life and death and resurrection. The details are about a young child being born, but the emphasis is on the life changing nature of his adult ministry. It is Luke’s attempt to remind us of the incredible contrasts within this “coming” of God’s and what they really mean – then and now.
Of all the contrasts/juxtapositions in this story, two stand out for us today.
First of all, holiness is the companion of life, of intimacy, of pregnancy, of childbirth, of family. Holiness is at home with the unromantic and painful aspects of all of these. Holiness invites both men and women into sensing divine presence in the first stirrings, the fetal gymnastics, the soiled diapers, the tired nights, the teething cries, the not knowing what to do. Human business is holy business – and frequently messy business.
Elizabeth and Mary are not to be locked away in obscurity. These sisters do not need male approval to matter. Their place is not back stage. In the real dramas of change throughout the world and its history they have leading roles, though often by choice or by constraint not those which govern the male syntax. Beyond obscurity, beyond abuse – and Elizabeth and Mary would have had their fill of it in their time – Elizabeth and Mary are people, whose identity is to be defined ultimately not by their gender or ethnicity, but by their faith which embraces and does not deny the specificities of their personhood. Mary, as we read last week, responded to the angel “let it be to me as it you have said. Elizabeth’s very name means “dedicated to God.” In a way that defies their place in society, they had a deep sense of knowing, a deep seeded belief that they were blessed among women. While it took a bit of convincing to help them see that indeed God was using them, once they grabbed a hold of that reality – they never let go, never diminished what God might do with and through them.
Secondly, Christmas is a reminder that powerful and potent faith is usually lived at the margins.
More than most years, we are aware this Christmas itself is fascinating as a place of marginalization. Even in a tough retail climate, Jesus is marginalized by Santa Claus – that we all know.
Profit and exploitation marginalizes good news for the poor. Many of us felt marginalized in the national discussion about the economy – either because we or our loved ones have lost jobs, or because we know that most of those who bilked others (including us and our children and grandchildren) will not suffer significantly from their greed and malice? How many of us fight for social issues and causes that feel like marginal issues in local and national politics – Obama and change notwithstanding. All of this can make the Magnificat sound a little quaint.
In this very passage, as this young woman praises God, she declares that God has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; and has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty. These words set the stage for Jesus’ later words in Luke 14 when he lays out his own mission to free the captives, give sight to the blind, feed the hungry, and initiate a Jubilee of economic redistribution.
Christmas faith recognizes that if God can trust Mary and Elizabeth to hold the banner of faith against the tyranny of Rome, God can trust us to speak truth to power, to live with joy at the social and political margins of our day. If Mary’s song of praise, sung in some remote hovel in the countryside of Galilee can make its way to our ears, so too can the song of love and praise that we sing bring light and truth and hope and power to our household and our world.
And so we pray that God would encourage and strengthen us in the very mess we live in right now. We pray that we could see how where we are right now can be the way God comes.
And we pray that this ‘good news’ would embolden us to speak from the margins to the real nature of peace, and the real nature of joy and love. Amen
Luke 1:46ff
46 And Mary said, “My soul magnifies the Lord,
47 and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
48 for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
49 for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name.
50 His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation.
51 He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
52 He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly;
53 he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.
54 He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy,
55 according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever.”
