Christmas Eve
Narrative 4 BFC 2017
Luke 1:46-55
December 24,
2017
What song are you singing
tonight? What lyric poetry gives
definition to your life? I know Sophia
and I regularly ride to Sunday worship listening to Kelly Clarkson’s “Love So
Soft” or Cake’s “Short Skirt, Long Jacket.”
We like to car jam and we’re quite embarrassing once we get
rocking. Or maybe the song you are
singing tonight has a holiday flare, something that puts you in the mood, has
you ready for tonight’s Christmas Eve or tomorrow’s Christmas Day. Away in a manger? Joy to the world? O come, all ye faithful? Darn hymnal writers. Changing all the words.
Tonight, before us, the
first Scripture read, was the song of a young Jewish girl, Mary of
Nazareth. The song is one deep within
the memory of the Jewish people, similar to the one the Jewish matriarch, Hannahm
sang.[1]
In a gloss of the Bible,
prophets appear as future predictors. We
are told in some traditions of Christian faith that they arrive on the scene to
tell us of the coming of the Messiah, the Second Coming, the rapture. In a deeper read, however, prophets are
truth-tellers. They see an alternative
reality, a deeper reality, and they know that if the present political and
economic practices continue, practices that contradict the heart of God, the
path to disaster is being made. And
these prophets have their ear to the ground.
These prophets know that slowly, surely, like an underground stream,
like a soft heartbeat, God is carving, piecing together, finding an alternative
way, sometimes with practices that seem nonsensical in the wider world. These practices are fundamental to bringing
about God’s hope, peace, justice, and joy for the flourishing of God’s good earth. These prophets poetically, boldly, with
developing clarity, call out the powers and principalities and their practices.[2]
Prophets
often call out with poetic language or odd public displays and re-enactments
because they know that the empire has bought off its wonks, its experts, to
provide facts and statistics repeated, repeated, and repeated to reinforce the
empire’s dominant, eternal status.
And
in the Bible, the prophet is often marked by a liturgical call and response. It begins with Moses. God calls, tells Moses his vocation, and
Moses responses, “Here am I.”
The angel Gabriel beams into
Nazareth and shares with the young girl Mary the vocation to which God calls
her. Mary responds with the classic faithful rejoinder of the prophet, “Here am
I.” Here am I. Immediately, we know who Mary is. She is a prophet. She is a truth-teller. In lyrical poetry, she sings and reveals to
the world God’s heart. Though we might
reference Mary as “tender and mild”[3] in the Christmas
hymn we sing with candlelight tonight, her song is a vision of radical
reversal. The arrogant and wealthy are
torn down. The lowly and poor are lifted
up.
As Gustavo Gutierrez wrote, “Any
exegesis [or interpretation] is fruitless that attempts to tone down what
Mary’s song tells us about preferential love of God for the lowly and the
abused, and about the transformation of history that God’s loving will
implies.”[4]
But I’m not sure we are
ready for that. I’m not sure we want to
catch that rhythm and then sing that song.
One of the most difficult struggles people of progressive faith often
have is “God.” We do not know what to do
with God. We have reduced God to a
romantic notion of a former time--when people were a little bit more open, hate
was not as strong, and, “Oh, do you remember that time when we raised that
whole ark of animals for the Heifer Project?”
We have no healthy fear of a God who may be working to change the world
as it is. Evangelical Christianity
created an expectation for all of us that worship would be entertainment and
have better production value.
Progressive Christianity made God for all of us into a romantic,
superstitious notion with no healthy fear of what God might be doing to
transform history on behalf of the poor.
We like the tune of Mary’s song, the Magnificat, but the words are
problematic. We dare not take the words
seriously. They are subversive.
• When the evangelical Anglican missionary Henry
Martyn went out to Calcutta as chaplain to the East India Company in 1805, he
was appalled to discover that the British
authorities had banned the recitation of the Magnificat at Evensong. On
the final day of British rule in India in 1947, Mahatma Gandhi, who was not a Christian, requested that this song be read in all
places where the British flag was being lowered.
• After Chilean dictator General
Augustine Pinochet came to power in a 1973 military coup, he banned the Magnificat as a
public prayer.
• The Magnificat’s prophetic speech was banned in the mid 1970s in Argentina after the Mothers of the
Disappeared used it to call for nonviolent resistance to the military junta.
• During the 1980s, the government
of Guatemala found the ideas raised by Mary’s proclamation of God’s
special concern for the poor to be so dangerous and revolutionary that the
government banned any public
recitation of Mary’s words.[5]
When rightly heard, the song of a young Jewish girl, Mary’s
song, the Magnificat, is considered subversive and dangerous to those who take
it seriously. But you have to believe
that God might just be at work to effect the transformation of history. Otherwise, we’ll dress Mary in blue, place
her next to Joseph in the nativity and have her reflecting and pondering in her
heart.
I want to suggest
something that might seem a little strange for what should be assumed in a
place of faith like ours. Tonight, I
want you to take God seriously. I want
you to begin believing that you are not alone.
That is one of the great imperial lies in our time, as people praise a
new tax reform proposal that will put money in their individual pockets. It is the lie we are told over and over--that
we are alone in this world. We are not
supposed to be piecing together the great Commonwealth or midwifing the great
transformation to God’s empire where the economically poor are seen as the people
of God’s own heart . . . God’s empire where people in
recovery are not immoral but symptoms of a societal tear that is ruptured, a
community wound that needs to be tended . . . God’s empire where the
good earth is given to us as a shared inheritance and a reflection of God’s
communal image . . . God’s empire where we belong to each
other and are to see one another as keeper and neighbor. “In some Native
American traditions, one of the harshest criticisms one can make about another
is to say, ‘You behave as if you have no relatives.’”[6] In
God’s empire, you know that relatives are everywhere.
You behave as if you have
no relatives, like you are self-made, in all of your arrogance and
self-congratulatory patriotism, in all of your aggrandizement of war and
militarism, as if the good earth were yours to exploit, use, and mine.
George Lakoff, linguistic
professor and author, recently wrote out the conservative moral hierarchy,
beginning with God above Humankind, Humankind above Nature, The Disciplined
(Strong) above The Undisciplined (Weak), The Rich above the Poor, going on and
on. If there is anything that should be
self-evident from Mary’s song, it is that Christmas is all about God
overthrowing this moral hierarchy. We
are not alone. Emmanuel. God is not above us. God is with us.
I know, for many of us,
it is difficult to have hope in this winter of moral values. But that is how it was for a young Jewish
woman from a backwater town in the Roman Empire. Remember as author Mary Hood said, that as
far as the eye can see, “There’s no difference between a bare tree and a dead
tree in the winter.”[7]
We are in a church season and perhaps a
time in our world where we must pay attention to the light in the midst of the
deep night and carefully stoke the embers of our communal souls, calling to
ourselves sisters and brothers, siblings and cousins, those people who look
nothing like our family, and caring for and tending the good earth even when
the sap is not running.
For those who have ears
to hear, Mary is once again lifting up her song. I pray it is the song you are singing tonight
and will be singing in all future nights so that tyrants and tax reform artists
will know that your soul is not up for sale.
I pray that the lyrical poetry of Mary’s song gives definition to all of
our lives. God is piecing together the
universe with thimble and thread. Your
square is required to make a quilt of extravagant welcome and love for the new
day that is seeking to be born on this evening.
I beg of you, on this evening, I want you to believe God is at
work.
Mary of Nazareth lifts her voice. Sing her song. Sing her song. Amen.
[1]This is a common practice among faith
storytellers. So that the present leader
might have authority, the name of an ancient leader or their language is
invoked. The Qur’an tells the story of
Mary invoking the story of the Muslim faith ancestor, Hagar: Then [Mary] conceived him; and withdrew with
him to a remote place. And the throes of childbirth drove her to the trunk of
a palm-tree. She said: Oh, would that I had died before this, and had been
a thing quite forgotten! So a voice came to her from beneath her: Grieve
not, surely thy Lord has provided a stream beneath thee. And shake
towards thee the trunk of the palm-tree, it will drop on thee fresh ripe dates.
So eat and drink and cool the eye.” —Qur'an 19:22-26
[2]“How
God Intervenes: Kenyatta Gilbert talks
with Walter Brueggemann about the prophetic call in 2018,” Sojourners, January 2018.
[3]“The song of Mary is the oldest Advent hymn. It is at
once the most passionate, the wildest, one might even say the most
revolutionary Advent hymn ever sung. This is not the gentle, tender,
dreamy Mary whom we sometimes see in paintings; this is the passionate,
surrendered, proud, enthusiastic Mary who speaks out here. . . . This song . .
. is a hard, strong, inexorable song about collapsing thrones and humbled
lords of this world, about the power of God and the powerlessness of
humankind.” —German theologian and pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer
[4]Elizabeth
Johnson, Truly
Our Sister: A Theology of Mary in the Communion of Saints, (Continuum, New York, 2003), p. 269.
[5]Ken
Sehested, “Signs of the Times,” Prayer
& politiks, December 13, 2017. http://www.prayerandpolitiks.org/signs-of-the-times/2017/12/13/news-views-notes-and-quotes.2968921
citing these sources: Bonnie Jensen,
“We Sing
Mary’s Song,” World and World; John Dear, Mary of Nazareth, Prophet of
Peace; Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, “Birthday
of Mary, the Mother of Jesus”; Craig Greenfield, “Here’s what you need to
know about the REAL war on Christmas” ; Dietrich Bonhoeffer, quote from The
Mystery of Holy Night, a compilation of Bonhoeffer’s sermons and writings
on Christmas; Dan Clendenin, “The Subversive Song of the Mother of God: Mary's
Magnificat,” in The Journey with Jesus: Notes to Myself
[6]Ken
Sehested, “Silent Night: An Advent
Poem,” Prayer & politiks,http://www.prayerandpolitiks.org/other-poems/2017/12/04/silent-night.2955702.
[7]Ibid.
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