Moving with Mary’s Song
Sunday, December 23
Fourth Sunday in Advent
Focus Theme
Moving with Mary’s Song
Weekly Prayer
O Shepherd of Israel, you gently support the one who is with child and call forth the Lamb who dances in the womb. Stir our hearts to recognize Christ’s coming, as Elizabeth recognized his presence in Mary’s radiant obedience to your desire, and open our souls to receive the one who came to love your flock. Amen.
Focus Scripture
Luke 1:39-45, (46-55)
In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.”
(And Mary said, “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. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name. His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty. He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever.”)
All readings for this Sunday
Micah 5:2-5a
Luke 1:46b-55 or Psalm 80:1-7
Hebrews 10:5-10
Luke 1:39-45 [46-55]
Focus Questions
1. What would you sing in a Magnificat of your own?
2. How well do the Elizabeth and Mary generations interact in your community?
3. How does it make a difference that you listen for God’s word in community rather than alone?
4. Are there, in your community, “Marys, Elizabeths, Zechariahs and Josephs” who long to connect more deeply with the people around them?
5. What would an “economy of generosity” look like in our nation?
Reflection by Kate Huey
We’ve just heard three weeks of preaching from Jesus and John the Baptist, those prophets out of the wilderness, about world-shaking events, part judgment, part exhortation to get our lives turned around in preparation for what is to come. In this week’s unique situation, we have four unlikely prophets gathered not in the wilderness but on the front step of Elizabeth’s home, two of them not even born yet (and John is already able to acknowledge the One who is greater). The other two prophets are women, women with names and stories, women with voices and something to say, or in Mary’s case, something to sing. Women and babies: we’re definitely not at the top of the heap, here, especially not when there’s an actual priest in the house, Zechariah, a professional, licensed and learned, knows-what-he’s-doing expert in matters of faith. Ironically, though, Zechariah is the very one in this scene without a voice, literally, since he’s been struck speechless during his own angelic visit. The stage is set this week, then, for us to have the rare opportunity to hear from the women and children for a change. And what a change they dream of!
Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan have written a very helpful book, The First Christmas, which offers an excellent lens through which we might read the familiar and beloved Nativity stories. Matthew and Luke each provide what the authors call an “overture” to their Gospel in which important themes in that Gospel are first heard. Borg and Crossan describe each evangelist’s “overture as microcosm to his gospel as macrocosm.” In Luke’s Gospel, his emphasis on women, the marginalized, and the Holy Spirit is evident in the birth narratives, including the one we read this week. In this short passage, the prophetic words of these two women, filled with the Holy Spirit, give voice to those who are lowly, like the shepherds to whom the angels will announce the birth of Jesus.
In The Road to Daybreak: A Spiritual Journey, Henri Nouwen reflects on the encounter between Elizabeth and Mary. This meditation from a priest is worthy of the best feminist theology, which draws our attention to the easily missed things that are happening to and with the “little ones” in our Scripture texts. It may be true that the mighty are brought down, and the great promises of old are kept, but in the meantime, on a dusty road, on a well-swept doorstep, two women meet to share the ancient, womanly experience of being with child.
Advent is indeed a time of waiting, a time pregnant with hope. On this Fourth Sunday of Advent, Mary and Elizabeth could be seen as two ordinary, pregnant women in the most extraordinary time and circumstances, on the brink of greatness but first tending to their relationship with each other and with God. Motherhood is daunting to every woman, especially the first time around, and these two women have found themselves pregnant under most unusual and unexpected terms, one past the age to conceive, and the other a virgin. So, like women in every place and time, they spend time together, keeping each other company, learning and praying and perhaps laughing together, as they face first-time childbirth and motherhood.
The new life promised in Mary’s pregnancy, of course, is the focus of Luke’s story, as it fulfills promises to all humankind, but one wonders how these two humble women must have felt about what was happening in their own lives. Nouwen says, “Who could ever understand? Who could ever believe it? Who could ever let it happen? But Mary says, ‘Let it happen to me’, and she immediately realizes that only Elizabeth will be able to affirm her ‘yes.’ For three months Mary and Elizabeth live together and encourage each other to truly accept the motherhood given to them.” As Nouwen reads this story, neither woman had to wait alone for the extraordinary events to unfold, slowly, as pregnancies do: “They could wait together and thus deepen in each other their faith in God, for whom nothing is impossible. Thus, God’s most radical intervention into history was listened to and received in community.”
Watching the promises unfold, together
In this Advent season, we are keenly aware that we wait in community for the promises of God to unfold in our lives. Here, in community, we hold each other up when one of us needs encouragement or support. We help one another search for meaning, rejoice with one another, walk alongside each other. Just as Elizabeth must have listened to Mary, and helped her prepare for what was to come (at least, as much as such a marvelous thing might be prepared for), we help one another work things out. Sometimes, we just sit in the dark quiet and wait, together, trusting in the promises of God, listening for a word from the Stillspeaking God. And in the midst of our waiting, as Paul, writing from prison, encouraged the Philippians; as Hannah and Mary sang God’s praise; and as Elizabeth welcomed her beloved cousin and companion, we rejoice, our hearts dancing within us. That is the way that we move with Mary’s song.
There is a generational theme underneath this story, too, and the Reverend Otis Moss III, senior pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, has offered this encounter between women of two generations as a powerful teaching moment. In an interview on http://www.ucc.org/vitality/ready-set-grow/video/otis-moss.html, Reverend Moss calls the meeting between Mary and Elizabeth “a Pentecostal moment,” a moment filled with the Holy Spirit, as an older generation makes space for the younger, as Mary shadows her older cousin in order to learn, as Elizabeth includes Mary in imagining the future they share and welcomes her fresh ideas even as they share the core treasure of faith. Reverend Moss exhorts congregations to value the creativity of the youth in our churches and count on the older, more experienced generations to shape boundaries for that creativity, for it is through the elders that the narrative of what God has done is passed down.
What is happening underneath this story?
Barbara Brown Taylor uses her religious imagination to re-create this scene in ways that are poignantly human and full of insights that we might miss if we rush too quickly through this wonderful little story, if we don’t let our imaginations run free. No one knows with certainty, of course, why Mary sets out immediately on a long and undoubtedly dangerous trip to see her relative, Elizabeth. I grew up hearing that Mary had parents, Joachim and Anna (another woman who conceived in old age), but they never appear in the stories in the Bible. We’re left to wonder, and to imagine, with Taylor, that perhaps a frightened Mary looks for reassurance from Elizabeth, an older and trustworthy person in her life.
Would we say today that Elizabeth is a kind of mother-figure to Mary, or a spiritual mentor? Mary seems to need both, and perhaps a protective figure as well. In her sermon, “Singing Ahead of Time,” Taylor evokes Mary’s plight, alone and disadvantaged in the system: “What she does not have is a sonogram, or a husband, or an affidavit from the Holy Spirit that says, ‘The child really is mine. Now leave the poor girl alone.'” But the young girl doesn’t have to explain her situation to Elizabeth, or ask her questions in search of answers, or even to ask for acceptance. When Mary sees her much older cousin, Taylor imagines, she sees a “gorgeous” woman, “so full of life that it is hard to see much beyond her joy” (in her sermon, “Magnificat”). Is it any surprise, then, that in her relief and joy, Mary begins to sing?
Trouble and beauty all in one song
Mary’s song is music that comes from deep within her, perhaps, we would say today, from her DNA. On that doorstep, she sings for Elizabeth and both of their babies, and maybe for the bewildered priest in the background, watching the whole scene. This inexperienced and sheltered girl sings about God’s blessings in her life, and about God’s vision of a world made right. Perhaps she got carried away: “She is no longer singing the song; the song is singing her,” Taylor writes, and this teenager is transformed into “an articulate radical, an astonished prophet singing about a world in which the last have become first and the first, last” (“Magnificat”). Taylor says that Mary sings not just for Elizabeth and Zechariah but “for every son and daughter who thought God has forgotten the promise to be with them forever, to love them forever, to give them fresh and endless life” (“Singing Ahead of Time”).
We linger for a moment on the meaning of Mary’s song about God filling the hungry with good things and sending the rich away empty. Scholars agree that this wasn’t just a “My God is stronger than your god” song. It wasn’t a call to violent uprising or bloody vengeance, either, then or now, even though it was seen as “subversive”–and banned–by the authorities in Guatemala in the 1980’s (John Ortberg, in The Christian Century, December 15, 2009, drawing on the work of Scott McKnight). I remember hearing years ago that in the Latin American base communities, the people read the Bible and heard in the Good News that God did not want their children to die of hunger and disease, or their husbands and sons to be disappeared, or their daughters lost in poverty. All sorts of “trouble” can start when the people get their hands on the Bible, it seems. Maybe the governmental authorities in Guatemala were just paying more attention than most of us do, as we sing our hymns. What, for example, do our Christmas carols really mean, when they sing about Jesus and the coming rule of God’s righteousness? What is all of that about?
A deep and desperate hope
Let’s compare, for example, “God’s righteousness” with the way things were in Mary’s time. We can better understand the deep, desperate hope of this young girl if we look more closely at her setting, in the time of Herod the Great. John Ortberg describes the burdensome taxes of Herod’s reign that built the temple and supported Herod’s lifestyle but also cost the poor their land, concentrating wealth at the very top and leaving the masses impoverished. Herod was so brutal and so unpopular that “[h]e knew people would party when he died, so he supposedly had 70 elite Jewish citizens imprisoned with orders that they be executed on the day of his death so that there would be tears in Israel.” Ortberg goes on to wonder with a religious imagination of his own whether Jesus himself learned “his material”–about the poor, the hungry and the meek being blessed–from his mother, who must have taught him that God dreamed of a very different world, one of justice and healing and peace, that would surely come to be (The Christian Century 12-15-09).
It’s true that things aren’t as they should be in our age, either, even without a Herod “the Great.” While there are proportionately many more people with enough (and more than enough) to live comfortably than there were in Mary’s time, the church is still called to proclaim “God’s challenge to good order,” as Charles Campbell reminds us, wherever that “order” requires or results in the suffering of the poor. As long as millions of children go to bed hungry or homeless or afraid each night, there are tables to be turned, if we mean what we sing in this year’s Christmas carols. Sharon Ringe describes the righting of things, when all of God’s children will have what they need: The rich and the hungry, the lowly and the powerful “represent economic and political opposites, and as a result of God’s action, they are said to move toward a common middle ground.” Ringe’s claim for Mary’s time is our dream, too, when “an economy marked by scarcity and competition is replaced by an economy of generosity in which all have enough.”
Daring to sing the Magnificat
Wouldn’t it be something if our Christmas dreaming led us to begin the new year with a new vision for our economy, one of generosity and abundance? After all, Mary’s song is “not intended to raise violent resistance or to drive the wealthy and powerful to despair,” Stephen Cooper writes. Instead, he says that the wealthy should “deal with their wealth in a way that brings them into a positive relation with the poor in order to partake in the same promised salvation.” Even this kind of conversion would take considerable courage. Richard Ascough asks, “I wonder whether we would dare to sing the Magnificat today. What would it mean?
We are now in the last week of Advent, on the verge of another Christmas celebration, learning from Mary, Fred Craddock says, to “stand expectantly at hope’s window.” Some of us look back longingly on Christmases past, hoping to re-create better, more secure, less troubled times; no wonder so many folks are grieving or depressed or lonely during the holiday season. The church’s call, then, is to tell the ancient story again, to comfort, inspire and just be with those who need help in looking forward in hope. Michael S. Bennett asks, “How many Marys and Elizabeths (or Zechariahs and Josephs) might there be sitting in the pews, awaiting an opportunity to connect more deeply with the people around them? How many long to connect their small story with the larger stories of God?”
In the season of Advent, our waiting is accompani
d by beautiful and treasured music. The Reverend Dr. Jo Hudson, senior pastor of Cathedral of Hope UCC in Dallas, writes evocatively in her church’s daily devotional of the power of Christmas carols to “speak to the deep places of my wandering from God and my wondering about God.” Perhaps that’s why this music is so beloved, so imprinted on our hearts and souls as Mary’s own song was part of who she was. In a world that longs for a gentle peace, a generous sharing of the goods of the earth, a time of quiet joy and healing, we stand by that window with Mary, expectant with hope and filled to the brim with joy because our tenses have been jumbled, too, and we have seen in every moment of tender love and forgiveness the promise of what is yet to come. We sing with Mary, and we move with her song.
A preaching version of this commentary can be found on http://www.ucc.org/worship/samuel/december-23-2012.html
For further reflection
Simone Weil, 20th century
“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
Meister Eckart, 14th century
“We are all meant to be mothers of God.”
Eleanor Roosevelt, 20th century
“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.”
Mother Teresa, 20th century
“One filled with joy preaches without preaching.”
Cheyenne saying
“A people is never defeated until the hearts of the women are on the ground.”
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