Fourth Sunday of Advent
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I am going to read Luke 1:46-55 this morning. But we have Luke 1 26-55 in view.
In that section we have the angel Gabriel appearing to Mary to tell her she will carry and give birth to Jesus.
We see Mary’s reaction of shock (which is understandable) and then we see her embrace her vocation.
Then we see her go to her cousin Elizabeth’s house who is also pregnant, carrying John the Baptist.
We see Elizabeth affirm Mary and speak blessing over her.
Then we have Mary’s song, the Magnificat, which reads like this.
Luke 1:46–55 (NIV84)
46 And Mary said: “My soul glorifies the Lord 47 and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, 48 for he has been mindful of the humble state of his servant. From now on all generations will call me blessed, 49 for the Mighty One has done great things for me— holy is his name. 50 His mercy extends to those who fear him, from generation to generation. 51 He has performed mighty deeds with his arm; he has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts. 52 He has brought down rulers from their thrones but has lifted up the humble. 53 He has filled the hungry with good things but has sent the rich away empty. 54 He has helped his servant Israel, remembering to be merciful 55 to Abraham and his descendants forever, even as he said to our fathers.”
This is one of those passages where I would happily defer to women in the body.
It may surprise you to learn that I have never carried, birthed, or nursed a child.
Nor have I been part of an oppressed people or lived in deep poverty.
And so it would be foolish of me to assume that I GET every nuance of this story.
I will try to pull out some themes for us but I’d encourage you to meditate on this passage beyond this morning.
In many ways I think this passage is a perfect synthesis of what we’ve been talking about for a month or so
That is ..
The redemptive work of God in the world touches down in REAL LIFE and changes everything
It is a CONCRETE hope in God’s promise to set the world right
AND the Christian life is about learning to live expectantly
believing that God has begun that work and that it will eventually be fully realized
A great deal of discussion about Mary’s Magnificat focuses on the political nature of it, and rightly so
If you don’t sugar coat it or over spiritualize it, it’s controversial
Consider what she says
God scatters the prideful
God brings down the powerful and rich
And God lifts up the lowly, the hungry, and the humble
If a politician said these things, let’s just say they would not be universally embraced
Does this mean God is a Bernie Sanders voter?
No. We’ve discussed how the kingdom doesn’t align neatly with either of America’s political parties.
The gospel is political, but not partisan.
Does this mean that all individuals with money and status are evil, inherently MRE evil than those without money or status and thus deserving eternal condemnation?
No.
It’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom.
Money and power are dangerous idols.
But with God all things are possible.
What it DOES mean is that the inequality, the exploitation, the outright oppression that we see in our world is unjust in God’s eyes.
There’s really no debating it.
It’s so consistently talked about in the scriptures it’s unavoidable.
We talked about it in previous weeks in the Isaiah passages.
We talked about it in discussion of the Sermon on the Mount.
God is as clear about this as he is about anything, he hates selfish pride and greed that leads to inequality and suffering.
Lifting up the poor and bringing the marginalized to the feast is central to his restoration of all things.
But that’s not actually where I want us to focus this morning.
I would like us to sit with this mind-blowing truth that the hope of the world, God himself, grew in the womb of a teenage Jewish girl.
The good news is not some general, theoretical philosophy of life.
The good news is that a real God has acted in real ways in history, giving real hope that he will act again to shape our future.
And the nature of his activity in history shows us that God is active in the lowly, forgotten places
And that the seed of his renewal is planted and growing within the messy realities of life
And so we are called to wait with hopeful anticipation for the arrival of its fulfillment
I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the movie Children of Men.
It was made in 2006
It’s an action movie (viewer discretion advised) set in 2027 in a world where humanity has become infertile for decades.
With this comes a global depression, with humanity on the brink of extinction, leading to an increasingly violent world.
The movie centers on a women who becomes pregnant, offering, in a very real sense, the only hope for humanity.
The title of the novel it’s based on comes from the King James version of Psalm 90:3
Thou turnest man to destruction; and sayest, Return, ye children of men.
It is a movie DRIPPING with biblical symbolism and you can see why.
One fragile child, growing in the womb of a young woman in the midst of a violent world, representing the only hope for humankind
Here in Luke 1, an angel appears to Mary and tells her that she will carry the hope of the world inside her.
What an unbelievable burden, privilege, do we even have a word for it?
How do you process such a thing?
Mary embraces her calling.
And while theologically we do not believe that Mary is near equal to Jesus or that we ought to pray to her
We should not make the opposite error of diminishing her
she is an absolute hero of the faith.
She played an utterly unique and impossibly heavy role in God’s redemptive plan and she deserves honor and respect.
One of the things to consider is JUST HOW real and messy and fragile human pregnancy is
This is significant because we talk about God entering into reality but I’m not sure there’s a more raw picture of that than entering through the messiness of human birth
Christmas stories obviously sanitize it all
We sing, “the little Lord Jesus no crying he makes”
He cried, he was a real baby.
And Mary was probably near insanity at 2 in the morning like every other mother in the history of humankind.
“God with us” becomes so much more profound when its not just a theological concept but a real child experiencing the reality of the human condition.
Can you imagine seeing Mary’s growing baby bump and realizing God was coming to us?
Can you imagine looking at a sleeping infant and trying to comprehend he was God in our midst?
Let that stir you imagination, your wonder, and your affection
Another thing to consider is just how symbolic this is for the overall pattern of the Christian life.
New life emerged in Mary that she did not produce herself.
No human produced it.
Yet she became a creative partner, to say the least, in the growth of that new life.
New life that only God can bring is a central theme in the Bible.
So much so that the in the early church baptismal fonts were often shaped like a cross or a circle, which was meant to symbolize a womb.
How symbolic to emerge again from a womb into new life in Christ.
We are being made new, born again, through a work that God is doing
A work that we simply embrace and participate in
As we consider all this we must also remember that at this point in the narrative the child hasn’t been born yet.
This is still an Advent story, not yet a Christmas one.
Mary is obviously not passive here, but she is waiting.
There is an already / not yet aspect to pregnancy.
Providing an incredible picture of hopeful anticipation.
It’s symbolic of Christian waiting for the kingdom to be fulfilled.
The seed of new life has taken root in us and begun to grow.
We can wait because we know something is happening.
And the longing for the arrival is almost unbearable.
So we prepare, we anticipate, we begin to build our lives around the arrival.
How do we wait well.
How do we live with hopeful anticipation.
And one of the things this story shows us, though often overlooked, is how much we need each other to live this way.
For this I’ll defer to the words of Henri Nouwen and an article I posted on Faithlife a few weeks ago.
He says this
I find the meeting of these two women very moving, because Elizabeth and Mary came together and enabled each other to wait. Mary’s visit made Elizabeth aware of the what she was waiting for. The child leapt for joy in her. Mary affirmed Elizabeth’s waiting. And then Elizabeth said to Mary, “Blessed is she who believed that the promise made her by the Lord would be fulfilled.” And Mary responded, “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord” (Luke 1:45-46). She burst into joy herself. These two women created space for each other to wait. They affirmed for each other that something was happening that was worth waiting for.
I think that is the model of the Christian community. It is a community of support, celebration, and affirmation in which we can lift up what has already begun in us. The visit of Elizabeth and Mary is one of the Bible’s most beautiful expressions of what it means to form community, to be together, gathered around a promise, affirming that something is really happening.