Sermon, Sunday, 20 December 2009

Luke 1:39-45 & 46-55

If you look at the four gospels, you’ll notice that each of them has an account of John the Baptist baptizing Jesus as a central turning point in their accounts.  Mark starts his gospel out with this event without any prelude or lead up. 

If you read the other three gospels until that point, you get a mini-version of what is to come.  John’s prelude is other worldly in many ways:  The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it.  (John 1:5 NRSV)  Matthew spends a lot of time fixing Jesus firmly within the Jewish tradition yet with an eye to speaking the gospel outside which are evidenced by his immediate listing of Jesus’ genealogy back to Abraham through David as well as the visit to the young savior Jesus by three mysterious, outsider Magi.  You know, as you read through Matthew, that he’s going to return to those themes of Jesus’ Jewishness and the spreading of the gospel outside.

But Luke, if you read his prologue, gives a very different story and is the only one to include the accounts we heard this morning of women, particularly of Mary and Elizabeth’s reunion and the extraordinary song that Mary sings as she comes to fully understand what is really going on.  Only Luke puts an emphasis on the women, silencing Elizabeth’s husband, Zachariah, and he keeps Joseph waiting in the wings for a few more verses.  Only Luke recounts Mary’s incredible song that is at once intensely personal as well as political to the extreme.  You know Luke’s gospel is going to be filled with good things.

Thus it is good for us to stop on this final Sunday before we reach Christmas and ponder with Mary and Elizabeth just what is happening.  This fourth Sunday in Advent when we’re almost but not quite there.  This final time of worship before the attention is all on a baby in a box of straw.  We stop for a breath in the frenetic pace that leads up to the 25th of December and listen to Elizabeth and Mary, almost touching heaven but remaining firmly planted here on earth.

First we have Elizabeth, surprised by her own pregnancy with a child who would grow up to be John the Baptist.  Both she and fetus John know something is up as soon as they hear Mary’s voice.  They don’t even have to see her; her voice is sufficient for them to start rejoicing about the approach, the advent if you will, of Mary and the particularly special treasure she is carrying.  With John leaping in the womb, Elizabeth has little choice but to greet Mary with words usually reserved for royalty and those who will bear royalty, which of course is what is going on. 

We’re not told why Mary decides to pay a visit to her kinswoman, Elizabeth, but something has drawn her there, perhaps inevitably; perhaps Mary herself doesn’t even know why she’s there.  Mary has already had her encounter with the angel Gabriel and is full of the knowledge that she’s been asked to perform a special duty and, more so, has accepted that duty.  Within, she knows, she is carrying one who is going to change all of history.  She knows this as only a mother can know it.

And that leads us to the second part of our scripture from Luke.  There, safe with Elizabeth, unfettered by having to act a certain way or do certain things as she would have to do back in Nazareth, she sings her heart out; singing as only an expectant mother can do about how her child is going to change everything and will turn the status quo upside down.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes about this singing that Mary does:

This song of Mary is the oldest Advent hymn.  It is at once the most passionate, the wildest, and 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 has none of the sweet, nostalgic, or even playful tones of some of our Christmas carols.  It is, instead, a hard, strong, inexorable song about collapsing thrones and humbled lords of this world, about the power and God and the powerlessness of humankind.  These are the tones of the women prophets of the Old Testament that now come to life in Mary’s mouth.  (The Mystery of Holy Night, p. 6)

And so, before we charge headlong into this event we call Christmas, before we stop in a chilly stable beneath a starry sky, before we sing the carols that we have sung for ages, we stop and consider the words that burst forth from a young, pregnant woman’s lips over two thousand years ago.  We consider how she saw the topsy-turvy world into which her child would be born and how he would bring into being his own topsy-turvy world and we realize that the song is song as strongly today as it ever has been.  The powerful still need to be brought down from their thrones and the lowly should be uplifted.  There are hungry ones in our midst who need their fill of good things while the proud could indeed use some scattering.

Mary’s song, sung out in safety in Elizabeth’s home echoes and echoes through the ages to us today.  It’s message is not diminished, indeed, if you listen closely enough, you will hear it just before you perceive the beating of angels’ wings.

Easter Sunday!

Responding to Resurrection
Mark 16:1-8

[I'm not preaching a sermon today. Instead, I'm doing an interactive sermon with the congregation. Here are some thoughts and questions for you to ponder.]

Mark's gospel ends abruptly. We read that Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, & Salome came to the tomb where Jesus had been laid following his crucifixion just days before and when they got there the stone was rolled away. A "young man" told them that Jesus was not there; that he had risen. He then instructed the women to go and tell the disciples. (Never mind that the women were "disciples.") According to Mark, they ran away in fear and told no one. And that's where Mark's gospel ends; in fear and silence. (There are two other endings of Mark's gospel that have the resurrected Jesus making an appearance and the women telling the story. But this abrupt, fearful, silent ending is considered to be Mark's original ending; it is older and more verified.)

Why do you suppose the women were afraid? Of what were they afraid? Of whom? Why did Mark leave us hanging there? What were the women feeling? How did those feelings affect their actions?

Given Mark's ending, the telling of the story is left to us, the reader. So we join with those of the Christian faith throughout the centuries who have read Mark's gospel, ending in fear and silence. How are we to pick up the instruction of the young man to "go, tell"? Is it our charge now to go forth and tell the story of resurrection, rebirth, & renewal? How can we tell the story? St. Francis is quoted as saying, "Always preach the gospel. Use words when necessary." How can we tell the story of resurrection without words? How do we overcome our fear & amazement and cajole ourselves into telling the story to those around us, our fellow 21st century dwellers? What story would you tell about resurrection?

Many blessings to you on this Easter 2009! Tell the story...take up the charge to the two Marys and Salome.

© Gerry Brague, 12 April 2009
Picture © Allen Foster, 10 April 2009
San Francisco, CA

21 December 2008, Advent 4

The painting to the right has been a favorite of mine for many years. I took the picture that you see at the Philadelphia Museum of Art on a visit there a few years ago, when I just happened upon the painting, after having really loved it for years previously. It's The Annunciation and was painted by Henry Ossawa Tanner in 1898. I hope you enjoy it as much as I have. A better image of the painting is here: Tanner Annunciation.
Now on with this week's sermon. May the remainder of your Advent be one of discovery and joy.
Gerry

Luke 1:47-55, Luke 1:26-38 (Click the link to read the scriptures.)

There is something about the two passages from Luke that are set as today’s lectionary readings that really get to me. I am attracted to them in ways that I cannot fully explain, catapulting all of it into the realm of the spiritual, as far as I’m concerned. And I’m not really alone, I know; many artists and musicians throughout the ages have tried to express the mystery of this event between an angel and a young woman.

But why are we all drawn to this event that non-believers around us would scoff at and call yet more evidence of superstitious foolery? Why does a story which occurred thousands of years ago, the actual factual truth of which is really of no importance to me, still make some of us catch our breaths and stop for a moment to reflect about how the divine and creation interact? Why this fascination in art and music and imagination with a story that’s no more than a few lines of an interchange and the subsequent song that young girl sang in response?

I think that part of it is because it is such an unusual tale; it’s a narrative we’re not used to, not even in the bible. If you consider the other miraculous births that we have from scripture, they all involve old women…elderly women…barren women…women well past their childbearing years: Sarah laughing her head off at the thought of her and Abraham adding a nursery after all these years; Hannah, barren and childless, dedicating her baby Samuel to service to God in grateful response to the birth. Even Elizabeth, whose tale of bearing a son in her later years is told just prior to and intertwined with the words we heard this morning in Luke, precedes Mary in becoming pregnant by only six months.

But in those six months, that tiny space of time when you think of the entire scope of human history, God does a new thing, a different thing, a radical thing. God chooses a young woman to bear the Messiah, God’s anointed one. God selects a woman who is at the beginning of her childbearing years to be the mother of this most important gift.

Of course, women had little if any status or position in society throughout the many histories of humankind. What status they did have came most often because of the man to whom they were married or perhaps due to their age or sometimes due to what we would call their family of origin. So maybe these other women, the Sarahs and Hannahs and Elizabeths, did have some degree of standing, just a bit of stature in the community.

But Mary? She had none of that it seems. She wasn’t yet married. And the man she was going to marry in fact was just a carpenter—likely he wasn’t a landholder and he wasn’t a priest or any of the other vocations that carry a certain amount of standing.

And Mary was young. We all probably remember hearing for the first time someone saying that Mary was probably a teenager. I haven’t done the research myself so I have to rely on the scholarship of others as likely you do too. But it does make sense, doesn’t it, that Mary would be just a teenager? Thinking about it in market terms, if you have a commodity, such as a daughter, you’re going to make use of her by arranging a marriage to her while she’s young, while she can still provide the future husband, the buyer, with offspring, wouldn’t you? Plus you may want to get her out of your household as early as you can so you don’t have to provide for her anymore. So it seems to be logical that Mary was indeed young.

So we have a young woman, a lowly servant, as she describes herself; one without stature or standing or connections. That’s quite different from those who had been granted miraculous pregnancies up to this point. And that’s the point: this radical choice proclaims to the world that God is choosing a new route; this birth will be completely different from all the others. God is entering humanity from the very bottom of society, where God is needed the most.

And Luke, our gospel writer this morning, gets that. Luke’s gospel, Luke’s good news, is all about God’s preference for the poor; Luke’s emphasis is on Jesus’ ministry to the lowest of the low. And this emphasis doesn’t start with the angels announcing to those smelly societal outcasts, shepherds, though that certainly is another big hint from Luke about what we’re going to hear from his recounting of a miraculous birth and life and ministry. Luke gets to his emphasis on the poor earlier than those shepherds abiding in their field. He hits us with it in the care that he shows in presenting Mary’s story, especially in contrast to Elizabeth’s. Elizabeth’s tale, as wonderful as it is, is the way things used to be done. And her son, John the Baptist? Well, we know where he fits in here. For two week’s in a row this Advent, if you’ve been paying attention, we heard two different gospel writers recount him saying that he’s just not worthy to even lace up the sandals of the one who would grow up under Mary’s care. The former things are past and gone and over; the new things, God’s new-fangled ways, are what are important here.

This is indeed radical stuff. Don’t believe any of the prosperity gospel preachers who are so popular who preach that if God loves you, you will be rewarded with material goods and wealth. Luke would hear none of that and Luke tells us that Jesus wouldn’t either. Luke reminds us that Jesus not only came for the least among us, but indeed came from that very place of poverty himself in the fact that it was Mary who bore him.

Listen to Mary. Hear her story and let it fascinate and move you too. Give into any urgings that you might have to just sit with those few words of interchange between Mary and Gabriel, who was probably wondering, as he spoke aloud those words of comfort and surprise, just what God was up to this time. Let Mary’s story live in our culture. And watch for new ways in which God continues to act as you end your Advent preparations and at last celebrate that miraculous gift.