The feelings and emotions that change stirs in your heart and mind are expected and understandable. You’re sad, anxious; disappointed, angry. Change challenges truths and understandings once regarded as absolute and unquestionable. Long-held assumptions start to feel flimsy and paper-thin. Time-honored bedrock suddenly feels like all-enveloping quicksand. Like it or not – mostly not, you’ve been swept up in viral events beyond your control. And no one is quite sure what to make of the disruption to plans and routines, to attitudes and mindsets.
As I suggested to you last Sunday, sometimes we enjoy novelty, a change of pace, something different. And in those moments we find reasons for joy and celebration amid the warm glow of it all. But when it comes to our thinking, we prefer consistent, predictable belief, and tend not to entertain easily other perspectives. Yet when the mind is flexibly open, you hold fast certain beliefs while remaining open to new information.
Dealing with disruption and confusion – and processing it all with an open heart and mind – is the frustrating, uncomfortable place where Mary finds herself in our Advent Scripture lessons from the Gospel of Luke. An angel delivered the surprising news that, like her much-older cousin Elizabeth, the unwed, teen-age Mary will bear a child who will come of age as Son of the Most High.
With equal measures of solid faith and sure trepidation, Mary accepts the challenging role that God has called her to play in the drama of salvation. Her heart and mind are open to new possibilities while holding fast to steadfast belief in the goodness and mercy of God. But the puzzle of what the Lord has in mind for her and her son is still missing a few pieces. So, Mary packs her bag and sets off to spend some time with Elizabeth in hopes of making faithful sense of it all. And what Mary discovers on her extended visit is breathtaking: God has called her to tend and nurture the divine dreams that God has woven into her.
Listen, now, for the Word that God has spoken, midway through the first chapter of Luke’s Gospel, as the evangelist continues setting the stage for the birth of Jesus. And Mary said,
In the Christian tradition, Mary’s song of praise is known as The Magnificat – Latin for “magnifies,” echoing the lilting start of Mary’s lyric hymn, “My soul magnifies the Lord.” By all indications, the recent cosmic events into which Mary has been swept have taught her a thing or two about God and about what God has in mind for her and the world around her.
Mary is painfully aware of her lowly social status in her time and culture. As a woman, she is a piece of property as much as anything, belonging first to a father who saw her as something less valuable than a son, and then later to a husband who could divorce her at will for good reason or no reason whatsoever – an act that she herself could never initiate, no matter how unfaithfully terribly her husband treated her.
Even worse for her place in the pecking order of her day, the bucolic Mary isn’t a member of a big-city, A-list family nor does she enjoy any prospects for making her mark on the world or ever being remembered for anything special beyond a generation or two – if even that!
Yet, miraculously and startlingly, God visits her with news so stunning, so jaw-dropping, that it’ll take at least the rest of her mortal days to sort it all out and make sense of it all. For now, though, that reversal of circumstances, that lifting up of the lowly, that exaltation of the humble, tells Mary that this is precisely how God works.
Maybe the Holy Spirit re-opens Mary’s heart and mind to the Old Testament stories she heard as a youngster:
Time-honored tales like God selecting the aging Abram and Sarai to begin a covenant of great blessing with their family and generations to come. Perhaps Mary recalls well-spun yarns about God choosing the younger, less-favored Jacob over his more highly regarded older brother Esau. Mary might see herself in head-scratching parables about God making holy use of a stuttering Moses, a vulnerable Ruth, and a baby of the scandalous family of David. Mary surely finds joy-filled assurance in God’s choice to favor the feckless Israelites with their fickle faith over the impressive Egyptians with their towering pyramids and mighty Pharoah.
It’s not so far-fetched to suggest that Mary remembers and takes her cues from the Israelite women who came long before her and whose Exodus story we’ve also been following this Advent. With the Lord’s help, God’s people have escaped the determined hunt of a ferocious, Egyptian army and reached safety of the eastern shore of the Red Sea, where Moses lifts his song of praise – singing praise to the Lord for his glorious triumph of tossing Egyptian horses and riders into the sea, and declaring the strength and might of this God of salvation. The Israelite praise then continues with singing and dancing:
The prophet Miriam, Aaron’s sister, took a tambourine in her hand, and all the women went out after her with tambourines and with dancing. And Miriam sang to them: “Sing to the LORD, for he has triumphed gloriously; horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.” (Exodus 15:20-21)
Perchance Mary remembers all these things: Miriam’s song of thanksgiving, the generational legacy of Abraham and Sarah, and all those other surprising-yet-assuring Old Testament stories. And in her remembrance, Mary connects all those dots with a bold, black line that leads straight to the child growing in her womb – a child so important that even her older cousin Elizabeth refers to him as “my Lord.” Mary – little Mary, meek and mild, is bearing the Savior of the nations!
And as she ponders and treasures everything that’s happened, as she eagerly anticipates and foretells everything that’s yet to come, Mary connects a few more dots to see that those who for now in this world fancy themselves as captains of industry and masters of the universe – those with enough money to force others to kowtow to their every whim in one spectacle after another of sheer self-aggrandizement – these supposedly wealthy and powerful folks, Mary now knows, will be on the losing side of salvation history if, at the end of the cosmic day, their worldly treasure and power are their only comforts in life and in death.
The rich and famous appear to have gained the whole world, Mary might have speculated in anticipation of biting words that her own son will one day speak (Matthew 16:26). But if along the way they forfeit their own souls, the high and mighty will be knocked down a peg or two and sent packing, empty as a pocket and hopeless as it gets. “What happens to me,” Mary as much as sings in her sudden song, “is a sign of what one day will happen to all Creation.”
Mary gets it in no uncertain terms, and Mary sees it with crystal clarity: God unconditionally loves the poor, graciously favors the disenfranchised, easily spots those whom society makes invisible and totally ignores. And under the kingdom reign of that same God’s Son, all the wrongs that produce the perpetually poor and perennially marginalized will be righted. All the wrinkles of injustice with which people now suffer will be ironed out in a righteousness that landscapes the whole earth. Mary sees it clear as day, and her heart swells with joy!
It’s easy to be joyless in this world. It’s simple and almost effortless.
You can put others down. You can dwell in hopelessness. You can even hop on social media and lob out lies and negativity from the comfort of your own home. Even better, when you lack joy, you don’t have to do a blessed thing constructive or otherwise. You can just languish in your misery and joylessness. It’s a whole lot harder to rejoice, because joy is hard. That sounds like a contradiction in terms. After all, joy is joy, and joy should be easy, right?
No, not really. Because real joy is something much deeper.
Joy is something that takes root, and joy is something that remains deeply rooted – even when the winds are howling and laying waste to everything else around you. Joy is resistance against the powers of sin and evil, and that’s particularly true on the worst of days. All too often we think of joy as a big, bodacious emotion. But joy, like a seed, starts small, and small acts cultivate joy in ourselves that spreads to others.
Mary’s Magnificat – the magnified rejoicing of God in Mary’s soul – recalls the cultivation of an ancestral promise, and Mary bears witness – in and with her very body – to a God of promise who always makes good on his Word. With the help and direction of the Holy Spirit, we are called to proclaim those same faithful promises of a faithful God to this world and its people, as the Lord writes new chapters in the story of his joyful promises in and through you and me for the hope and healing of a broken and fearful world.
That means you and I must sally forth into the world – in joy – and act upon the joy-filled dreams that God holds for the future of all Creation.
As we take those courageous steps into unknown territories, more of our friends and neighbors come to believe that the way things are now – from hardship and oppression, to fear to brokenness –definitely are not the ways that things are going to remain if God has anything to say about it. And God surely does!
Perhaps we’ll look back on all the disruption and change our times have wrought upon our lives and see how those interruptions and disappointments actually afforded us the time and space to spy opportunities for joining Mary in magnifying the glory, grace and goodness of God in thought, word and deed. Maybe fervent prayer also demands the stillness of quiet listening for answers, even if we don’t understand – or simply don’t want to understand.
After all, it’s OK to mess with tradition if, in the end, the change somehow or other reveals the heavenly dreams of resurrection and reconciliation that God has woven into our hearts.
Pastor Grant M. VanderVelden shared this message on the Fourth Sunday of Advent, December 1, 2024, at First Presbyterian Church in Waukon, Iowa, USA. Scholarship, commentary, and reflection by Wilda Gafney, Lisle Gwinn Garrity, Emily C. Heath, B. Janet Hibbs, Scott Hoezee, and Anthony Rostain inform the message. Previous sermons in this Advent series are available at FirstPresWaukon.com/sermons/. The video of women reciting The Magnificat is by Christian Aid. For more than 70 years, the non-profit organization has been standing with the poorest of our neighbors, working in 37 countries with people of all faiths and none for dignity, equality and justice.