• Luke 1:39-55 •
In our Good Friday service here at St Gregory’s, we read a section from TS Eliot’s poem “East Coker” that says, “Wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith — But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.”
This is our season of waiting. The coming Jesus is so close. He is so close that he is, as the Apostle Paul says, in our hearts and on our lips.
God is just dying to be born, ready, full of promise.
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We are now at the end of Advent. We have been waiting, and we have been hearing about God’s promises, and we have been hoping that What Mary said is true: that God is faithful and mindful of her love.
Mary’s song that we just heard is a lot to hear. It’s a lot to believe. God has promised to fill up the hungry, but people still need to be fed. God has promised to bring the princes down, but they are still sitting.
And yet we hope. We hope because hope is like love: You can’t prove it, there’s no way of controlling it. We just have to trust that it’s true.
Advent is the time of year that we remember what it looks like when God says “I have a desire for you, a love, a dream.
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Some have said that the whole of Jesus life, death, and resurrection is what it looks like for God to love the world. If that is so, then what we heard today is the beginning of the love story.
Mary had just gotten the news that she has been asked to be the mother of the messiah, th
e great savior that she and her people had been waiting for, through occupation and exile, all these many generations. The Angel Gabriel who came to he
r told her everything she might be expected to hear about the savior: he will take up the throne of the great King David. He will reign forever and never be overthrown. This is what messiahs are for.
Mary agrees, and when she does, it is as if at the moment she does so, everything changes. Suddenly what she has signed up for is something completely different than she had expected.
Suddenly, this fourteen-year old peasant girl, who, it should be mentioned, lives in the middle of nowhere, in a town nobody has heard of, has fallen in love with God.
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Sometimes we like to talk about the books that Mary would have known as the Bible as though they’re full of nothing but doom and gloom, punishment, judgement, and fire. But if you had asked Mary, she would have told you one thing about what the Scriptures contained: God’s loving-kindness for God’s people.
And now, suddenly, to begin the God’s work in the world, Mary is given a glimpse of what that loving-kindness looks like, and she just has to tell somebody. She’s filled up with it, and it comes spilling out: a picture of what it looks like for God to be out of her mind in love with the Creation.
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I can’t help but think that there must have been times for Mary and her people to believe in that love. When the Roman soldiers were setting up camp in their towns. When the tax collectors were taking so much that there wasn’t enough to buy food to eat. When teenage girls without husbands got pregnant, and then had to hide out for fear of getting stoned to death by the authorities. It would be hard to see just exactly how it is that God’s love is working here.
What the Magnificat, Mary’s Song of the Love of God tells us is exactly what God always does and we always forget: God is always doing things that we couldn’t expect. God’s love is always pointing further than we can see.
I have a feeling that when the Angel Gabriel came to Mary and told her all about the savior to come, she was expecting the dashing military type who would clean out the Romans and set things right, like they used to be. That’s certainly the picture that Gabriel paints for her. But as soon as she’s agreed, she knows better than what she’s just heard: Mary’s Song is about God doing everything backwards, everything upside-down, all of our millions of ways of making each other less human thrown out, nailed up, and let go. There will be no military conquest, there will be no throne of David. There will only be mercy. Mary’s song is about what all love is about: Mary’s song is about dying and being given life, and about being truly human.
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The scandalous thing about the Christian message is that we claim to have experienced God as having become a human being. Not a superman, or an angel, but a real man born from a real woman, with blood and tears and laughter. A real human being, standing on the ground.
As Paul said a couple of weeks ago, if there’s one thing we know from the Bible about who God is beside the fact that God’s all crazy in love with us, it’s that God’s desire shapes our reality. The things that God wants for the world are being worked out right now. And more than anything else, what God wants for people is that they should be people. Not pretend-people, or empowered-people, or humble-people, but people: real, true, fleshly human beings.
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And so, Mary’s Song is about God’s love; it’s about God working in history to love people to life, to make them back into people. We go to great lengths to turn each other and ourselves into something other than human. But the whole point of Mary’s Song is that these things really, really don’t matter to God.
You are not the pile of money that you’ve stacked up around yourself, it says. You’re a person.
You’re not the pit that you’ve been thrown in by a system that has forgotten you. You’re actually a real human being.
You are not the student loan debt that you’re afraid you’ll never repay, and you’re not the house that you just had to sell. You’re not the ex-boyfriend that you’re still missing, and you’re not the college that you didn’t get into.
You are not problem to be solved, you’re a person. You are not illegal, you’re beloved. You are not a failure, you’re about to be resurrected.
God’s love is the kind of love that changes everything. It even changes death into life.
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There is an old medieval folktale that tells that, when Gabriel came to visit Mary to invite her to join in God’s story of the Incarnation and the saving of the world, she was there weaving weaving Jesus’ burial shroud. She already knew what was to come, and she was getting ready.
This is not the image that we ordinarily have of Mary at Christmastime. This is not the Mary sitting peacefully by the manger, or looking pretty for the painter when hearing the news that soon she’s going to be in a family way.
This is not the way that we ordinarily think about Christmas, about the Incarnation, about the love of God. God does not will death, and yet the medievals were not just morbidly fascinated by death. They were surrounded by it. I would imagine that death was much less interesting to your average Christian in the middle ages than it is for us, still sad, still tragic, but not at all unfamiliar.
And so, it’s just a folktale, but it points to something very important that is easy to miss at this time of year, when we think the focus is supposed to be on joy: that Christmas points to Good Friday. Sometimes people here at St Gregory’s say that there are only two season in the liturgy: East and Easter is coming. What we forget when we say that, though, is that Easter never comes before Good Friday: the resurrection never comes before the crucifixion. You have to die before you can be resurrected. Like all love, the Love of God that we celebrate at Christmastime, goes through suffering into life. And, Christmas is about the beginnings of love.
You are suffering now, says God, and I am with you. You are dying now, and I am waiting to breathe you back to life. You have died, and now you are alive.