Advent IV: “GOD’S UNSTOPPABLE PURPOSE INVITES!”

December 18th, 2005
Gary Harder

Text:     Luke 1:26-38, 47-55
Introduction
Beware of Christmas. Beware! Luke one should come with a warning label. “Warning! The following scenes are explosive, radical, revolutionary.” It is a dangerous, subversive text. But we in our western world are more into “cute”, nice feelings, sentiment, nostalgia. We mostly read this text as an innocuous, feel good baby story.

Let us beware. Let us beware. There is a kind of dangerous restlessness loosed upon the world with incarnation, an unwillingness to stay within proper boundaries and definitions. Nothing will stay fixed and frozen anymore because God is on the move in more ways than we can understand or ever imagine. And many people won’t like it one bit. A whole lot of folk didn’t like it one bit. Many very powerful people resisted the new life brought by Jesus with all their power. There is a dangerous, surging power let loose on the earth with the birth of that baby, a new life that unsettles and disrupts and challenges so many of our categories: rich-poor, dead-alive, insider-outsider, sinner-saint, male-female, transcendent-immanent. Ah, a dangerous restlessness emanates from that stable in Bethlehem, and none of the Herod’s or Pilate’s of the world can stop it or control it or bend it to their will. (Some ideas and phrases taken from Brueggemann, “The Threat of Life”, p. 152).

This is not, of course, how our western world celebrates Christmas. We have tamed down the story, emasculated it of any real threat to us, sentimentalized it into a nice baby story. We have over-read and over-heard the story until it is sanitized of any of its disruptive force.

This particular incarnation was a deeply scandalous thing, turning political ideologies on their ear, and dismantling religious pieties. As Crawford says, “This incarnated one would go about healing wounds, changing lives, bringing life to the dead, making the crippled whole, giving bad news to societies so-called leaders, and to the marginalized, the down-and-outers, the nobodies, he offered good news.” (Church Worship, Oct. 97, p.5)

Who wants that kind of life? Certainly not our campaigning politicians.

The Texts
Our two texts today from Luke 1, the “Annunciation” and the “Magnificat”, are so very familiar to us, and yet in many ways seem so incomprehensible. They bring together the personal and the political in ways that blur all of our neat categories. The bring together a “macroscopic” view of God’s work in the world, together with a “microscopic” view of God’s work in one person and one family. The story of incarnation is so very political. And it is so very personal.

Writes Sheila Klassen-Wiebe in our Conference provided resources, “Mary, like Isaiah and the psalmist, sings about God’s power to establish justice on the earth, lifting up the lowly and overturning the powerful. But now the sweep of God’s action suddenly shifts. The camera which so far has offered panoramic views of God’s justice, wrath, and mercy, suddenly zeroes in on one tiny corner of Galilee. The focus is on one girl who is perplexed by an angel’s gracious words and incomprehensible promises.” (Leader, Fall 2005, p.26).

Luke 1:26-38
The first text, the so called “annunciation” text, seems at first glance not to have the bite of sharply radical edge to it – though it does have the immediate suspicion of radical scandal about it. A normal kind of teenager in Nazareth, a mostly out of the way village in Galilee, is living there minding her own business, head full of dreams about a young man who has set her heart racing, when a new dream which is almost a nightmare, shatters her sweet romantic longings. Gabriel is suddenly there saying, “Hi Mary, how’s it going. The Lord is with you. You’re someone special you know.”

Gabriel is going to have to work on his entries because Mary is terrified. But then who wouldn’t be scared seeing an angel. Gabriel calms her down, saying, “Relax Mary, God has been gracious to you, and you’re going to get pregnant and have a son that you’re going to name Jesus, and that son is going to be someone totally unique, the Son of God, the king of Israel whose reign will go on for ever and ever.

Well, that news is both far more political than Mary has ever even imagined, and far more personal than she could ever have wanted. Poor Mary, she’s not only terrified, but now she is totally embarrassed too. “That’s impossible even if you are an angel. Why, we don’t even live together. I’m still a virgin.”

But Gabriel has an answer for that too. “Calm down, Mary, your son will be called the Son of God for good reason. The Holy Spirit will have something to do with this conception.

Which is all going to be hard to explain to Joseph. It’s one thing to have an angel explain it to you, but when it’s your fiancee you need to explain it too …but that’s another part of the story.

Gabriel isn’t quite finished yet. There is something about Mary’s relative Elizabeth yet. She too has been visited by the angel. She has already become pregnant in an inconceivable (pardon the pun) circumstance. She is simply too old to get pregnant. Isn’t it strange that the two conceptions announced by the angel are to women who are not supposed to be pregnant, women in fact kind of at the very margins of community life and respectability? One is too old, and being childless, has lost any status in her community which she may have once had. And the other is a teenager, a woman who didn’t count for much either, it being only marriage and children which gave you a place of recognition.

The Movie “Water”
This week Lydia and I saw the movie “Water”, it being highly recommended to me by my colleagues at our Mennonite Pastor’s Fellowship lunch last Wednesday.

The movie is beautifully shot, powerful and disturbing. A nine year old girl in India, a child bride, becomes a widow when her husband dies. And then life for her is over. She can never marry again, and only marriage gives one status and a place in the community. Her father places her, much against her will, in a “widows house”, where, together with other widows whose life is over, she is meant to live out the rest of her life in poverty, misery and abuse. But she is one feisty nine year old. The other widows have accepted their lot. It is the will of Krishna. To think otherwise is sin. After all, their 2000 year old Scriptures so proclaim. But this nine year old asks such outrageous questions. Like, “Where is the widower’s house?” Total outrage follows.

There are little hints along the way that their 2000 year old scriptures say more than only this particular prescription for widows. And hints that there are other ways of interpreting the texts. But what is clear is that these scriptures are used to maintain patriarchal dominance and to totally subjugate women who are widows. But a nine year old child bride opens windows to other possibilities, and the whole world of the widows house is turned upside down.

The films tells us, at the end, that there are some 34,000,000 Indian widows still living that way today. And the film maker, Deepa Mehta, has received death threats for making the film and raising questions about the tradition. After all, it is tampering with a 2000 year old text. It is using a very personal, human story of one child to challenge an entrenched social structure. It is immensely subversive.

Like the story from Luke, the story of the Annunciation, which is also immensely subversive. God chooses two women, Elizabeth and Mary, both women of no account, no status, no defining place in their communities, and announces that amazing good news is going to grow in them. Both will become pregnant against all the odds, and their sons will both turn the world up-side-down. They will challenge all the structures of oppression, including patriarchy, and this will be particular
ly good news to those on the margins – to widows, and children and the poor and the powerless.

The language of the angel Gabriel is very earthy. “You, Mary will conceive. You’re going to become pregnant. This baby will grow in your womb, in your body. You will feel this baby grow inside of you. You will bear it in pain, like all mothers do.”

But this baby will not be ordinary at all. This baby will the Son of God, and you will name him Jesus. The root word for Jesus means “Savior”. It means “to set free”. In him there will be fulfilled a new vision for freedom from oppression, for justice and for peace, for salvation.

But Mary still lives in a very patriarchal world. She is still a nobody. Gabriel’s good news promise will not be well received. Structures of dominance and oppression and subservience do not easily give way to freedom and equality and justice.

We Christians too have not honored these texts, these incredibly liberating good news texts of a Messiah coming who would be named Jesus, the Savior, saving people from oppressive systems – including hierarchy. We too have used 2000 year old Scriptures to protect the powerful and to keep the equivalent of widows in their place, finding rules to keep outsiders out rather than invitations to bring marginalized people in.

The Magnificat
Gabriel leaves on other errands for God. And sure enough, Mary discovers she is pregnant, and gradually a magnificent poem is conceived too, and both grow inside, the baby and the poem, but the latter finds birth first, the labor for this one coming during her trip to visit kinswoman Elizabeth. After the greeting, after the “It’s so good to see you again”, after the tears, after the “did you have a lot of morning sickness too?”, Mary, echoing the song of Hanna in the Old Testament, bursts out with the incredible poem which we now call the Magnificat, and which every of composer of note has set to music.

Sweet, yong, innocent Mary bursts out with a battle hymn; with a jarring, radical, revolutionary battle hymn. Pregnant, fearful, waiting hoping, Mary sings about the use and abuse of power, about the conflict between rich and poor, between the strong and the weak, between the hungry and those who are well fed. Images of her very real Roman dominated, religiously dominated, poverty stricken world. Images of our rather brutal 2005 world where even as we speak the world trade organization conference being held in Hong Kong is coming apart because there is too big a gap between rich countries and developing countries, especially around the issue of agricultural subsidies & trade barriers in the rich countries.

Mary’s poem is perhaps the most revolutionary poem in the Bible, though everything she sings is already to be found in the Scriptures of her people.

The Personal
The hymn is in two parts. The first part is very personal. “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour, for he has looked with favour on the lowliness of his servant…” Mary identifies with those on the margins of power.

The first line could be translated, My “being” magnifies the Lord. My very being. Not only my words. Not only my smile. Not only my mind telling me that I should. But my very being. There is an outburst of joy from the core of her being. Life is still hard. There is still much pain. The Romans are still there and still cruel. She will still have a great deal of explaining to do to everyone, including her betrothed. She is still a no account teenager on the fringes of worth in her impoverished world. She is still a female in a very patriarchal world. But Mary knows that God has visited her. She knows that god loves her and the world which God is about to enter in a new way through her son. And that is enough.

“Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for the Might One has done great things for me, and holy is his name. His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation.”

A very personal poem.

The Political
And then the poem turns very political. God is the powerful one before whom even kings will tremble.

In expectation of the birth of her son, Mary sings that he will turn the world upside-down. She sings of a transformation of the political and social order. Mary, carrying the Messiah within her, sings, “The Mighty one has done great things. He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud…He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly…”

Mary knows what it is to fear the powerful, to be afraid of the proud – whether that be the Roman occupants of Palestine, or even her own religious and political and financial rulers. Often the lowly are in pain and despair. But there will be a great reversal. Her son, Jesus, will bring in an upside-down kind of Kingdom. Ah, the seditious, infiltrating and penetrating work of Jesus.

The poem continues. “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.”

I suspect that Mary knew what hunger was about. Who knows but that from time to time she could have used a food bank. And she certainly would have known many rich people who cared not at all for the poor or for the fact that their opulent life-style further deprived the poor of food.

This magnificent poem sings an expectation that the world as it is will be deeply challenged by the New Messiah growing in Mary’s womb. There is no mincing of words. It sings of a transformation of the personal and the political and the economic order. Like Jesus himself said at the beginning of his ministry, quoting Isaiah 61, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, to bring good news to the poor, to release the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.” (Luke 4).

It is both very personal and very political. God’s powerful love, as demonstrated in the Son Jesus, has the power to change us and our world. And who can then help but shout for joy?

Conclusion
What can these texts from Luke one say to us on the verge of another Christmas?

On a very microscopic and very personal level, they tell us, deep within our being, that God loves us and sent the Son to express that love. God loves us in spite of our social and economic location. God loves us even in our sinfulness. God loves us in our overwhelming struggle to make sense out of our lives. That love invites us to follow this Jesus in transforming the world in which we live.

And in this very personal realm, we dare to ask, “Where do I/you need God’s good news of freedom this year? Where do I/we still feel unfree, bogged down, living life less fully and less meaningfully than we could? What good news do I/we hear in the Christmas story this year? We might also ask the other difficult question, Where are we a part of the structures and attitudes that continue to oppress other people?

On the macroscopic and political sphere, these texts, especially the Magnificat, reminds us that God cares deeply about the world, including the people, that God created. On a social level the hymn tells us that God does care for the world that we humans so often turn into chaos by our greediness and by our abuse of power. God cares so much for this world the Messiah is going to do something about it. The power abusers will tremble, will eventually topple from their thrones, will someday be held to account. (Conrad Black).

This season we might ask, “Where do we need to be ready to confront and challenge injustice and oppression?” Where do we see God at work bringing justice and peace within our own congregation?

Who would believe that a poor, pregnant teenage girl cold let loose with such a song, such a vision, so much personal transformation and social transfo
rmation?

I told you it was a dangerous text. Beware. Beware of Christmas. God’s unstoppable purposes will invite us into God’s way, God’s revolution, and that is always so very dangerous.