Joy in our Midst

Luke 1:46-55

And Mary said,
‘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.
   Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
for the Mighty One has done great things for me,
   and holy is his name.
His mercy is for those who fear him
   from generation to generation.
He has shown strength with his arm;
   he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
   and lifted up the lowly;
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 for ever.’

Two years ago, I wasn’t with you on this third Sunday in Advent. Two years ago, I was taking time to grieve the loss of my very, very wanted pregnancy, nearly 22 weeks in. One of the reasons I chose to take that particular Sunday away was because the beautiful scripture the Glenda just read for you was the passage I was going to preach on before I got that devastating news. Obviously I could’ve preached on a different lectionary option, but I needed the time to grieve, and also—I just couldn’t take the cruelty of the fact that the passage I should be preaching on is about a woman singing to God about her faith and joy in this miraculous pregnancy, not to mention, the estimated due date of that pregnancy was Easter that year.

Now, I know this is the third Sunday in Advent, and so this is the Sunday of joy, and I have so much to be joyful about right now, but I’ll be honest, this has been a strange Christmas season for me. Last Christmas, I was pregnant, and I think I was full of so much anxiety and fear, my brain could only take so much, so it kind of compartmentalized all those traumatic memories away—but this year it’s all hitting a little different. This year, despite having this perfect baby, I’ve been reminded time and again of how hard the past two Christmases really were for me, of how two years ago in particular, I really didn’t feel like there was much to celebrate. In a way, two Christmases ago, things were easier—I had good reason to be grieving, despairing, even, and I could give myself the space I needed, I could ask for the space I needed.

This year is… odd. There’s a strange tension between the truly overwhelming joy I feel about embracing every moment of my first Christmas with my little Frankie, but the fact that my termination two years ago happened during the Christmas season will always, for lack of a better word, haunt this time of year for me. In a sad, but ultimately helpful way, I think it will serve as an eternal reminder for me that, until we actually bring about that earth as it is in heaven, there will always be this tension, right? This constant push-and-pull of feeling like we need to be bright and happy and jolly during the whole month of December while also dealing with our own anxieties and fears— not to mention the tension of wanting to celebrate and feel joy when the wider world is so broken.

So two years ago, I knew what I had to do—two years ago I knew I couldn’t celebrate the way we’re often pressured to. And so when I read a couple weeks ago that in Palestine, they’ve decided not to really celebrate Christmas this year, that they took down the nativity, the lights, the joy, it sadly makes sense to me. One Orthodox priest is quoted as saying, “In our homes we can celebrate, but in our hearts we are suffering.” So they are still celebrating—or maybe, observing is a better word—but there are no lights. No gifts. No carols. And maybe this is appropriate in other ways—maybe this is more in line with the first Advent—while, thank God, there was not indiscriminate bombing, Galilee was a peasant-class community occupied by the militarized Romans. It was a place where women of lower status were routinely abused by those in power, and so imagine how Mary must have felt, already on the bottom rungs of the socioeconomic ladder, and now unwed and pregnant.

In our passage today, we get the joy Mary came around to, but surely she didn’t feel this overwhelming and incredible joy immediately. When the angel came to her and said she was pregnant, she was scared, “perplexed,” asking, “how can this be?” Mary found herself in an incredibly precarious position, already in perpetual danger just by existing in the world as a poor, young woman in an occupied place, and now she has received what could be a literal death sentence. And so she went to find some support and some solace. She took the trek to see her cousin Elizabeth, also miraculously pregnant with the fetus that would grow to be John the Baptist. Elizabeth is married to Zechariah, a priest, and it was probably somewhat risky for her to take Mary in for a bit. She could give shooed her away, shamed her, not taken the risk, but she says that Mary is ‘blessed among women’ as is the life she is carrying. “Blessed is she who believed,” Elizabeth exclaims. In her book The First Advent in Palestine, Kelly Nikondeha writes,

These two women believed: Elizabeth believed Mary. Mary believed Gabriel’s words. And Mary’s elder relative called her blessed once again.

You can never hear those words enough amid times of uncertainty and fresh revelation.

Because it was after Elizabeth believed Mary that Mary breaks out into her song of praise. It is then Mary seems to full embrace the terrifying and incredible thing that is happening. It is only then, thanks to the love and support of a friend, of a family member, that she is able to really act on her faith and praise God for this miraculous thing.

In an interview with two Palestinian-Christian peace activists, Munther Issac and Tamar Haddad, journalist Asma Khalid asks them what their day-to-day life has been like since the October 7th Hamas attacks. Haddad states that she hasn’t really left the house in a month and a half because it doesn’t feel safe. Issac says that he doesn’t feel safe walking the streets, due to the massive waves of arrests and massive numbers of Palestinians thrown into detention without trial. So here are two people, two Christians, unable to celebrate Christmas in part because they don’t even feel safe walking outside. They can’t even do what Mary did, and walk to a beloved family member’s house for some support, for a shoulder to cry on. Is it really so much to ask for this Advent, this Christmas—that all should be able to walk the streets safely to be with loved ones, without fear of abuse or violence?

Not to compare our comparatively small worries with the very real dangers of the Palestinians—because truly nothing compares to the horrors they’re currently experiencing—but I think all of us know that uncomfortable feeling of isolation that comes with complicated feelings about holidays or events that are supposed to be happy, during times when we don’t feel particularly joyful. Imagine how alone Mary must have felt initially—how isolated, how scared. But thanks to the support of a loved one, and thanks to her faith, she embraces this terrifying, miraculous event. And that’s, I think what Advent is all about—it’s about embracing the fear, the uncertainty, and having faith that what’s coming will all be worth it.

So I’m here, in front of you all today, with some very conflicting and contradictory feelings about Advent and Christmas this year. In one respect, I’m happier than I’ve ever been, just truly overwhelmed with joy on an hourly basis—but, as I’ve come back to a place where I can be safely in touch with my body and mind again, those reminders of the past two Christmas seasons have returned, and two years later, the waves of grief are still there, are back. And to add to the personal feelings of grief— and on a larger scale, I’m finding myself completely overwhelmed with by the photos coming out of Gaza right now— bloodied children and babies, just absolutely horrifying that were gut-wrenching before I had Frankie and now make me feel physically ill when I see them.

So what do I do with these feelings? What do we do with these feelings? As usual, I have no straight answers for you. I’m actively working on these things myself with my therapist, because these are big feelings, it’s emotional whiplash. But to start, let’s look at that Bonhoeffer quote that Caroline and West so beautifully read for our wreath lighting— “The joy of God has gone through the poverty of the manger and the agony of the cross; that is why it is invincible, irrefutable. It does not deny the anguish, when it is there, but finds God in the midst of it.” The joy of God…does not deny the anguish…but finds God in the midst of it.

I think, for better or for worse, we can’t deny the anguish in our lives or in the world. We can’t pretend it never happened, or it’s not happening; we can’t turn a blind eye to the grief in our own lives or to the violence in the world— but it’s really hard to ignore the impulse to do that—like we talked about two weeks ago in our sermon on hope, toxic positivity is a real problem in our world today, particularly in this country… that pressure to always be happy, to believe that there’s not real value in feeling our feelings. Because if we ignore the tragedy, the violence, and the anguish, we lose sight of God in the midst of it—our God who came to us in the form of a vulnerable human baby… our God who came to us in mortal human form to feel all that we feel, the joy and the sorrow… to deny that these emotions are there, to deny the tragedy and the horrors of the world, is, in a way, to deny God.

I can know now, as much as it hurts sometimes, that so much of my joy in being a mom to Frankie is informed by what I went through to birth her. I know my love for her is shaped by the losses I experienced, by what I went through two Christmases ago. So I imagine that Mary’s faith, that Mary’s joy was shaped by the incredibly precarious and scary situation she found herself in. I imagine that the fear really fed her—the visit from the angel combined with the support of her beloved Elizabeth—it all led her to our scripture passage today, this song of praise for the miraculous life that would change the world.

Mary’s song of praise is all about divine reversals—bringing down the powerful from their thrones, lifting up the lowly; feeding the hungry, sending the rich away empty—it’s all about turning the world upside down. And it’s all about her fear guiding and informing this joyful and faithful song. So what can we use to feed our faith? Because as hard as it can be, we have to let our pain and our traumas inform our feelings of joy and love. We have to let what we’ve been through shape our faith—because that’s how we connect with one another, and that’s how we empathize. That’s why so many people, I believe, are coming to realize how abhorrent the atrocities coming out of Gaza are— it’s impossible to deny the violence we see. The horrors of what we see and what we feel will make us more informed, will make us stronger, will make us more confident in our faith and in our conviction that every single person on this earth deserves to be able to walk the streets safety. It drives us to fight for what’s right, to fight for an end to violence both here and abroad. But it hurts to get to that point of clarity.

I wonder if we can channel Mary for the rest of this Advent season—I wonder if we can channel her grieving the simple life she had planned, her fear of this completely unprecedented thing happening inside her that she flips into joy. And I wonder if we can remember that the joy she is singing in this song does not negate the feelings of fear or grief— rather, it is made stronger by those feelings. So let’s embrace those holy contradictions. And has painful and difficult as it is, let’s face the violence of the world, and let’s face the pain in our own lives, and work to transform it all into a world in which no one will have to face violence or pain ever again—to transform it into an earth as it is in heaven. Amen.