Love Songs
Luke 1:39-55
In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leapt in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud cry, ‘Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leapt for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfilment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.’
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 weeks ago, we read the Benedictus—Zechariah’s song that he sings after his nine months of silence as punishment ends for not believing the angel who told him his wife Elizabeth, long thought barren, was pregnant with a very special child. This week, we backtrack a little, and a still-mute Zechariah opens the door to his wife’s young cousin Mary, come to confide in Elizabeth about her own scandalous and miraculous pregnancy—and so now we have Mary’s song, the Magnificat. Elizabeth, as well as the baby in her womb, is full of the spirit when she sees Mary, and she sings the praises of Mary’s son, already calling him “my Lord.” Mary is in turn filled with the spirit, and sings her beautiful and famous song.
Mary comes from a long line of brave and faithful women, facing sometimes frightening, sometimes unbelievable situations, giving a resounding “yes!” to God. The Magnificat is most famously and obviously an echo of Hannah’s song, the song the Jewish matriarch sings when she becomes pregnant with Samuel, the future powerful prophet for the Jewish people.
The bows of the mighty are broken, / but the feeble gird on strength. / Those who were full have hired themselves out for bread, / but those who were hungry are fat with spoil. / The barren has borne seven, / but she who has many children is forlorn…
sings Hannah in 1 Samuel about these incredible and divine reversals of which God is capable. And Mary echoes these reversals—“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.” This is what God is capable of, and this is what Mary’s son will do. And Mary is herself is a representation of this—she is a poor, “lowly” as she calls herself, and this is who God chose to carry God’s only son.
But it’s not just Hannah whom Mary follows. She follows the judge and prophet Deborah and the warrior Jael from the book of Judges. She follows the bold and fearless Judith from the Apocryphal book bearing her own name. She follows Miriam, the ultimate Jewish Matriarch in her victorious Song of the Sea she sings as the red sea crashes down upon Pharaoh’s encroaching army.
Miriam grabs her tambourine and leads her people dancing, “Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously!” Deborah sings, “Most blessed of women be Jael,” as she describes Jael’s heroic and violent defeat of the oppressive military leader Sisera; And Judith sings, “The Lord is a God who crushes wars / and sets up camp among the people!” after she took matters into her own hands when she was sick of the men of country’s inaction… and she continues after describing her defeat of the cruel king Holofernes,
Then my oppressed people shouted; / my weak people cried out, and the enemy trembled; / they lifted up their voices, and the enemy were turned back… / I will sing to my God a new song: / You are great and glorious, / wonderful in strength, invincible.
And now here is Mary, singing another new song—singing about more divine reversals. And not just the poor becoming rich and the weak becoming strong… but unlike the songs of the past, Mary is singing about an ultimate divine reversal—she is celebrating the forthcoming Prince of Peace. She is singing a new song about a savior who comes to earth not as a warrior, but as an innocent, vulnerable infant. Mary’s is a brand new song. It is a love song.
And yet, her Magnificat still has so much in common with those songs of the past. Because these women were all women who did not let their lowly or lesser status in life keep them down. They did not let the violence of their oppressors or the harshness of their lives keep them from working and fighting for, and believing in a better world.
There is a reason that these bold women fearlessly step up to the plate when the time comes. A couple weeks ago, I kind of picked on Zechariah a little. I surmised that the reason he was punished into silence was because he was too cynical to believe that his wife was truly pregnant after years of barrenness; that despite his standing has a well-to-do high priest, he just didn’t have the faith to believe what God was truly capable of. He had seen too much violence and occupation and oppression to believe that real good could actually happen, and ultimately, his life was still relatively comfortable in spite of it all…
But the women— Elizabeth, Mary, and the bold and faithful women who paved the way for them, they did not have this luxury of cynicism or apathy. They did not have this privilege of unbelief. When the political, cultural, or religious systems in place do not benefit you, you have to believe in something bigger. You have to believe in something outside yourself, something outside what feels possible. Hannah prayed faithfully and gave herself to God so that she could bear the son she dreamed of and thrive in a system that wasn’t made for infertile women. She had faith that strong because what other option did she have? Deborah had the faith and knowledge of a prophet that her male peers could not fathom because she had to believe in the visions and prophesies God was giving her; and her warrior-friend Jael had to believe she was capable of taking out the armed and dangerous military leader Sisera because as a woman in this time, she had so much more to lose and to fear. And Judith, sick of her countrymen’s inaction, cynicism, and distrust in God that their home of Bethulia would never be liberated from the cruel Holofernes, took matters into her own hands because she, a widow, one of the most oppressed and disenfranchised groups in these ancient times, could not bear her homeland to be destroyed and could not risk an even more difficult life for herself and her loved ones.
And Mary— a poor teenager, discovering she was pregnant and unwed, could not risk disbelief. She had to believe that the frightening, precarious position she found herself in was, indeed, a blessing and would lead to great and world-changing things. She simply didn’t have the privilege to think otherwise.
As I wrote in my note to the church this week, we had more than double what we usual have for our Blue Christmas service, and the fact that the vast majority were people who weren’t regular church-goers was especially surprising and telling—telling that we seem to be moving into a time in which people are realizing they might no longer have the privilege or the ease of mind to just shrug their shoulders and hope for the best; to just shrug off whatever might be coming down the pipe and assume they won’t be affected. It tells me people are looking for something more, that people are looking for solidarity and hope that something better is possible. It tells me that people want to say yes to God, that people want to say yes to new possibilities, that maybe people really do want to hear a brand new song—maybe even sing a brand new song.
It's no wonder these women of ancient Israel and Palestine chose songs to shout their joy, their triumph, and their faith— the same way enslaved peoples of this country, in the 18th and 19th centuries used spirituals and anthems to keep their hope alive, to believe that they too would be freed, as Miriam’s people were freed from the bondage of the pharaoh in the book of Exodus— it’s the same way civil rights leaders marched the streets, peacefully protesting segregation and Jim Crow oppression while singing We Shall Overcome.
In Black liberation theologian James Cone’s God of the Oppressed, he writes of the reasons Black folks and other oppressed peoples look to the Bible for that hope of a better world—
In the midst of Israel’s despair, prophesy began to strike a new note. Jeremiah began to speak of the new covenant and Ezekiel of a new heart and a new spirit. And then there was the voice of the unknown prophet [in Isaiah] who began by proclaiming,
“Comfort, comfort my people.”
This new covenant, this new heart, new spirit, this comfort… this is what was growing in Mary’s womb. This is the promise, the hope, the faith in something better. This is what we can’t afford to not believe.
This sermon, church, is really just an extension of our sermon two weeks ago. It’s another sermon against cynicism. Put yourself in Mary’s shoes. Imagine you’re already a poor young women struggling to get by. Imagine you find yourself pregnant and unwed. Imagine the social isolation, the stigma, the poverty, the harsh and cruel life that awaits you in an already occupied and militarized land, if Joseph had “dismissed her quietly” as he originally had planned. And imagine you’re told that this is actually a blessing. That the child you’re carrying will be the Prince of Peace, the Son of the Most High, will shine a light on all the injustice in the world and lead people away from oppression and to comfort. Of course you’d believe it. It would be a death sentence not to.
It is far too tempting in times of chaos and unrest and to want to give up and assume nothing will change for the better. But if you find yourself feeling that way, I want you to really think about and explore where that comes from— maybe it comes from exhaustion and fear, and so it just means you have to take a break from national or world news for a bit; or maybe it comes from the fact that you know you won’t be one of the ones hurt most by whatever new policies or shutdowns may or may not be coming, so you don’t actually have to worry. And then I would ask you to imagine you were someone who would be directly affected by say… a policy taking away naturalized citizenship, and the kind of fear you would be feeling right now… or someone, like myself, 3 years ago, who would have been directly affected by a national abortion ban after I got that heartbreaking news. And this spiel isn’t to make us despair or freak out—it’s to make us hope! and work! It’s to motivate us to say yes to whatever challenges await us! Resounding yesses like the ones Miriam, Deborah, Jael, Judith, Elizabeth and Mary proclaimed! It’s so that we say yes to singing a brand new song, to singing songs of hope and Love, is so that we keep the faith that a better world is possible. It’s another reminder that we can’t afford to be apathetic or cynical. We have to believe, and we have to lift each other up and support one another in whatever seemingly small but ultimately life-giving ways we can.
Advent is a time of waiting, and we are waiting for that Christmas promise of love to be fulfilled. Divine love comes to earth in the form of a human infant, one who would feel all the sorrow and heartbreak, all the joy and hope of what being a human being is all about—divine love comes to us in this fragile form, but it also comes to us in this tiny human being who would never give up hope that we could be better. And divine love comes to us because a poor, young, courageous woman, following in the footsteps of brave women before her, had the courage and the faith to say yes, here I am. So I ask you, this Christmas and beyond: to put yourself in the shoes of those who have no choice but to have the courage, the hope, the faith, that this world can be a just and fair world for all people; and to have the courage, hope, and faith that God is with us, and so we do have the power to bring about that better world by helping each other, by being there for each other and whatever ways we can. That is Advent Love—that Advent Love is what the last weeks, of hope, peace, and joy have led to. This new brand new song of Love.
I’m going to end my sermon with a very short poem by Madeleine L’Engle called After annunciation:
This is the irrational season
When love blooms bright and wild.
Had Mary been filled with reason,
There’d have been no room for the child.
Amen.
