2023-12-20
Brooke Strong
Sermon Text...
December 17, 2023 Hamilton Coe Throckmorton
Luke 1:46b-55 The Federated Church, UCC
When I was in seminary, a friend of mine, a student at the divinity school, got herself a kitten one semester. And in a stroke of genius—at least as far as seminary humor is concerned—she named the cat—wait for it—“Magnificat.” Pretty good, right? We called the cat “Maggie.”
Early in the story of Jesus, before Jesus is even born, in fact, a young woman finds herself pregnant. And she’s so amazed by the promise of this impending birth that, in her elation, she sings a song of praise to God, giving thanks for the wonder of this new reality. The song she sings we call the “Magnificat,” after its first word in Latin. This teenage girl sings this anthem to God because, while in the eyes of society, she is a nobody, it is also the case that she is bearing the offspring of God. “I’m bursting with God-news,” she sings; “I’m dancing the song of my Savior God. God took one good look at me, and look what happened—I’m the most fortunate woman on earth!” (Luke 1:46-48; The Message). She couldn’t possibly hold the song in because she knows how incredibly blessed she is. Picture the best news you’ve ever gotten—when you learned you were pregnant, maybe, or you just landed the job you felt born to take, or the person of your dreams just let you know of their desire to marry you. Maybe you can recall your unspeakable elation. That’s something like what Mary feels at hearing her unique news.
In truth, though, her elation is likely even greater than anything you and I have ever felt, because think what she’s just learned. She discovers she’s going to bear the very child of God. What could possibly compare with that! Years ago, in my college’s alum magazine, in the section where the news of various graduates is reported, sandwiched into the customary news about various rather typical promotions and milestones, came this brief item: alum Stephen Sondheim won the Kennedy Center Honors. And I remember laughing out loud, thinking this was so ridiculously more impressive than anything anyone else on that list had done that it didn’t belong in the same column. Mary’s news is something like this, only more so. It’s beyond anything imaginable. And she’s totally blown away. So she rejoices, and she dances, and she sings. “I’m bursting with God-news; I’m dancing the song of my Savior God.”
And what Mary dances and sings about is what God has done not just for her, but for the world. Eugene Peterson puts it vividly: God “bared [God’s] arm and showed [God’s] strength, scattered the bluffing braggarts. [God] knocked tyrants off their high horses, pulled victims out of the mud. The starving poor sat down to a banquet; the callous rich were left out in the cold. . .. [God] remembered and piled on the mercies, piled them high” (1:51-54; The Message). Mary’s song is a litany of praise for the scintillating wonders God has made happen.
And the odd thing, as we hear it, is the tense of the verbs in Mary’s song. It’s a song not about what God “will do,” in the future, but what God “has done,” in the past. And if you’re like me, you think, ‘Well, there’s something wrong with that. The great reversals Mary sings of have not yet happened.’ Even if we found it hard to believe them, we could probably at least live with these sentiments if we thought they were God’s promises of what is yet to be. To hear these words as already accomplished facts, though, may make us cringe. Or they may allow us to just dismiss this song of Mary’s as woefully out of touch. God has shown strength? God has scattered the proud? God has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up those who are lowly? God has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty? What world are you living in, Mary? How could you be that grotesquely off the mark? I don’t see it. I can’t imagine what you’re looking at.
There are not many specific classes I remember from my days in seminary many years ago. Mostly I’m left with just general impressions. One class session in particular, though, stands out in my memory. It was taught by Prof. Leon Watts, a Black theologian who reflected with us on the legacy of the Civil Rights struggle and its work for justice. What Prof. Watts said to us that day went something like this: we are beckoned, he said, to act as though what God most wants is already true. It’s not that it will eventually come to be. It’s that it is already here. God has essentially built love and justice into the fabric of the universe. And our very job is to uncover that deep and abiding way that the world is already made. We wouldn’t know, after all, what a kind and gentle world could be unless God had already embedded those virtues in our bodies. We wouldn’t know what a world of justice and equity looked like unless God had already instilled such a way of being into our bones. We wouldn’t know what an anti-racist world would look like unless God had planted that notion in our hearts. Our very work, as the people of God, he said, is to live into that already-accomplished reality. And Prof. Watts finished by saying this: the most appropriate song for the Civil Rights movement, he said, is not “We Shall Overcome,” which only aspires to a hoped-for future, but “Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, we are free at last!”, which declares instead what already is. Don’t act, in other words, as though we’re pursuing some distant dream, which may or may not come to be. Act, instead, on the basis of the already-accomplished truth of God, which is that you and I are created free and kind and thoughtful and just and whole! This is who and what we are now, in this very moment. So let’s own it. Let’s live it.
Theologians sometimes talk about the fullness of God being both “already” and “not yet.” God’s work is both incomplete, not entirely embodied in life—“not yet,” in other words—and also fully enacted—“already,” in other words. It’s obviously true that God’s world is to some extent “not yet.” We dare never forget, though, that it is also profoundly “already.” It may be that one of the prevailing failings of our time and our culture is that we are too often mired in the “not yet.” You and I are acutely aware of the dismal incompleteness of the world in which we live, with war and hunger and hatred and fear dominating the news cycles. It’s what so often characterizes our conversation—we talk about our discouragement at the state of the world. My sense is we often feel overwhelmed by the gruesome state of events, as though things are never going to get better and all we can do is make the best of a bad situation. My sense is we all-too-often feel imprisoned by the “not yet.”
So Mary’s Magnificat calls us up short. Even though there is, indeed, an unquestionable “not-yetness” to the world—we can’t deny its evil and senselessness—Mary’s song reminds us that there is also a fully realized “already” that never lets us go. God is already here. God is already infusing every moment with grace. God is already instilling each encounter with peace. Our vocation, then, is to see the truth of the way things already are and join it.
The Christian tradition has often talked of Mary as the God-bearer. The Magnificat is a holy reminder that we are all God-bearers, that you and I embody the beauty and hope and wonder—the loveliness, really—of God’s presence in the midst of every moment. Every moment.
The Arab-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye tells this story: “Wandering around the Albuquerque Airport Terminal . . . I heard an announcement: ‘If anyone in the vicinity of Gate A-4 understands any Arabic, please come to the gate immediately.’
“Well—one pauses these days. Gate A-4 was my own gate. I went there.
“An older woman in full traditional Palestinian embroidered dress, just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing loudly. ‘Help,’ said the flight service person. ‘Talk to her . . . We told her the flight was going to be late and she did this.’
“I stooped to put my arm around the woman and spoke to her haltingly [in Arabic]. The minute she heard any words she knew, however poorly used, she stopped crying. She thought the flight had been canceled entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for major medical treatment . . .. I said, ‘No, we’re fine, you’ll get there, just later, who is picking you up? Let’s call him.’
We called her son and I spoke with him in English. I told him I would stay with his mother . . . and would ride next to her . . .. She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of it. Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and found out of course they had ten shared friends. Then I thought . . . why not call some Palestinian poets I know and let them chat with her? This all took up about two hours.
“She was laughing a lot by then. Telling about her life, patting my hand, answering questions. She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies—little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts—out of her bag and was offering them to all the women at the gate. To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the mom from California, the lovely woman from Laredo—we were all covered with the same powdered sugar. And smiling. There is no better cookie.
“And then the airline broke out free beverages . . . and two little girls from our flight ran around serving us all apple juice and they were covered with powdered sugar, too. And I noticed my new best friend—by now we were holding hands—had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing, with green furry leaves. Such an old country traveling tradition. Always carry a plant. Always stay rooted somewhere.
“And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought, this is the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in that gate—once the crying of confusion stopped—seemed apprehensive about any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women, too. This can still happen. Not everything is lost” (Center for Action and Contemplation, daily email, Dec. 14, 2023).
Today is the third Sunday of Advent. It’s the day we mark joy as one of God’s great gifts. The airport scene that Naomi Shihab Nye describes is a shining witness to the God who is already here, the God who has made possible a world full of love and kindness. That’s a joyful world. It’s a world we can all live into. And it’s not just a promise. It’s a reality. May the God who is already present, the God who has already done great things in and for us, the God who has already made the world a shimmering sacrament of powdered sugar and held hands—may that God fill us with joy as we live into that world of kindness and generosity and shared tears and exuberant laughter and saving love. Together.