"Sing of Hope and Healing" Isaiah 35:1-10 & Luke 1:46-55
A young woman is pregnant but not married. A young man begins to wake up to the fact that he may be gay. An older couple experiences increasing bouts of anger and even violence as a formerly loving partner moves into early stage Alzheimer's. How will their families react? Will they be able to bring hope and healing to a challenging time? How will their faith be tested?
A young pregnant woman, whose name is Mary visits her relative Elizabeth, and the two share their joy and amazement and gratitude to God, at their miraculous pregnancies. Fear and confusion have turned to joy! Mother Mary, a child herself, becomes a prophet when she sings her song of hope and healing. We call it the Magnificat. Mary sings a song to celebrate God's preferential option for the poor, the downtrodden, the oppressed, even the outsiders within Israel--the "God-fearers." Instantly a prophet, because filled with the Spirit, she announces to the world: "My soul proclaims the greatness of God. My spirit rejoices in the God of peace, who has done great things for me. God's nonviolence is from age to age. God has dispersed the arrogant of mind and heart, thrown down the rulers from their thrones, lifted up the lowly, filled the hungry with good things, sent the rich away empty, and remembered God's mercy to God's faithful ones."
No matter how you translate Mary's cry of joy, this is one dangerous text, this utterance from a lowly woman, "languishing on the outskirts of a brutal empire."
It is still dangerous. Military juntas and totalitarian regimes have actually banned its recitation. One Sunday some years ago, after I read the Magnificat, a conservative congregant came up and asked me, "Why do you always choose such political messages from the Bible?" My response was, "I don't write this stuff. And I don't select the choices of readings."
In Christian communities that practice daily prayer, the Magnificat is sung every evening. If we find ourselves in times of trouble, or if we find ourselves in need of courage or comfort, Mother Mary's Magnificat might be our mantra! The love and justice of God shine through Mary.
There are young women today who find themselves pregnant in dubious circumstances, and sometimes their families are not as welcoming as Joseph and his family, or Elizabeth and Zechariah and theirs. There are places in the world where those who fail to follow the norms are shunned or stoned. The church can provide a place for all God's children to sing of hope and healing!
Isaiah writes in chapter 35 of his yearning – aching – for a better world. It’s a beautiful and powerful vision of a Messiah-Savior-King who will bring about the fulfillment of the divine will on earth.
A few years ago I had a brief correspondence with an inmate at the Fishkill Correctional Center. I wrote to him: When God’s people are in distress, messengers [angels] of hope come to remind us of God’s steadfast love. Isaiah speaks a message of comfort to God’s people in exile: God will bring them back to the land of promise. The Gospel passage reminds us of the good news of God’s faithfulness. Christians are called to be messengers of hope. You and I both can be such angels in the world.
As we approach the celebration of his birth, I'm especially mindful of those in our Christian family who are cut off from loved ones and friends.
You may compare yourself to the followers Paul wrote to in Philippians 4:1, "My dear, dear friends! I love you so much. I do want the very best for you. You make me feel such joy, fill me with such pride. Don't waver. Stay on track, steady in God." God longs for you to grow in faith, especially in this holy season. My prayer for you is that you receive answers to the letters to other churches, and begin connections in faith that will strengthen you.
I hope you enjoyed the quote at the top of the bulletin from Stephen Mitchell. I confess that once I start reading him, it's hard to stop quoting! So let me read from Stephen Mitchell's The Gospel According to Jesus, and give you a little more:
What is the gospel according to Jesus? Simply this: that the love we all long for in our innermost heart is already present, beyond longing. Most of us can remember a time (it may have been just a moment) when we felt that everything in the world was exactly as it should be. Or we can think of a joy (it happened when we were children perhaps, or the first time we fell in love) so vast that it was no longer inside us, but we were inside it. What we intuited then, and what we later thought was too good to be true, isn't an illusion. It is real. It is realer than the real, more intimate than anything we can see or touch, "unreachable," as the Upanishads say, "yet nearer than breath, than heartbeat." The more we deeply we receive it, the more real it becomes. . . .
When Jesus talked about the kingdom of God, he was not prophesying about some easy, danger-free perfection that will someday appear. Hew was talking about a state of being, a way of living at ease among the joys and sorrows of our world. It is possible, he said, to be as simple and beautiful as the birds of the sky or the lilies of the field, who are always within the eternal Now. This state of being is not something alien or mystical. We don't need to earn it. It is already ours. ... The rich especially have a hard time reentering this state of being; they are so possessed by their possessions, so entrenched in their social power, that it is almost impossible for them to let go. Not that it is easy for any of us.
In emotional terms, those who receive visions often experience and express ecstatic joy—like David dancing beside ark as it was brought into Jerusalem. Picture spontaneous and uncontainable joy: "our mouth was filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy." (Psalm 126) It is, as Stephen Mitchell put it, "a joy…so vast that it was no longer inside us, but we were inside it."
None of this asks us to deny what we may actually be feeling this December. Whether we are happy or sad, we may still encounter JOY. Mary's Magnificat does not come from a place of mindless bliss. Her shouts of joy are born in the throes of an un-wed pregnancy, in a culture far less tolerant than our own. And yet Mary has entered "a state of being, a way of living at ease among the joys and sorrows of our world."
I'd like to try something different today. I want to invite someone to share a little bit of your faith journey, to stand up and talk about your faith and how that motivates you in the world. Maybe we could think of it as an invitation to Magnificat--to sing of hope and healing as you have experienced it. …[Janet Fink spoke movingly about her ministry with Gladney Center for Adoption.]
This Third Sunday of Advent, no matter what we're feeling, we can affirm that "everything in the world [is] exactly as it should be." We can celebrate the potential for peace, hope, and joy, with which our world is pregnant, even if we haven't yet arrived at its birth.
And so, with the world's poor, with all who hunger for the real, with the Prophet Isaiah and Mother Mary, and with children everywhere, we too can sing:
O come, O come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel.
That mourns in lonely exile here, until the Son of God appear...
O Come, Desire of nations, bind all peoples in one heart and mind.
Bid envy, strife, and discord cease; Fill the whole world with heaven's peace ...
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel!
AMEN.
--Jack Lohr, Interim Pastor
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