Fourth Sunday of Advent (C)
December 23, 2018
Hebrews 10:5-10 In burnt offerings and sin offerings you have taken no pleasure.
Luke 1:39-56 Blessed is she who believed.
O God of “she who believed,” grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.
It’s been a noisy week for me around here: the newly manufactured elevator doors have been getting installed, the roofers have been walking back and forth outside my office window. At home, it’s been the gutter cleaners and leaf blowers. Aside from sawing rocks, I don’t think there’s any machine noise that I dislike more. And really, those things are quite trivial compared with the domestic and international news that just keeps going from bad to worse. While the timing might not seem so good, the noise really fits very well with where we are in our Christian calendar. Our readings have wisdom for us to hear through the din.
In our liturgical year, we have arrived at the fourth Sunday of Advent – the last Sunday before the Feast of the Nativity. Our reading from Micah describes a woman in labor, about to give birth from Bethlehem to a child who will feed his flock in the strength of the Lord, in the majesty of the name of the Holy One. (Let’s not jump ahead to that so fast, though. Let’s stay a moment with this woman in labor. If you haven’t been in labor or been with someone who is in labor, I can tell you, it hurts. A lot. And it’s not quiet, nor is it usually quick, nor is it safe.)
You might have noticed that our assigned passage ends before the second half of verse five. That’s what chapter 5, verses 2 through 5a means. I want you to wonder what 5b says and why it didn’t get included. (I’m going to tell you.) Here it is: “If the Assyrians come into our land and tread upon our soil, we will raise against them seven shepherds and eight anointed ones as rulers who will shepherd Assyria’s land with swords.” I think we don’t include these verses on the fourth Sunday of Advent because we are really trying to get ready for the holidays.
Micah (a name which is short for the rhetorical question: “Who is like the Holy One?”) was probably written in the 6th century Babylonian exile, using the stories of the Assyrian occupation from two centuries earlier, calling for integrity in worship and social justice with words about God’s judgment and about God’s promise of forgiveness and future restoration. It’s important to remember that there is a vast span of time (more than eight centuries) between the events Micah describes and the Gospel of Matthew’s story of the Wise Ones from the East who answer King Herod’s interrogation about a Messiah born in Bethlehem by quoting the ancient story from Micah.[1] Those words were still alive for Matthew. It’s Micah’s words in the next chapter that are still alive for me because they sum up how we are to respond whenever we realize how far astray we have gone from the Love of God. Micah says, “The Holy One has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Holy One require of you but to do what is right, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.” Do what is right, not what is expedient, not what is most productive or least costly, or what can be gotten away with. Love kindness. Walk humbly with your God. I think that will mean hammering swords into pruning hooks and spears into ploughshares, to quote Micah’s contemporary, the prophet Isaiah.
Our reading from that long long sermon called Hebrews is reminding (for the umpteenth time) those who are listening, that worship is hypocritical in the absence of shalom – of the well-being of all of the people, of peace where resources of food and shelter and clothing and health are shared among everyone. Sin or guilt offerings are not required; indeed they are not even desired by the Holy One. What is required is this: stop doing evil; learn to do good; seek right relationship; rescue those who are oppressed; defend those who have no defenders; plead for those who are without resources; listen to the Holy One perpetually pleading that we walk in the path of steadfast Love that has been set before us. The writer of Hebrews is summarizing the prophetic tradition of the Hebrew Bible, quoting 1 Samuel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea, and the Psalms about building relationships and caring for one another.
Like any long, long sermon, Hebrews has some beautiful part, other parts – well, less so, and still other parts that become background noise for wherever our minds wander. Near the end of Hebrews is this wonderful exhortation: “Let mutual love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it. Remember those who are in prison as though you were in prison with them….And may grace be with all of you.”
May grace be with all of you through the suffering, through the trials, through the din, so that you can take in our Gospel story of Mary’s arrival at Elizabeth’s home. According to Luke, the only Gospel that tells this story, the angel Gabriel announced Mary’s pregnancy and added that her kinswoman, Elizabeth, who had been barren, was in her 6th month of pregnancy because “nothing is impossible with God.” Luke says that Mary went with eagerness, with a sense of urgency, to see Elizabeth in the Judean hill country. We don’t really know where in the Judean hill country, but it would have been at least a three-to-five day journey for Mary. Was her urgency to get out of town or to help Elizabeth with hopes of learning what to do herself? Probably both! The encounter of these two pregnant prophets is extraordinary. It’s a rare dialogue between two women (reminiscent of Ruth and Naomi). Elizabeth is giving a blessing to Mary. Zechariah the priest and Joseph the builder are not described as being anywhere around.
What they have in common is the weirdness of their pregnancies – Elizabeth doesn’t have any more experience bearing a child than Mary does. Their situations are extremely stressful. Neither seems to be in a position to be of much help to the other, and yet, there they are, blessing one another, validating and affirming one another. The pastoral pain of their larger story is intense. They are going to get hurt and their children are going to get hurt. (Their children are going to get murdered by the government.) A little more than a year ago, when I first saw my granddaughter in 3D sonogram on a large screen, my immediate thought was how sweetly familiar she looked. My next thought was like a sword piercing my heart – I looked at her, about two months from being born, and felt deep anguish that, in being born and growing up in this world, she would get hurt, because none of us gets through life unscathed. In an instant, I could see both the promise and the threat of new life.
Our Revised Common Lectionary makes inclusion of the Magnificat optional for our Gospel reading, probably because it, too, is quite troubling. Dietrich Bonhoeffer called the Magnificat, “…at once the most passionate, the wildest, one might even say the most revolutionary Advent hymn ever sung.” In Bonhoeffer’s book, The Mystery of Holy Night,[2] he wrote: “This is not the gentle, tender, dreamy Mary whom we sometimes see in paintings; this is the passionate, surrendered, proud, enthusiastic Mary who speaks out here. This song has none of the sweet, nostalgic, or even playful tones of some of our Christmas carols. It is instead a hard, strong, inexorable song about collapsing thrones and humbled lords of this world, about the power of God and the powerlessness of humankind. These are the tones of women prophets of the Old Testament that now come to life in Mary’s mouth.”
The Magnificat is quite threatening to those who are rich with money and arrogant with power. But the thing I like to point out is that, in the realm of God, as soon as the rich are sent empty away, as soon as the proud are scattered, they have an opportunity to become hungry enough and humble enough to rejoin the beloved community sharing food and shelter and care. Listen and respond to the invitation of the Holy One to reverence and transformation, through the noise, through the suffering, meeting trials with joy, whether, like Mary, you are just starting out in adult life and you feel unprepared, or like Elizabeth, you are older and have experienced the barrenness of dreams deferred, or unrealized, or crushed. Make the choice to let God – or Love — in. As Martin Buber once said, “It is our choice each minute every day.” This is how we will best get ready for Christmas.