22 December 2024 – Advent IV
First Reading – Nikki Giovanni, The Women and The Men (1970)
if it does not sing discard the ear
for poetry is song
if it does not delight discard
the heart for poetry is joy
if it does not inform then close
off the brain for it is dead
if it cannot heed the insistent message
that life is precious
which is all we poets
wrapped in our loneliness
are trying to say
Second Reading – Micah 5:2-5a
Third Reading – Luke 1:39-55
Sermon
We are the blessed stewards of an amazing pipe organ, and the blessed partners with an amazing Music Director and Organist, so I do not begrudge the sermon-free Sundays of Lent III and Advent III. In fact, preachers in liturgical settings missed Advent III for decades, as this was the week traditionally sacrificed to Christmas Pageants. Still, Gaudete Sunday, with its pink candle and theme of joy, is unique, and worthy of our attention, so I am going to attend to our week four theme, love, while also leaning into last week’s theme. And we’ll start with our reading from the Gospel According to Luke the Physician, Mary visiting Elizabeth, and giving us the lines that came to be known as the Magnificat, “My soul magnifies the Lord,” and so on.
We could embrace our not particularly well-hidden cynicism, and problematize the entire story, that of an unwed teen who either lies about her virginity or is involuntarily impregnated, by the divine or a cad of the more common variety. Neither approach offers a promising start to a story of salvation.
But I understand why early Christians came to believe in the virgin birth, how it fit into their pre-scientific understanding of purity and sacrifice and a transactional god, how they were interpreting the ancient prophets. I just don’t believe in that transactional god, and I’m not sure Jesus believed in that transactional god, so I’m not ready to let salvation hang on the two Nativity narratives.
Jesus saves by changing the way we understand God and therefore the way we understand ourselves, blows right past all of the traditional Jewish notions of who is in and who is out, who is clean and who is untouchable, and replaces judgment with grace. This is a rather important detail, for drawing lines and pursuing retributive justice are the most human things to do, and pre-rabbinic Judaism had always responded to cultural pressure by doubling down on what set them apart, on odd practices in diet and dress and worship. The weirder they seemed to others, the more they felt themselves, much like today’s rich and famous.
Jesus didn’t do that, didn’t care about in-group and out-group, and for all we might criticize Paul, the evangelist to the Gentiles, the end result of his mission is a religious community defined by choice, not race or ethnicity.
Still, some want Mary to be a virgin, choose Matthew’s kings and Luke’s manger, even want the brutality at the end of Christ’s life to be rendered a “Good Friday,” and if that works for you, hey… go for it.
Jesus and John as cousins makes sense, miracle babies leaping in the womb maybe less so. Though I can totally roll with Mary’s words about divine reversal, the rich and powerful brought down, the lowly lifted and filled. The meme that circulates every year about this time nails it… these two pregnant women are sitting around talking about a revolution.
Joy might be excessive in describing Mary’s situation. Relieved that she hasn’t been stoned in the street seems more likely. And we are mindful that while some expectant mothers are joyful, like Elizabeth, many women who find themselves pregnant are not joyful, and even in that ancient context, they could make decisions about their own bodies.
And again, joy might make sense through the lens of a post-resurrection theology, but let’s not forget that there are dead bodies everywhere in this story, from the slaughtered toddler boys of Bethlehem in Matthew’s nativity narrative to the head of Elizabeth’s son on a plate, to Mary’s son brutally tortured and publicly executed.
I want to suggest that joy is appropriate and is an incredibly subversive and a necessary spiritual practice, one that reflects something at the heart of a progressive and reconstructive Christianity.
Continue reading “Disruptive Joy”