Göttinger Predigten
Göttinger Predigten im Internet hg. von U. Nembach
4. Sunday of Advent, 12/23/2012
Sermon on Luke 1:39-55, by Frank C. Senn
I was bemused to read the opening of an Advent sermon posted by my Baptist friend in Melbourne, Australia, Nathan Nettleton. It began, "At this time of year, unless you lock yourself in your house and never come out, it is impossible to avoid the great summer holiday festival known as Christmas. Its symbols and sounds intrude into absolutely everything - what people wear, what people talk about, what people eat, what's decorating the shops and houses, what music is playing on the radio, and what's arriving in your mailbox."
It sounds like Nathan was doing what Christian preachers have done since 4th century Rome: railing against the solstice festival. Except that for him it's the summer solstice. All things considered, I'd rather be contending against that one myself, and heading to the beach on Christmas afternoon. After I experienced Christmas in the Caribbean back in 1972 and 1973, I thought Christmas worked perfectly fine without being "white."
Be that as it may, while our society has been observing a secularized and commercial Christmas for the last six weeks or so, we haven't gotten there yet in our liturgical observance. It's still Advent. I suppose it might be confusing to the uninitiated who might drop into a liturgical church this morning that we are not singing Christmas carols yet-and tomorrow is Christmas Eve! We will sing them tomorrow night and next Sunday when most of the Christmas decorations will have been taken down in the stores and the Christmas trees will be lying on the parkways.
The relationship between the solstice festival and the Christmas festival has always been a rather confused one. As I explained in my recent "Frank Answer" column (www.ilcevanston.org), the Roman festival of the nativity of the Invincible Sun began to emerge under imperial patronage in the third century just at the time Christians were becoming interested in calculating the birth of Christ.
The theological issue, of course, was when the new creation began; and Christian thinkers reasoned that it began with the conception of the Son of God in the womb of the Virgin Mary. They located that event at Passover time, which is when Jews believed that the world was created. Christians reasoned that the new creation also began at the paschal time, which they placed in proximity to Passover on March 25. Well, nine months later brings you the nativity of Jesus the Christ...bumping into the new festival of the nativity of the Sun. The two festivals have been competing ever since. I don't think there's much mileage in the "put Christ back into Christmas" campaign. Unfortunately, there also doesn't seem to be much traction to getting Christians to observe their own festival. We're caught up in a cultural captivity.
The fact is that our society has been more successful at paganizing our celebrations than we've been in Christianizing theirs. So we hear all these pop versions of Christmas carols in the malls with no one really paying attention to the lyrics, because if they did they might have second thoughts about what they're doing in the malls. They would be flocking to churches to do what the carols invite us to do. "Oh, come let us adore him." "Fall on your knees." They would be praying the words that the hymns over the loud speakers give us: "Oh come to us, abide with us, our Lord Immanuel." "Oh, come, oh, come, Immanuel and ransom captive Israel." Do people know that they are so deeply in the clutches of sin, death, and evil that they need to be ransomed?
The reason we Christians need to be in church observing our festivals is because only in church do we hear the prophesies and stories which point to our need to be ransomed and proclaim the One who has redeemed us. The story we heard today from the Gospel according to Luke is one that sounds our need for redemption loud and clear. You're not likely to hear it anywhere else but in church. It's also the first story we've had in this Advent season which actually mentions the baby Jesus, albeit at this stage still in utero, and we will perhaps get closest to understanding its call to us by comparing and contrasting it to the way the Jesus stories and songs are used in the secular solstice festival.
You see, in the shopping mall music and Christmas card nativity scenes, the one thing that Jesus's presence does not stand for is the expectation of radical, earth-shattering change. Quite the opposite, in fact. He is depicted and sung about in order to keep things more or less the same as they have always been. Although Jesus has no life-shaping significance for the vast majority of Americans, and no particular relevance to how they celebrate the festive season, the songs and pictures are retained because they are symbols of continuity with the past. They serve to reassure people that even though the pace of change in our world can be bewildering and disorienting, some things stay the same and can be relied on to keep staying the same. Even when our planet is warming up and the oceans are rising, and the world is tearing itself apart in war and civil unrest, and our country is threatening to go over a fiscal cliff because our elected leaders are playing a game of dare with each other, we wax lyrical about family togetherness and cute babies and sing of peace and goodwill on earth. The great deception is that the world sings of peace and goodwill to all precisely to avoid having to make the changes that will be necessary to bring peace and goodwill into reality.
Luke's story of pregnant Mary visiting pregnant Elizabeth could lull us into a similar haze of sentimentality. I mean, here are two overjoyed expectant mothers getting together to share their happiness. We have lovely details about a baby seeming to join in the happiness, bouncing for joy inside the womb, and the mothers, as mothers do, suggesting that the baby's kicking is actually an indication that the baby is responding with deep theological insight to the events taking place around it. It could almost be any two expectant mothers. All is cute and lovely. Perfect material for affirming that all is well with the world. Peace and goodwill and keep everything safe and nice.
But then Mary breaks into song. Chances are it was a song she already knew and maybe Elizabeth joined in too. It was a song like the one Hannah sang in thanksgiving for her pregnancy with Samuel back in the Old Testament. But Mary's song is jarringly juxtaposed against this scene of maternal bliss. And, as is pretty much always the case when the Bible or the liturgy juxtapose things against each other in ways that startle and jolt us, the deepest meaning is in the juxtaposition itself, not in the two parts taken separately. The two things which seem to resist being put together like two same poled magnets, need to be held together until we begin to see God's mysterious truths emerging from the juxtaposition itself.
In this song, we have a radical, earth-shattering vision of the world made different. In this song, Mary's vision moves quickly from the Lord showing favor to her, a lowly peasant, to the Lord upending the world as we know it, tearing down the powerful from their thrones, trashing the plans and schemes of the proud and wealthy, and lifting up the poor and hungry and crowning them with glory and honor. This is the kind of song that tyrannical regimes go to great lengths to suppress to keep the peasants and workers from singing such subversive words.
Mary's song is full of visions of presidents and dictators and kings being ousted from power and left with nothing. It portends political leaders and their operatives being handcuffed and sentenced to time in jail for their profiteering. It is full of millionaire tycoons having to sell off their property to pay their debts. And it is full of immigrants being welcomed anywhere and everywhere; the homeless being given the keys to luxury condos; and the fearful and frightened laughing and dancing in the streets with nothing and no one to be afraid of ever again.
And what the gospel writer, and indeed the whole season of Advent, is asking us to do is to hold that disturbing, unsettling and wildly hopeful vision in constant tension with this seemingly innocuous vision of a baby about to be born and a couple of blissful expectant mothers-one too old and the other too young. Actually, most expectant mothers know that a new baby is going to turn their lives upside down and inside out. Life will never be the same again. But the gospel writer wants to drive home to us the message that with the birth of this baby, the whole world will begin to be turned upside down. The status quo, the world as we have known it, is going to be upended as surely and wildly as the money changer's tables in the Temple.
The gospel writer and this season of Advent are preparing us for the Christian celebration of Christmas by sounding a loud and clear warning: do not kneel and worship this baby unless you are ready to embrace the vision of the whole world remade in the image of God. Do not come and adore him unless you are ready to have your life and your world and everything you hold dear turned upside down and shaken and reshaped to fit a world where justice and truth and reckless hospitality reign. Because this sweet and harmless little baby nestled in Mary's womb is the One who comes to do God's will and will upend the world as we have known it so that God's will is done on earth as it is in heaven. This baby is the powerful presence of a God whose kingdom will come and, as we sing in Handel's Messiah, "the kingdoms of this world will become the kingdom of our God and of his Christ." That's radical stuff! And it's not good news for retailing giants or arrogant politicians. But it is very good news for all who suffer under the weight of the sin of the world and cry, "Oh, come, oh, come, Immanuel, and ransom captive Israel." Amen.