Today's teaching scripture comes from Luke chapter 1, verses 39
to 56. It says in those days Mary set
out and went with haste to a Judean town in the Hill Country
where she entered the House of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth.
When Elizabeth heard Mary's greeting, the child leapt in her
womb and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and
exclaimed with a loud cry. Blessed are you among women, and
blessed is the fruit of your womb.
And why has this happened to me? For the mother of the of my Lord
comes to me. For as soon as I heard the sound
of your greeting, the child in my womb leapt for joy.
Blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of
what was spoken to her by the Lord.
And Mary said, my soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices
in God my Savior. For He has looked with favor on
the Lily state of His servant. Surely from now on all
generations will call me blessed, for the mighty One has
done great things for me, and holy is His name indeed.
His mercy is for those who fear Him.
From generation to generation He has shown strength with His arm.
He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
He's brought down the powerful from their Thrones and lifted up
the lowly. He has filled the hungry with
good things and sent the rich away empty.
He has come to the aid of his child Israel, in remembrance of
His mercy, according to the promise he made to our
ancestors, to Abraham, and to his descendants forever.
And Mary remained with her about 3 months and then returned to
her home. This is the word of the Lord.
So friends, I want to say hello and welcome to those of you who
are listening. No one is listening to this in
real time because today I'm, I'm recording this on December 14th,
but we had a snow day. We canceled our service today.
And so I am preaching to no one for the first time since the
pandemic. It's a strange feeling.
But because our Advent series is tied to the traditional themes
during Advent and I felt like I had something important to say
this week and next week, we elected to just go ahead and
record the sermon this week and release it as its own podcast.
So today is Gaudet Sunday. Historically, this Sunday has
functioned as a kind of pause in Advent.
It's a brief reprieve in a season that's otherwise fairly
quiet and reflective, even heavy, where our focus is on
waiting for the arrival of Jesus and waiting for the Kingdom of
God to come in fullness. And the church has always known
that waiting can be hard. And so right here, just before
the end of Advent, we are told rejoice, lift your head, take a
breath. There is a week to focus on joy.
But this is important. The joy Advent names is not
light or easy. It's not the joy of distraction
or denial or some kind of mindless celebration.
It's not the joy of pretending the world isn't heavy.
Advent joy is hard fought joy. It's joy that has learned to
survive in the middle of the deep ache of being human.
One of the clearest expressions of that kind of joy in all of
the scriptures is Mary's song in Luke chapter 1, The Magnificat.
Something about the Advent season and even this song always
reminds me of the first time I read Wendell Berry's Jaber Crow.
If you've never read that book, or, or if you've never heard of
it or had any exposure to it, I commend it to you.
I find it to be one of the most lovely things that I have ever
read in my life. If you know that book, you know
it's not a cheerful story in any obvious sense.
It's slow, it's patient, it's marked by disappointment,
unfulfilled longing, and honestly, the quiet accumulation
of loss over the course of Jaber's life.
He spends much of his life waiting for love that doesn't
resolve the way that he had hoped, and for a world that
keeps changing in ways that he can't stop with the passage of
time. He's waiting for a goodness that
never necessarily arrives super cleanly or all at once.
And yet, I find Jaber Crowe to be one of the most joyful books
that I have ever read. Not because he or any of the
characters in the story of Wid's suffering, and not because
things turn out neatly, but because over time, his love
deepens and his attention toward the important things in life
sharpens. His faithfulness to people and
place and friendship and commitment becomes a kind of
sacrament. And his joy doesn't come from
being proven right or ending up on the right side of history.
It comes from staying faithful and from learning to receive
life as a gift, even when that's a painful experience.
I think that's the kind of joy that Mary is singing about.
Mary's joy is not the joy of everything working out in the
moment. It's the joy of God entering the
long, unresolved middle of human history and refusing to abandon
the humans in the middle of it. It's the joy that knows tragedy
and waits without any kind of guarantees, and still dares to
trust that God is at work beneath the surface of things in
our lives, in our life together, that we do not yet understand.
And the song that Mary sings in Luke chapter 1 is not the song
of someone who has escaped the ache of being human.
It's the song of someone who's discovered that that ache itself
has become a place where God is very present to us.
And so I sense that this week, you know, even as, as we're not
gathered together, but just knowing the, the state of things
in the world and in many of our lives, this kind of thin joy
that relies on, you know, being nice and avoiding tragedy and is
just sort of a, a polite kind of joy.
It won't, it won't sustain us. It won't hold.
Because the kind of joy that Advent offers isn't this, this
thin or easily digestible kind of thing.
It's a joy that costs something. It's joy that's formed in people
slowly over the course of a life well lived.
It's a joy that by the Spirit becomes a source of life for us,
even when the circumstances of our lives remain unresolved.
So Mary, I think in this song that she sings, is trying to
wake us up. She's singing because the Christ
Project is God's answer to the heaviness of the world, a
transformation from the inside out and not an escape from it.
And it's this kind of joy that doesn't float above suffering.
It's it stands right in the middle of it and it says God is
already at work in this. To really hear Mary's song, we
have to pay attention to when it's sung.
This moment from the Scriptures comes very early in Luke's
Gospel, before Jesus is born, before he preaches, before he
heals anyone, before he confronts the religious leaders
or Roman power. Nothing has meaningfully or
tangibly changed yet about the circumstances of the people in
this story. The world looks exactly the same
as it did before, and Mary herself is not someone that
history would expect to carry a song like this.
Tori spoke about this beautifully when we were
together last week. She's young, vulnerable,
socially insignificant. She has no platform, no
protection, no authority. She is a poor, unmarried woman
in a small occupied country, living under the shadow of
empire and constant anxiety about survival.
And she is the person that Luke puts at the center of his
Gospels opening movement. Mary sings in a world that's
ruled by Caesar, a world that's ordered by power and violence, a
world where Rome decides who matters and who doesn't, a world
where her own future is suddenly uncertain and dangerous.
And yet she opens her mouth and sings this joyous song about
Thrones falling, the lowly being lifted and the hungry being
filled. And I think that's important
because it tells us something crucial about the kind of joy
that Advent is seeking to name. It's not some kind of a victory
lap or a celebration. It's not joy on the other side
of resolution. It's joy that is hard fought and
being born in the middle of the ache of the real circumstances
of our lives. Mary's joy comes from an
understanding that God has acted.
God has entered the story, and even though the world hasn't
caught up to that reality yet, Mary knows that nothing can stay
the same after this moment in her life.
That's the heartbeat of the coming Kingdom of of Jesus.
This passage is a foretaste of the shift that's coming that
accompanies God's final putting right of all things.
And so Advent teaches us to live in this strange space, to wait
with alertness and hope, because God has already begun the work
of repairing the world, even when the evidence for that feels
thin. And so Mary is singing, not
because the ache for something different is gone, but because
it's been made known to her in an intimate way that God is
coming close enough to redeem it.
So when we look at her song, Luke tells us that she sings, My
soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my
Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowly state of his
servant. And what strikes me immediately
about this is, is the order of Mary's song.
The first half doesn't focus on what God does, but on who God
is. Mary names God as Savior.
She speaks of God's holiness. She locates everything that
she's about to speak about in God's mercy and faithfulness
across the generations. She locates the intervention of
God and the love of God in the promises of God that she would
have known from the Hebrew Bible.
And so in Mary's story, worship comes first.
And that matters because the Bible is doing something
genuinely new here. Fascinatingly, you know, one of
the quiet revolutions of ancient Israel's faith is that worship
is no longer a technique for getting God to act.
It's a response to a God who has already acted.
It's a response to the grace of God.
And so this is something that scholars note that's just
particularly unique about ancient Israelite religion in
the Hebrew Bible. In much of the ancient world,
religion work the other way around.
You worshipped in order to activate divine power.
Rituals, ethical behavior, even reverence for the natural world
were all sort of ways of arranging yourself correctly so
the gods might respond to you. Worship was a lever that you
would pull in hopes of getting a result.
But Israel's story and Mary's song flips that logic.
Israel doesn't sing in the Hebrew Bible to make God move.
Israel sings because God has already moved.
God creates and liberates and makes covenant 1st.
And obedience and worship follow.
Not as a way of manipulating God, but as a way of living
truthfully in a world that's already been touched by grace,
almost as a way of displaying our awareness that the world
that we live in, even though we don't see it fully worked out
yet, has already been touched by grace.
And so that's the order that Mary is standing in.
I think Mary's song flows out of deep trust in the character of
God. It's not ideology dressed up as
praise. It's it's a kind of praise that
tells the truth about reality. Worship here is not escapism or
denial or retreat. It's how Mary names what's
actually true beneath the surface of appearances.
Before she says anything about Thrones or hunger or wealth, she
roots herself in the conviction in the story that she knows that
God is merciful and holy and faithful from generation to
generation. And that grounding is what makes
the rest of the song that she sings possible.
So Mary doesn't sing to make God act.
She sings because God has acted, and once God has acted, the
world can no longer be understood in the same way.
And only then does Mary turn to what God actually does in the
world. She says he has shown strength
with his arm. He has scattered the proud in
the imagination of their hearts. What a beautiful line in the
imagination of their hearts. So she's saying this isn't just
about external power or visible oppression.
It's about the stories that people tell themselves to
justify domination, accumulation, exclusion, and the
narratives that make inequality feel normal.
The inner logic that that tells us, you know, this is just the
way that things are settled for the status quo, she sings.
He has brought down the powerful from their Thrones and lifted up
the lowly. So she doesn't spiritualize
power. She acknowledges that Thrones
are real, hierarchies are real, lowliness is real.
And so this isn't symbolic language for some kind of inner
humility. This is God intervening in the
real, concrete ordering of the world.
He has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich
away, empty. This isn't just a gentle
encouragement toward generosity. This is God reordering a world
that has decided some lives have more value than others.
It's a declaration that hunger is not inevitable and wealth is
not morally neutral. It's the announcement that God's
Kingdom confronts how resources are distributed and who gets
protected. And it's important to say this
clearly. Mary isn't recruiting us into a
political party or into a, a, a particular cause.
Apart from that, she is announcing a Kingdom.
The Kingdom that Jesus brings is, is not just an inspirational
upgrade to the existing ordering of things.
It's an upheaval. It's a reordering of who matters
and why. And so how does that Kingdom
arrive? Not as an idea or as a metaphor,
but you know, as we, we're sort of centering in this Advent
teaching series that we've titled Being Born in Flesh.
It arrives in flesh. The the incarnation announces
that God who enters the real conditions of human life, a God
who does not remain distant or abstract, but clearly takes
sides with vulnerable humans by taking on vulnerability himself.
God sides with the lowly, not by shouting from heaven, but
actually becoming incredibly small in the person of Jesus.
Vulnerability is not a weakness here, it's the strategy.
You know, thinking about this text and this idea, my mind goes
to the place in Second Corinthians when the apostle
Paul is frustrated with the limitations of his humanity and
and he writes about this and we have God's reply.
My grace is sufficient for you for power is made perfect in
weakness. And so considering just the the
implications of Christ born as a human baby during the Advent
season, it's a reaffirmation of of what has been made known to
us as the strategy all along. The invitation is to let this
idea do its work on us, that the God who comes in vulnerability
can truly reorder our our lives, reorder our loves, and disrupt
our assumptions about how the world works or how it ought to
work for us. To experience the tension of
simultaneously being affirmed by the love of the God of the
universe and challenge. To embrace the call of God, To
lean into the work of the coming Kingdom.
And as we've said, this reordering doesn't arrive as an
idea or a metaphor, but it arrives in a person.
And so the birth of Jesus announces that God who steps
directly into the real conditions of human life.
This is a God who sides with the lowly, who brings down the
arrogant. A God who refuses to let power
or wealth or empire have the last word.
And friends, that matters tremendously, especially right
now, because we are living in a moment when our immigrant
neighbors right here in Columbus are being spoken about in ways
that strip them of dignity. People are reduced to threats,
burdens, problems to be managed, and language is being used that
flattens real people, families, children, workers, neighbors
into abstractions and fears. And the Church has to be clear
eyed about the moment that's in front of us, not reactive, not
partisan, but awake. The incarnation doesn't allow us
to look away from the vulnerable.
There is no way to detach the concrete realities of the beauty
of the Holy Family and the Advent story from the the
realities of what's going on in the world around us right now.
And this God who takes on flesh identifies himself so closely
with the stranger, with the poor, with the displaced, that
Jesus can say whatever you do to the least of these, you do to
me. And so to insist on the dignity
of every person made in the image of God is not a political
stance, it's a Christological one.
It's simply is what it means to take Christmas seriously.
And so that's why if you sometimes feel like Christianity
should stretch further or be more justice shaped or be more
honest about the brokenness of our world, Mary is already
there. It's one of the reasons I love
this song that she's saying so much.
The incarnation is already there.
The Kingdom that Jesus brings friends is not a sentimental,
feel good upgrade to your ordinary life.
It's profoundly disruptive. And so the invitation of Advent
isn't be a little kinder or feel a little inspired this holiday
season. It's this.
Let the God who truly loves you and comes in vulnerability
reorder your life, disrupt your assumptions, and draw you into a
Kingdom that challenges. You and I, starting with the
parts of our own hearts that resist the work of the love of
God. And so if anything, you know,
giving some some thought, some consideration to the kind of
Advent joy that we're talking about should take us further
than we might naturally want to go into compassion, into
justice, into solidarity, into costly love.
The impulse to seek a world made new is good.
And I just want to keep in front of us that Advent simply says
that the way that the world is remade is not by human optimism
or by some kind of moral effort alone, but by God taking on
flesh. And what that means for the ways
that we show up in our day-to-day lives.
It's not a vague spirituality of being nice.
It's the living Jesus turning everything upside down and
inviting us to follow. You know, I found myself
returning to a passage from Doctor Martin Luther King
Junior's letter from the Birmingham Jail over the last
number of weeks and months, and after he names a few courageous
exceptions, he rightly confronts the complacency of the white
church and the struggle for civil rights in the 60s.
And he writes that many leaders had become, quote, more cautious
than courageous and have remained silent behind the
anesthetizing security of stained glass windows.
And King goes on to say that there was a time when the church
disturbed the power structures of society, not because it was
trying to be extreme or trendy or provocative, but because it
was faithful to carry out its purpose in the world, its
mission to show people what the the self giving, cruciform love
of Jesus looks like. And so wherever these early
Christians went, the powers noticed not because the church
was loud, not because it was antagonistic, but because it was
fundamentally different from any force that the world had known
to this point. And so, you know, I think
there's an echo between Mary's song and King's letter.
Doctor King isn't calling the church to outrage or to
spectacle. He isn't asking us to mirror the
anger of the world. He's asking us to remember who
we are, to recover the courage that flows from worship that's
animated by the kind of joy that we're looking at this week to
live like a people who actually believe that God has entered
history and that God is still at work in the Vineyard movement.
We talk all the time about this already and not yet nature of
the Kingdom. And this is just another moment
where we're faced with these two realities hand in hand, that the
the work of God, the disruptive announcement of the Kingdom of
Jesus has come crashing into the way that things are, and we find
ourselves continuing to wait for the full outworking of what that
means. And so, friends, I just would
want to remind us that genuine worship, while it's full of joy
and full of the acknowledgement of the character of God,
simultaneously refuses to make peace with injustice.
It names reality honestly. It trusts God enough to believe
that the world can be reordered. And Mary's song, I think, is
what Jesus Church sounds like when she's so full of joy that
she can still believe that God could turn the world upside
down, even in our moment. And Advent asks us whether we
still find ourselves believing that, too.
Could it be true that this kind of joy, the joy of Christ the
King, is still being born into the world right under our noses?
And so, friends, Advent joy is not denial.
It's not pretending that everything's fine.
It's not the thin, shallow cheerfulness that comes from
distraction or comfort. Advent joy is a kind of defiant
hope. It's the kind of joy that dares
to exist in a world that is both full of the activity and the
love of God and still at the same time feels heavy.
It's the joy that comes when you realize that God has already
begun the reordering, even when the evidence of that reordering
still feels thin. It's this desire for a world
made new that is a good desire. That longing is not naive or
misplaced. But we're reminded by this story
that the way that the world is remade is not finally, by our
own effort or by our own willpower.
It's remade by God taking on flesh, by God entering the mess
of human history and refusing to abandon it.
This is God's answer to the heaviness of the world.
We're not invited to escape from it.
We're invited to believe that somehow it's being transformed
from the inside out. God doesn't wait for things to
improve before showing up. God comes right into the ache,
into the confusion, into the fear, and begins the slow,
faithful work of making all things new.
And so friends, if you are weary or skeptical this week, if hope
feels a little fragile or hard to access, Advent Joy is not
asking you to fake anything. And so I'm praying.
I'm praying for you. I'm praying for our church this
week that we would know this kind of presence of God that
that shows up right in the middle of the ache, in the
middle of the confusion, the fear, the unrealized hopes or
dreams of our lives, whether that's in our lives, you know,
individually or our our life together in our community, in
our city. Friends, God has not stepped
away from your story and the reordering has already begun.
So as I close out, I just want to pray for every person
listening to this Lord, that you would give us the kind of grace
and peace that we need to live in this world over the next
week, that you would be giving joy, the kind of joy that can
sustain us in, in the midst of reality.
I pray for each person listening that there would be a, a sense
of what you're reordering in us. The, the, the things that we
love, the assumptions that we carry, the ways that we see the
world. Pray, come, Holy Spirit, give us
a kind of faith, a kind of attentiveness to the world
around us and to our neighbors that reflects the the love, the
grace and peace of Christ. Amen.