Reflection by Christine for December 12, 2010

Advent 3

There is a story of a young man who lived in an isolated house on a hill. Some would say this was a God-forsaken place for a young man to live alone. But, one thing fascinated him about where he lived. Each night he would look out into the darkness and see a light. The light was far away on a hilltop but this sign of life was a symbol of hope for him.
One day the young man decided to go in search of the source of the light. It was a long and lonely walk and it was dark before he reached the outskirts of a town. Tired and hungry, he knocked at the first door he came to and explained his search for the mysterious light that had always given him hope.
"I know it!", exclaimed the woman who answered the door, "It gives me hope as well." And as she said this she raised her arm and pointed back in the direction from which the young man had come.
There, on the horizon, was a single light shining brightly. A sign of life in the darkness. The light from his own house.

(Brian Woodcock, "December 13" in GROWING HOPE: Daily Readings, Wild Goose Publications, 2006)

The light of God's presence is behind us and before us and we each carry the light of God's spirit within us wherever we travel. God's presence with the ancestors, with current generations and the promise of God's continuing presence in the future is a consistent theme throughout both the Hebrew and Christian scriptures and throughout the experience of countless generations of people of faith. It is one of the reasons that in our Christian tradition we ritually light a candle on each of the four Sundays in the Advent season to remember the hope, peace, joy and love that are God's gifts born anew in our lives.

Today's scripture readings reflect the wonder and joy of the immeasurable possibilities of new life in God's creation. Isaiah waxes poetic about the desert rejoicing and blossoming abundantly. As if to make sure his readers really understand the wonder of this transformation Isaiah uses many ways to describe the bleakness of life, in the wilderness, dry land, desert, burning sand, thirsty ground, which was present before God's transforming touch. The analogy of the wilderness and of a seemingly hopeless situation being transformed by life-giving water would not have been lost on Judean people in Babylon who were the first listeners of these words of hope. They were an exiled people thirsting for the promise of a better life for their children and grandchildren.

Matthew, on .the other hand, reveals the view that the ancient prophecies and long-held hopes of the people are being fulfilled in the life and ministry of Jesus. Lives are being transformed, hope is born anew in the inbreaking of God's reign of love and justice in small everyday miracles and in extravagantly wondrous ways. One line in today's reading from Matthew jumped out at me as an important connection with today's passage from Luke. The line, spoken by Jesus: "and the poor have good news brought to them", is a common theme in both of today's gospel readings.

Luke's gospel is all about good news to the poor, the marginalized, the oppressed, those without voice or power in their culture, social and religious structures. The good news in the gospel of Luke speaks of a new world order; a new day when there are radical reversals of fortunes and the poor will have enough of everything they need. And the rich; well there won't be any who are very rich because they'll have shared what they have so that everyone has enough.

Throughout his recounting of Jesus birth, life, death and resurrection, Luke systematically tells stories which reveal the transformative qualities of God's commonwealth beginning in common ways to people of lowly birth and circumstance. As one commentary put it, "there is the repeated affirmation [in Luke's gospel] that God hears the cries of oppressed people, and that the lowly and powerless are more likely to be open to hearing and seeing and experiencing God's work in the world." (Dennis Bratcher, 2010)

The very first stories which Luke records are stories where the most unlikely people are the purveyors of God's grace and blessing. In a time and culture where women were not seen as being persons in their own right, Elizabeth and Mary emerge at the very beginning of Luke's gospel as blessed by God in ways that could not have been imagined for women of lowly birth. Elizabeth, a woman who was "getting on in years" had been barren but was now pregnant, in her sixth month, with the baby who would become John the Baptizer. Her relative, Mary, was also pregnant and was destined to bear the baby who would later be recognized as the messiah; the liberator of her people. "Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb," says Elizabeth to Mary. In response, Mary sings a song of praise to God.

Mary's song, or the Magnificat as it is also known, is a subversive song of praise for God who has looked with favour on a lowly person and will bring down the powerful from their thrones, lift up the lowly, fill the hungry with good things and send the rich away empty. (Luke 1:52-54) Perhaps the words of Mary's song didn't sound too radical to you when we were reading the text responsively a few minutes ago. But, in the context in which Mary lived, under the full weight of Roman imperial rule, her people lived in survival mode barely eking out a daily living. There were countless people who were dispossessed and marginalized and it was these, masses, for whom the gospel message was not only hopeful but liberating.

In Luke's gospel everyone is recognized as important. Women, those of lowly birth, even shepherds who were close to the bottom of the hierarchical system of the day were viewed in Luke's gospel as valued in the sight of God. It is important to note that in the story of Jesus' birth,
as told by Luke, it is shepherds wandering in the wilderness tending their sheep who are the first to be notified of the birth of the messiah and the first to go and pay him homage.

...Back to Mary's Song. We can see how it would be a subversive message in her time and place. What is not so readily seen in our contemporary North American context is that it is still a radical call for liberation for many people in our world today. So powerful are these words of liberation that in the 1980s, at the height of military violence and repression in Guatemala, public reading of the Magnificat was banned. I recently read that it was also banned during the 1970s by the Argentinian military junta when utilized by the Mothers of the Disappeared and also during the 1930s in Mexico, to name a few examples.

I was also interested to find a quote from the writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer regarding Mary's Song:

The song of Mary is the oldest Advent hymn. It is at once the most passionate, the wildest, one might say the most revolutionary advent hymn ever sung. This is not the gentle, tender, dreamy Mary whom we sometimes see in paintings...This song has none of the sweet, nostalgic, or even playful tones of our Christmas carols. It is instead a hard, strong, inexorable song about collapsing thrones and humbled lords of this world... These are the tones of the women prophets of the Old Testament that now come to life in Mary's mouth. (Internet source)

When I was in Guatemala in 1999, as part of my theological education, I witnessed first hand the powerful message of liberation in the gospels as seen through the eyes of people of great faith who had suffered unimaginable horrors. The people that I met were some of the indigenous peoples of Guatemala. They are people who are strengthened by their belief that God is a God of justice and that one day justice will prevail in their homeland. They also are dedicated Christians whose reading of the gospels directly speaks to their experience of oppression and marginalization. When Jesus speaks through the gospels about liberating the poor and oppressed, they know he is speaking directly to them. They have no difficulty in seeing how the gospel stories connect to their experiences. The gospel stories offer them a stubborn and subversive hope for the future.

Mary's Song also contains a vital message of hope for our North American context. The affluence and privilege that are prevalent in Canada and the United States has not created entirely just societies free of social stigma and inequality. A Congregational minister in the United States named, A. Stephen Van Kuiken, says that Mary's Song contains a vital message for North Americans:

  It still is a subversive hope
           for full equality for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered
people, not separate and unequal status.
  It still is a subversive hope
           for a humane and just immigration policy...for we are all
           immigrants or descendant of them....
  It still is a subversive hope
           for fairness towards workers, not just for those "too big to fail", but for the millions
          of those "too small to be heard", those who who have no jobs, no health care,
          and who are living on the brink.
  It still is a subversive hope!

I'll close with words of hope and commitment to action from the same source:

Let it be to us
            to live lives of love and justice
            with our fellow human beings.
 Let it be to us 
            to work for a peaceful world.
  Let it be to us
            that there should be hunger no more.
  Let it be to us
            that we have new life of freedom
            from our fears, from our past failures,
            and from the chains of our aspirations.
  Let it be to us
          that we expect the miracle of justice, compassion and equality being born
          in our lives.

May it be so this day and in the days to come.

Amen