Brothers and sisters, grace and peace to you from God our Creator, Jesus Christ our Redeemer, and from the Holy Spirit, present and active in our midst this morning. Amen.
First, turn to your neighbor and take a minute or two to answer this question: what are the things you need to feel like you’re celebrating Christmas?
For me, it seems like food plays a big role. Kristin and I were in Alex yesterday and on a whim I looked for potato sausage at the market. Lo and behold, I found some, so now I’m excited to go home tonight and cook up my first batch of potato sausage. Next year I’m going to try to make ostkaka, the Swedish cheesecake my grandmother always made for Christmas dinner.
Today is the Fourth Sunday in Advent, but it’s also the day before Christmas, so naturally our minds and hearts are moving ahead already to the celebration soon to come. I know that some of you have already welcomed family home for the holidays – and I know that many more are on their way. Some of you already have meals cooking for tonight’s Christmas Eve feast. You’ve been shopping for those things that make Christmas special, the traditions that have come to mean so much to you and your family. This week of the Feast of the Nativity is a week loaded with meaning and tradition and celebration, and it is a time that the church and the world considers blessed deeply with God’s presence.
But no matter how much we might try to hold on to those special traditions, we know that nothing lasts forever, don’t we? My family will hold a different kind of celebration this year, because my grandmother, Ruth Johnson, died just after Christmas last year. There’s no celebration at Grandma’s house this year; no ostkaka, no lutefisk, no potato sausage, no wassail steaming in the pot on the counter. Yesterday marked the tenth anniversary of my Grandpa Johnson’s funeral, another time of great change for us as a family. For us, Christmas has marked changes over the past ten years, and it’s been a time when we’ve sometimes found it difficult to celebrate.
However, not all change is painful. This Advent has been a very special time for Kristin and me, as we look forward to the advent of our own little one and the massive changes she will bring into our lives. When we went to see “The Nativity Story” we were both struck by the new emotional connection we made with Mary and Joseph; this year, more than any other, we understood the fear and the awe they must have felt as they waited for the arrival of their baby boy. Kristin was moved to tears more than once, and even though it was a good movie, I think the emotional connection with our soon-to-arrive family was the difference. Our friends Nate and Audrey are celebrating a Christmas unlike any other this year: in March they adopted brothers from Ethiopia and brought them home to Minnesota. Now Bereket, who’s 5, and Eshetu, who’s 2, are going out of their minds waiting to see their first snow. This is a year of massive change for them, and these changes have brought out deep joy in Nate and Audrey – we think it’s a wondrous thing to behold.
We tie all kinds of traditions and special remembrances on to the arrival of Christmas, traditions we’d like to get set in stone if we could. But the advent of God’s Son into flesh and bone and blood was a titanic upheaval in the order of things, and nowhere in scripture do we see this more clearly than in the Magnificat, Mary’s song praising God for the change that is soon to come into the world. In the eyes of the world around her, there was nothing remarkable about Mary. She was a child of a devout Jewish family, a daughter born to be married and be the mother of a family in Nazareth. Her betrothal to Joseph must have been the occasion for great celebration for her family; in her marriage to Joseph, she was making bonds under which she would live for the rest of her life, sheltered and protected from a world where women without husbands or children had to rely on begging to survive. She was not the daughter of a noble house, or the daughter of a poor family; what we can tell from scripture suggests that in today’s world she and Joseph were solidly middle-class citizens, content but not rich, average in every sense of the word.
That was before her pregnancy, however – and that pregnancy would have changed everything. In the eyes of the world, Mary would have been greatly shamed by her pregnancy, and it could have ruined her betrothal to Joseph. Joseph had the right to have her stoned to death for breaking the covenant of their engagement. In some ways, the mercy of Joseph the carpenter prepared the world for the mercy of Jesus; as this baby Jesus was saved from a death by stoning, so would the man Jesus save others from stoning. Joseph’s willingness to believe God’s promises and Mary’s faith in what God was doing through her pregnancy brought great change into the world; the first change was the out-of-wedlock, commonplace birth of the king of kings.
Mary’s song praising God for what is about to happen reveals change upon change upon change, for Mary, for her cousin Elizabeth and for the world in which they live. Mary begins by praising God for this shameful, dangerous pregnancy that has put her in a very delicate situation with her family and her husband-to-be: “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior…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.” We read this knowing that in centuries to come, Mary was indeed called Blessed, but in her time and in her world that certainly wouldn’t have been the case. Mary believed God’s promises more than she believed the world around her. Mary believed that the world would change before God’s promises would change, and her song continued to declare to the world how that change would come about: “God has scattered the proud…God has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly…God has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty…” Again, Mary is singing of changes that are yet to be – and in many ways God is still bringing those changes into the world. We know for a fact that the rich are still rich, the powerful are still powerful, and the poor and hungry still struggle to survive. Mary knew this, too – but she sang praises to God for the changes her son would bring into the world, and she believed with all her heart that the God who was carrying her through her pregnancy would bring about the changes of which she was now singing.
There is a sense of deep awe and majestic wonder in Mary’s Magnificat. Deep awe because God chose her, a common, unremarkable virgin, to bear God’s only Son; majestic wonder because if God could do this, what could be impossible for this child in her womb? The mystery of what was happening was made stronger and deeper by the reaction of Elizabeth’s unborn child to the presence of Mary and her own unborn child. As the world would one day leap for joy at the coming of the Christ Child, so John leapt for joy at the advent of his cousin and his Savior. Elizabeth herself was filled with awe and wonder when she realized what was happening: “Why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me?” It was revealed to Elizabeth that a great and mighty change was coming, and that nothing would ever be the same again. In those moments, Elizabeth became a prophet because she saw clearly what was happening, and she gave voice to what God was doing through herself and Mary.
Today, two millennia after the birth of Jesus, it can be difficult to think about how the birth of Christ changes everything. After all, the poor are still the poor, the hungry are still the hungry, and the rich and powerful are still the rich and powerful. We are the rich and powerful, even though we fool ourselves into believing otherwise; after all, do we not have the luxury of fighting to maintain our Christmas traditions? If Mary’s song is to come true in our lifetimes, we are in for a change, but we might not think that change is so good. But the far greater change we should consider is how the presence of Christ is transforming our lives. Advent is not a time to think only of the coming of Christ two thousand years ago – Advent is a time to prepare for Christ coming into our lives in the present, and the change that presence will work in us. Christ is alive, brothers and sisters, and through the Holy Spirit Christ will change your life forever. No dead traditions here – no empty observances without meaning or substance – Advent is a time to pray for Christ to bring the deep awe and majestic wonder of Mary and Elizabeth into our lives, today, here and now.
When I told you that I need food to feel like it’s Christmas, I was only telling you part of the truth. I need the Magnificat to know that Christmas is drawing near. I need Mary’s song of wonder and joy because I hear in her words the promises and changes I want God to make in my own life, and I pray with Mary for the fulfillment of all of it. Christmas is coming, friends, and Christmas means change. May your lives be changed with the coming of the Christ child. Let us pray:
God of humility and innocence, God of wonder and miracle, we give thanks today for your power and presence in our midst. In Jesus – his birth, his life and ministry, his death and resurrection – you have shown us that greatness can emerge out of vulnerability, and that with you, all things are indeed possible.
This morning, God, we ask that you guide our journey to the stable. May all your people gather this night around the Holy Family, bringing hopes, fears, joy, sorrow, delight and most of all love into our circle of adoration. May we hear the song of the angels as the birth is announced and may our voices ring out with praise at the miracle of it all.
Eternal God, in the name of the tiny babe of Bethlehem, we pray for all humankind…for the strong and the weak, for the poor and the wealthy, for oppressed and oppressor. May all kneel together at the manger, seeking help, healing and hope.
God of comfort, swaddle us in the safe closeness of your divine embrace, and bring us peace. May your name be praised and glorified on this day of wonder, and forever more.[1] Amen.
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