Singing of Joy December 14, 2008

Singing of Joy A sermon based upon Luke 1:47-55

Movie clip - The Nativity Story

A couple of Christmases ago when this text came up, I told you the story of a friend of mine from Iran, who at 14 was married to her high school English teacher, a man twice her age. He and her parents came to an agreement, and she simply had to do it. So she was married at 14 and had her first child at 15. Shortly after her daughter was born her husband decided to go to school in the US, to get a PhD, and she had to go with him. She was terrified, she said - having to leave her village and go to a new country with a baby, not speaking English, not knowing anything about the culture or the world around her.

This is a very old practice, predating even the story of the nativity. Mary was betrothed to Joseph in an agreement made between him and her parents. What was her response? While I think the rest of the movie gets a little sappy from time to time, Mary’s reaction to being married off is less than enthusiastic. She is sullen, somewhat argumentative, and clearly doesn’t want to get married. Then, God intervenes and she becomes pregnant. She goes to be with her cousin, to spend some time thinking.

When Mary returns from visiting Elizabeth, and it is clear she is pregnant, her parents are angry, Joseph considers cancelling the agreement, and in fact she could be stoned. Of course she was terrified.

But somewhere in all this turmoil, there is a part of her which refuses to be put down or put aside. She is going to wear her pregnancy and wear it openly. She reaches a point where she believes that she is meant to have this child, for whatever reason - so knowing that she could be disowned by her family, cut off by Joseph, and even stoned for committing adultery, she still somehow finds faith to be open to the unprecedented event, and trust that God knows what will happen.

Perhaps she recognised that regardless of how it happened, the child is not at fault in any way. Perhaps her acceptance was a way of stating again the sanctity of all life. While the commandments said “No killing”, stoning was allowable for adultery, sending a woman away to live as a prostitute or beggar was considered appropriate. Culturally, women had little status. The religious “laws” which supported the cultural ethos were man-made, not God-given. Somewhere she gets the strength to trust God, and hold to her determination to have the baby. She moves from a sullen girl in a snit, to a strong woman of faith.

Into the text comes a song - lifted from the Hebrew Scriptures, the song of Hannah - not quite word for word, but close enough - words inserted 75 years later when the text was being written. We know Luke wrote this text, and he states right up front he is writing down what he has been told by someone else. So he doesn’t know whether or not Mary was happy - it’s a story, handed down by word of mouth and embellished along the way.

We can look at this on two levels: first, Mary herself and the cultural conditions she lived in. The text is a story of turning the recognised way of things upside down. God has given a gift - and not to the wealthy people one would expect a king to be born to, but to a young peasant girl in a backwater village in a tiny country under occupation. Her family are labourers - not quite untouchables, but close enough. People who make their living by manual labour are the bottom of the social and economic heap. So the one who is to free Israel from its oppression is being born to a nobody, nowhere. And Mary recognises that to God, that’s exactly the idea - to turn everyone’s preconceived notions upside down, and do something no one expects. In this turnabout, the rich are sent home with nothing, while the poor are fed; the proud are scattered, the mighty are taken down from their thrones. - and the most stunning part of all, God comes to a simple young girl who is to be married off by her parents against her will.

In the movie, Mary and Joseph encounter one of the old shepherds, on a cold night on their way to Bethlehem. The shepherd tells Mary “My father once told me God gives each one of us gift. Your gift is what you carry inside you.”

The great Reformers in the church didn’t give a lot of attention to Mary, and given that God’s grace was central to their faith, Mary probably should have had more attention. She illustrated that every one of us is a passive and virgin recipient of God’s calling. Christianity is a religion of what God has done for us and to us. Mary herself speaks of God gracing a “humble servant”.

But the idea is not that we remain passive recipients. While Mary received the gift, she then took an active role. God graces us so that we will be active and creative, but at the root of everything is God’s initiative and grace. Everything that is comes from God; every hope for the redemption of all things comes from God. If we think in these terms, how can we fail to realise that we are all Mary, made pregnant with the gifts of God’s grace.

In our lives, we tend to think that we are in control, we are in charge - or that we should be in control and in charge - and when things don’t go in our preconceived way, we panic. We use same approach for our politics, for our finances, for the running of our church, for everything. We have built up elaborate props around ourselves and our systems which we rely on. We pay lip service to God’s grace, but when it comes to the bottom line we think we are the ones who make everything work. We don’t want to do what God calls us into.

And so I hold up Mary, the humble servant - a young woman at the bottom of the social scale, selected by God to receive a great gift. Each of us at Glen Ayr is also to be a humble servant, and we have each been selected by God. We are individually, and collectively, the humble, barefoot recipients of a grace and a call that are the foundation of all we can ever hope to accomplish. Maybe God needs us to continue to sing the song of creation, which came down through the ages, through Mary, and more like her. Maybe raising our voices in joy for the grace of God giving us each a unique gift is our purpose. May it be so.