Advent 4, Year C | Luke 1:39-55
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
December 22, 2024
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
To watch the full service, please visit this page.
For the past few weeks we’ve been trying to adjust our focus and mindset from the stereotypical preparations the entirety of American culture associates with Christmas. Instead, we’ve been attempting to pay attention to the reality of Advent with its emphasis on the return of our great and powerful King. For those the current regime oppresses, that long-awaited coming is something to anticipate with fearful hope. For those of us doing just fine under the way things are, who are perfectly content to enjoy ourselves and profit under the present Empire, this news ought to be challenging, to say the least. The rules we’ve been playing by are about to change dramatically, and loyalty to our old ways of rebellion and idol worship is about to become a major liability. We’re going to need to make some major adjustments—and fast.
The good news in all of that is that we still have some time to prepare, time to choose to adapt to the culture of God’s Kingdom rather than undergo the trauma of sudden and dramatic change being forced upon us.
This morning, our final Sunday of Advent, I’d like to keep things simple. Love is coming. Love is very nearly here. Change is still possible. Change is still necessary.
We look to Mary’s song and hear her rejoice, but have any of us ever really paid attention to what she says? The Magnificat certainly is a song of joy, but it’s a joy found in relief, in escape from oppression and in light of desperately needed kindness and acceptance.
Despite how we’ve romanticized Mary and Elizabeth’s meeting over the centuries, imagining it through paintings of demure Medieval aristocracy politely greeting one another in Italian palace courtyards, Luke’s description of Mary’s flight strongly suggests otherwise. This wasn’t a well-planned visit wherein a younger woman skips next door to help her older, more pregnant relative with household chores and nursery planning. Taken literally, Luke says Mary was “made to go…with haste.”[1] This journey was not a choice: Mary appears to have snuck out of her village and fled for her life. And considering the distance between their homes and the very limited travel most 1st Century people would have had the opportunity to undertake, whether a blood relation or an unfamiliar yet matronly figure,[2] it’s unlikely that Mary and Elizabeth would have ever seen one another before Mary’s arrival.
Having found refuge in the midst of her pain and fear, Mary’s words erupt as much from defiance as relief. God was indeed with her. Those who rejected her and sought to harm her would not succeed. Even in her world of aggression, violence, and oppression, kindness and mercy could still find a foothold. And so she sings.
She sings her gratitude to God, who looks upon the degraded and humiliated and sees them in their distress. She praises the one who sees past present circumstance and honors the downtrodden. She thanks God for the small mercies that have gently gathered to preserve her life in exile.
At the same time, she proclaims the reality of God’s reign, the inversion our society can and should expect when God truly intervenes in human affairs: the arrogant winnowed like chaff, those most esteemed seized directly from their seats of power, the wealthy banished in destitution.
Last week I asked that we attempt to see ourselves clearly, that we set aside our ingrained presumptions of victimhood and persecution and note where each of us truly stands within society. Despite how we’d like to identify, few of us will ever truly fit the model of Mary. Sadly, most of us are far more likely to behave like the villagers who cast her out. Whether from a sense of pride, of not wishing to be seen with those kinds of people, or possibly from fear, desperately attempting to excise a curse from among us, we’re most likely to function as those who would reject or even oppress someone who doesn’t fit our accepted standards of society.
But even if we discover that we are the villagers, we still have an opportunity. We can choose a different path: we can aspire to be like Elizabeth—to welcome the stranger, to provide relief from terrible circumstances, to recognize the dignity and worth of those the rest of our culture would prefer to expel.
Love is coming—suddenly and unexpectedly. Will we be able to join Elizabeth as witnesses to Mary’s defiant joy, sharing mercy and providing an end to her exodus? Or will we remain as we are until we find ourselves to be the ones cast down from our thrones and freshly exiled possessing nothing but our own names?
Love is coming. Where will we find ourselves when it finally sets the world to right?
[1] Luke 1:39 | my translation
[2] The term Luke uses functions much like “auntie” in a variety of modern cultures.