Fierce Joy
“Fierce Joy” by Pastor Rosanna McFadden
Good morning! It is the third Sunday of Advent; you’ll remember — of course you all remember — that two weeks ago I promised that my Advent sermons were going to go from a very wide-angle, long lens view of God’s work in history and Creation to a very tight focus on a specific and unique mother and child. Last week we heard from a couple of prophets — Isaiah and John the baptizer, as well as a carpenter and an angel.
This morning’s text is a well-known one, so storied that it has it’s own title: the Magnificat. This title comes from the first line which says, “My soul magnifies the Lord.” The person who gives voice to this text is Mary, the mother of Jesus, and it is the longest recorded speech by a woman in the Bible. According to Christian tradition, it wasn’t simply spoken, but was sung by Mary. If you look at the text in the first chapter of Luke, it certainly seems like in the midst of conversation, Mary breaks into poetry. Advent: the musical. This text has been set to music by scores of composers: it was and still is chanted in monastic communities and has musical settings composed by Bach, Vivaldi, Mozart, Schubert and other folks who are so famous that they’re recognizable even without me having to use their first names. We’re going to sing a version of this text set to a folk tune at the end of the service—just so you know.
Theologians. too, have had a lot to say about this text. Before we get into the text and context ourselves, listen to this quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I quoted Bonhoeffer last week. He was a German theologian who spoke out against the Nazi regime when many Christians — German and otherwise — did not. This is from an Advent sermon in 1933 — 81 years ago.
“The song of Mary is the oldest Advent hymn. It is at once the most passionate, the wildest, one might even 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 some of our Christmas carols. It is instead a hard, strong, inexorable song about the power of God and the powerlessness of humankind.”
If we had only this section from Luke which Karen read this morning, the speaker and the context might not be immediately evident. We wouldn’t know if the speaker is male or female; the references to God’s strength and bringing down the powerful and lifting up the lowly suggest some kind of military battle or change of political leadership. Naming Israel and Abraham and his descendants means a Jewish context, for sure. A Jewish revolutionary, maybe? Not a bad guess, and probably accurate, but it can be challenging to line up that image with a pregnant, unmarried, probably teen-age young woman. Who taught that girl to sing like that?
Most of what we know, or think we know, about Mary comes from Luke’s gospel. We know she lived in the Galilean town of Nazareth and was engaged to a man named Joseph. After an angel told her she had found favor with God and would conceive a child by the Holy Spirit, and she agreed to that plan, Mary walked across the hills of Judea to see her much-older cousin, Elizabeth, who was well into her own pregnancy. Elizabeth had her own story, and she was the only one who could tell it, because her husband, Zechariah, had lost the power of speech since before their child was conceived. His encounter with the angel Gabriel didn’t go as smoothly as Mary’s; Zechariah’s incredulity left him speechless, while Mary’s obedience filled her with triumphant song.
That song happened when Mary entered Elizabeth’s home, and Elizabeth’s baby (not yet born) leapt for joy at Mary’s greeting. We know that Elizabeth’s son would be named John, and become the prophet John the Baptist whom we heard from last week. There is a lot of awareness of God going on in that home, from some pretty unlikely people — an older woman, a pregnant teenager, and an unborn baby. The official religious representative in that home — Zechariah, the priest–is silent.
This set-up all by itself should make us sit up and take notice of what Mary has to say. It might also make us wonder who that song is for. It is obviously a message of praise to God, but there’s also a lot of encouragement for the lowly, the poor, the hungry, and the generally down-trodden. Of course, the Hebrew scriptures are riddled with messages like this. Prophets, who speak for God, have a soft spot for those who have been oppressed: the poor, the hungry, the imprisoned, the widow and the orphan. Prophets, as we noted last week, also have a way of being really annoying to people in power. Nobody who’s sitting on a throne is going to just step down without a fight, and if you’re rich, being sent away empty is not the way you are accustomed to being treated.
Mary’s song has been a rallying cry for liberation and justice, especially in 1950s and 60s Latin America, where it was displayed by women whose sons had been kidnapped and killed by government forces. Probably the greatest testament to the power of these biblical words is their history of being banned, in Christian countries, because they were so incendiary. Public reading of this passage of Luke was banned in colonial India and Guatemala and Argentina in the 1970s and 80s. It has inspired and empowered community organizers in the United States, such as Dottie Stevens. Dottie was from East Boston and married at age 16 and a mother soon afterward. Dottie joined the National Welfare Rights Union and spent most of the rest of her life fighting for justice and mercy for the poor, for mothers to put hot food on the table and have heat and hot water during the cold winter months. Dottie died in 2014 after a battle with cancer. She was an abuse survivor, teenage wife, and freedom fighter.[1]
Jesus’ mother Mary is a complex character: we should not restrict her to a being a revolutionary firebrand any more than we should keep her kneeling by a manger, forever meek and chaste and serene about giving birth unattended in appalling conditions. If that were all we know about this girl, we should admire her determination and grit. But a light which shines through Mary’s story, even in a dim and grimy stable, is the light of joy. Where does that joy come from, bright and fierce and lovely? Like every good gift, I believe that joy comes from God. The deep, fierce joy which I read in Mary’s story comes from knowing and accepting how she was part of God’s purpose. Knowing and accepting and participation in God’s purpose. I believe the biggest dis-service we do to Mary is to make her a passive player in the Advent narrative. Not only does that rob Mary of the chance to be a joyful participant in the story, it isn’t even a good reading of the gospel. Whoever taught that girl to sing, she is belting it out. There is no way to make the words of Luke 1:46-55 insipid and powerless. No one bothers to forbid songs that are sentimental and sweet, sentimental and sweet doesn’t shake anything up.Mary had the chuzpah to ask questions of an angel and to consider and consent to her own destiny. She didn’t ask her parents, she didn’t ask her fiancée, she agreed to do what the angel said God wanted her to do. She could not have known where that decision would take her — we never do. But there is joy in knowing that our will is aligned with God’s will. That doesn’t mean that we won’t have doubts about whether we’re wise enough, prepared enough, or strong enough; I can imagine that Mary wondered all of those things — how could she not? But what this magnificent song tells me is that although Mary had to know she was an unmarried teenager from a backwater town, she chose to subscribe to the bigger reality that God is the Mighty One who has done great things for her and would accomplish great things through her. She had the fierce joy of knowing that future generations would call her blessed. We are still calling her blessed, and God is still at work to accomplish mercy, justice, and freedom. Mary’s song is not only praise for what has happened, it is joy for what God is still doing. Every song we raise at Advent and Christmas should be praise for what God has already done and joy for what God is still doing, because the story is not over yet. May our spirits continue to rejoice in God our Savior. Amen.
[1] Song of Revolutionary Mothers Savina J. Martin kairoscenter.org