Advent Mercies

Let us pray, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, and may this advent bring us closer to the mercy you offer through the coming of the Christ among us. Amen

We are deep into Advent now, on tiptoes looking toward Christmas. We are almost to Bethlehem with the lighting of the third, and now fourth candles. Our waiting is coming to an end.  Over these weeks we have our signposts for this road:  hope, peace, love and today, joy.

Of the four Joy may seem to be the most elusive. Joy seems to have a life of its own. A rhythm of its own. We can study and ponder our faith, we can do acts of love. We can lean into hope. But joy? It’s like a butterfly that a lights  as it will, the trout  than can be lured but isn’t biting, the kiss that can’t be forced.

Joy is unpredictable, like the littlest angel dancing around the baby Jesus at our church’s Christmas pageant two weeks ago.  Did you see her, so thrilled that she was waving her wings as she touched the Christ Child?  Joy is like that—it can’t be planned.  It is sudden inspiration, often out of our reach, and yet what we so long to feel. Whether invited, beckoned, beguiled, joy will not be had. Joy is given, it is gift, it is grace.

Human life has infinite places where joy can be found, but none where joy can be manufactured.  Human life provides multiple avenues to joy, but no one can guarantee the arrival.  You can have the experience of joy once, and then go back to the same place at the same time and it will not be there as hope or expected.  Who has not, as a parent, friend, or lover, tried to recreate an experience and find it wanting, the expectation draining life from the reality?  We may find some reliable sources of joy, places that we know usually will lift us, but if we try too hard we will fall flat.  Music, art, nature, prayer, will yield joy only when we yield our demand that they do so.

Mary seems to have found her way to joy.  Her song, the Magnificat, is a jubilant poem that Luke has Mary exclaim soon after she hears that she will bear a very special son.  We can imagine that at first, for Mary, this news might have been met with dismay and shock.  Joy would come later, maybe after the fact, when the story had been told and retold and the reminiscences of this Jewish woman would be taken up by the evangelist as he proclaimed the coming of Christ to the world. It’s a remarkable literary construction, a call to action, a declaration of God’s intent for humanity, and an important vision of the realm of God.  The conventional winners, the rich, the rulers, get  their comeuppance  and the lowly are raised, the hungry fed. These are ancient  prophetic themes that  echo throughout Hebrew scripture.  Mary’s song is a riff on Hannah’s, the Hebrew woman who was the mother of Samuel.  When Hannah learned she was to be a mother, she also praised God with a joyous outburst.  Luke recapitulates this song to show that Jesus too would be a ruler, in the line of David, but a different kind.

Mary’s speech is a strong a political statement of the ordering of the world that can inspire much of our work for justice.  And it is more than that.

For this justice of God is not only about how politics and economics should reflect the equality of all people and meet basic human needs.  It is also about how we must change in order for the external world to change.  In our faith tradition, inner change is always linked to outer change and vice versa.  And Mary’s call to be the mother of Jesus , her response and her song , make that clear.

        One basic truth about change: it is never only about “them” the other guy, the other gal.  But it often looks like the other person or situation is the problem.  Who has not felt that if one’s partner, or child, or coworker, or the other political party would only change, be more reasonable, be more accommodating, reform itself, then the situation would be fine?  It doesn’t work that way, even if the other person or group seems to be grievously at fault.  Because we can never change that other, only ourselves.  If we focus on the other, we have no power, because the only power we have do have is to do something ourselves in relation to that situation or person.  This is true politically, as well as on a more personal level.  And the message from scripture agrees.  We are called to something deeper.  Our own inner transformation is equally important, the necessary first step.  As is echoed in other wisdom traditions as well:  as Gandhi said “Be the change you want to see in the  world.”

In Mary’s song there is a very intriguing  line that might help us understand the link between the inner and outer change we need. That line is “God has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.”  Another translation, a bit less cumbersome, is simply, “God has scattered the thoughts of the prideful.”  However we translate, basically I think this line means that God takes our human ideas of who  we are and who we think we should be and scatters and disrupts them.  And give us something better: life, true life.  And joy.

Our minds, including our imaginations and our thoughts comprise our greatest human capacities.  We depend on our minds for survival.  But our minds can also trip us up, cause problems and yes, even cause suffering. Our thoughts can cause us to think things that are not true, or jump to conclusions. When we review the past and can’t get beyond it, we suffer.  When we live only for tomorrow and not in today, we suffer.  When we live in our minds only, we lose something of the very stuff of living.  And our God is a living God, who wants us to live fully as the embodied creatures we are, in our hearts, in our guts, and not just in our heads.  One of the great theologians of the early church, Iranaeus of Lyons, said it best: the glory of God is the human being fully alive”

When we look at this phrase “God has scattered the proud,” though, we may balk.  I’m not proud, am I?  Is this text accusing me?  I thought I was on the side of the angels.

Most of us, I agree, do not think of ourselves as proud, in the puffed up, negative sense of that word.  We are not walking around like Muhammad Ali, saying I’m the greatest, or Kanye West acting like the center of attention.  But pride is a slippery concept.  It doesn’t necessarily mean superiority.  We can have certain expectations that masquerade as pride.  We can see ourselves as having to live up to a standard and that is a kind of prideful behavior. We may have self-image to keep up --to ourselves and others.

Craig Barnes, the Presbyterian theologian, and President of Princeton Theological Seminary, describes us this way:  “the typical American strives to be as attractive as a fashion model, as good a parent as Claire and Cliff Huxtabel, as successful in work as Bill Gates,…. all while maintaining the inner peace of  the Dalai Lama.”  To which we might add, as healthy as Dr. Oz, as financially solvent as Suzie Orman and with a house as beautifully decorated as Martha Stewart’s at Christmas.

Of course we fail and then we have the opposite problem, an insidious voice which says “ I’m not good enough”.  But both of these sides the “not good enough” and the “better than” are both false voices, false images.  

This is where our text helps us to see what is really important, in God’s realm.  God scatters these thoughts, these images and makes some space for a different way of living to take root.

When we scatter, we spread things, breaking them apart. This creates openings.  Holes.  Gaps.  Space.  We don’t like feeling scattered, it is a vulnerable place.  After all, we want to get our lives together.   We don’t want to have gaps and we especially don’t want other people to see the gaps we have.  How embarrassing, how awkward.  How human.

We might even say that our God is a God of the gaps, who longs for us to recognize our need, and then in mercy, responds to us.

        And to help us to see these needs, our human needs and our need for God, God scatters our thoughts and our ideas and our concepts and our self images.

God wants to enter into those gaps, those lowly places—and in mercy, lift us.  God want to enter into those gaps, and in mercy—love us just as we are.  In mercy—fill our hungers.  And in mercy—empower us to do the work of justice so that all will know of God’s will for the world.

Will we accept these advent mercies that our God so much wants to give us through the birth of Jesus?

 If we let ourselves, be scattered, open to the mercy of God, something new occurs.  The gaps, the openings, the space, they make room for joy.

Isn’t that what happened to Mary?  Certainly, the angel scattered her, a young peasant girl going about her daily business.  ”You will bear a son“.  How, she wanted to know?  She questioned the angel, worried, perplexed.  Then she opened to the news, and went on to consult with her elder, Elizabeth, who herself had been scattered by an unexpected pregnancy.  Mary saw that this was God’s way, and she burst forth in joyful song.

She sees that God is opening a new way to live, and her vision of the divine order, the realm of God breaking into our human life, gives us these mighty phrases that call us to the work of justice.  Justice combines with joy and a new way of being is born. 

God scatters and shakes our imaginations, our ideas of how things should be or will be.  God’s child is born in a stable, not a palace.  To a peasant girl, not a queen.  God finds us as we are, not as we think we are, or how we want to project being, or how we wish we were. God finds us just as we are and comes to us.

If we let God scatter us, shake us up a bit, upturn our expectations and overturn our habits, we make room for joy to enter.  And we are filled with a passion to do the work of justice, and to find creative solutions to human needs.

The imaginary life we have created, in our minds, the fantasies of how we want to be, perfect, or at least pretty close –we can let that go.  More, we can let go the voice which criticizes ourselves for not measuring up.  We can grant ourselves some advent mercies, given by a God who wants to be with us as friend and lover and companion.  The scattering of our false pride, false superiority, false self-criticism gives a place to the real person we are.  And that real, imperfect, human person is the one that God knows and loves.  And the one that God needs and inspires so that human life can fully flourish, for all of God’s people.

This is the good news that Mary's child was born to bring:  we are God’s beloved.  And that is a joy everlasting. Amen.