Micah 5:2-5a
Hebrews 10:5-10
Luke 1:39-55

God be in my words and in my speaking; God be in our hearts and in our understanding. AMEN.

There’s a lot going on, theologically, in the lessons appointed for this morning. In the passage from the Hebrew Scriptures, the prophet Micah make a prediction that has been interpreted as pertaining to the coming of the Messiah. Bethlehem figures in the familiar Christmas stories in the Gospels; it was commonly understood to be the place from which the Messiah would originate — and this passage from Micah is one of the reasons for that understanding: “…from you shall come forth for me one who is to rule in Israel, whose origin is from of old, from ancient days…” As Christians, this passage speaks to us of the Incarnation of Christ; but our Jewish brothers and sisters, who are still waiting for the Messiah, hear this differently. Micah’s words hold, for the Jewish people, the promise of what will be; it is a vision of — a hope for — the changes the Messiah’s coming will finally bring: “He shall stand and feed his flock in the strength of the Lord…And they shall live secure, for now he shall be great to the ends of the earth; and he shall be the one of peace…” But, beautiful as this passage is, it poses a bit of a problem for us Christians, since our Messiah’s coming — Jesus’ coming — did not in fact usher in a time of prosperity, peace, and security — or at least, it hasn’t yet.

In the passage from the Christian letters appointed for today, the author of the letter to the Hebrews is trying to make sense of the coming of Christ by interpreting the Incarnation within the context of the Hebrew tradition of offerings and sacrifices. Some of the prophets’ writings express the idea that God doesn’t really want all the rituals that have grown up. “Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired…in burnt offerings and sin offerings you have taken no pleasure.” Within this framework, the Incarnation provides the ultimate sacrificial animal — God’s anointed one — who can, by his willing sacrifice, atone not just for some sins, but for all sin. “And it is by God’s will that we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.”

And in the lesson from Luke’s Gospel, we have the story of the meeting of Mary and Elizabeth: two pregnant women, bearing children of promise, who experience, in each other’s company, moments of profound revelation. “Blessed are you among women,” Elizabeth cries out, “and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me?” And Mary responds with the Magnificat: one of the most powerful — and subversive — expressions of God’s love and compassion for the poor and the oppressed. “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. … His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.”

This is powerful and beautiful poetry; it’s unexpected and amazing theology; it’s subversive and revolutionary politics; and — like the passage from Micah — it isn’t an accurate description of the world, either during Mary’s lifetime, or today. As I was pondering all this, I happened to ask Ernie what he made of Mary’s song in Luke’s Gospel. He shrugged and said, “Her reality-testing skills are weak.” It was actually a very helpful comment, because it helped me to crystallize an insight with which I’ve been struggling all Advent. You see, there’s such a lot of tension, during the Advent and Christmas seasons, between the beautiful, poetic predictions of the coming of the Messiah, and the rather gritty reality that, in spite of Jesus’ Incarnation, still surrounds us. If, in the words of Mary’s song, God “has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty,” then why are there still so many who suffer hunger, and so many who have far more than they need? If God “has brought down the powerful … and lifted up the lowly,” then why are there still such huge divisions between the strong and the weak, the powerful and the powerless, the rich and the poor? If the coming of the Messiah will (as Micah predicts) usher in a time of security and peace, then why is the world still torn by war, and threatened by violence, terror, and disaster?

Micah predicts that the Messiah “shall stand and feed his flock in the strength of the Lord … and they shall live secure, for now he shall be great to the ends of the earth; and he shall be the one of peace.” And Mary proclaims: “[God] has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly.” But unlike Micah’s vision, Mary’s proclamation is set in the past tense, not the future tense: “He has brought down the powerful…” not “He will bring down the powerful.” Mary’s words sound like a description of something that had actually happened before (maybe just before) her words were uttered: neither a hope, nor a vision of the future, but something already realized. I’m not enough of a linguist to make a scholarly case for this, but I’ve always had the feeling that Mary was putting into words an insight, a conviction about what God was doing through her, and in the child she carried. Ernie’s rather flippant comment helped me to recognize that in the Magnificat, Mary wasn’t talking about an observable reality; she wasn’t describing events that had (already) occurred; instead, she was trying to express a revelation about something happening: something immediate, current, constantly in process; something in the now. Mary was attempting to articulate her discernment of a process, of God at work; she was not rejoicing over a finished product of God’s creative energy. Listen to what happens if we recast the passage in the present tense, to capture the sense that Mary is talking about what God is doing, not what God has already done: “In this holy child that I carry, God is showing strength…; God is scattering the proud… Through this child, God is filling the hungry with good things, and sending the rich away empty…”

In her song, Mary recognized and celebrated God at work in and through her and her unborn son; and the work Mary celebrated wasn’t over when the babe in the manger drew his first breath. The new thing God began in the Incarnation continued throughout Jesus’ earthly ministry; there were important choice points and transformational experiences along the way, but the work wasn’t over with Jesus’ Baptism, or the temptations in the wilderness; it wasn’t over on Good Friday, when Jesus on the Cross gave up his spirit. It wasn’t over with the Resurrection, either. In fact, what we need to recognize is that that work is still going on; the Incarnation is an ongoing process and its ramifications are still being worked out, in the world, in the life of the Church, and in each of our lives as Christians. In the Incarnation, God chose to be born a human being in order to touch and transform human lives — and not simply the lives of the Disciples and the people of the time in which Jesus of Nazareth lived, but all lives, all times. When God became a human being, that transformative moment touched and changed everything; like a stone cast into a still pool, the forces of that event are still rippling outward, moving things, changing things, stirring things in unpredictable and unexpected ways. Because Mary bore her son, because Jesus accepted his mission and ministry, because the disciples spread his teachings, people’s lives changed; the shape of the world and the course of history were changed; and some two thousand years down the timeline, through the people who have been transformed by Christ, God is still filling the hungry with good things, challenging the proud and the powerful, and lifting up the lowly. We are all a part of this; we are all caught up in the transformative work of the Incarnation. It’s sometimes hard to talk (or even think) about it; God’s work takes place at a very, very, very slow speed. It happens so incrementally that, often, we can’t begin to perceive it. But we are part of it; like the cells that make up our bodies, or the atoms that make up all matter, we are miniscule — but integral — pieces of God’s creative, transformative work: each unique, each necessary. We can’t know, at any given point, how it will all turn out; we can’t tell, about any given action, whether it will yield positive or negative results in the wider plan. We can’t even define or comprehend precisely what the wider plan is; we only perceive faint reflections of it in the words of the prophets, in the visions of the mystics, in the inspirations of artists and musicians, in the sacraments, and even (occasionally) in the teachings and traditions of the church.

In this season of Advent, it is my prayer that we will take courage from the knowledge that we have (each and all) a role in the transformative work of the Incarnation; and that, strengthened by that courage and inspired by the Spirit, we will discern new and unexpected ways to open ourselves up to God’s creative energy and power, so that through our work and witness, our brothers and sisters may experience the Divine Love that chose to be born, to live, to die, and to rise, for our redemption.

In the Name of Christ, AMEN.

Sermon preached by Beth Hilgartner
at St. Barnabas’, Norwich, Vt.