18 December 2011

What is baptism? It’s an Advent Conspiracy.
“Love all”
4 Advent B
The Magnificat – Luke 1:46-55
18 December 2011


We’ve finally made it.
Yes, today we come to the end of our Advent journey … and granted, it’s been a bumpy one.
We began three weeks ago with the usual First Sunday in Advent words of apocalypse … Jesus’ warnings and encouraging about The End, his coming again.
Then we had our two weeks with John the Baptist … this year’s visit, some might say, mercifully short, no cursing the people, “You brood of vipers,” but still, there he was, hair shirted, ranting in the wilderness.
But remember … this year, we’ve laid two other themes on top of the Scriptures. Both are faithful to the texts … both are faithful to the sense of the season.
The first – our year-long focus – is on Baptism.
And the second – perhaps controversial to some – is the reform movement known as Advent Conspiracy. We’ve heard so far three of the four points of that reform of this season … Worship Fully, Spend Less, and Give More.
Maybe … with those texts, with those prominent themes; combined with life as it plays out for us, personally, corporately … maybe it hasn’t felt like, maybe it hasn’t been a happy Advent for you.
Not that the season of Advent – as Lutherans and other liturgical, church year cycle following Christians mark it – is ever really a “happy” time … as in gleeful and giddy. Apocalyptic Scripture isn’t usually part of the “feel good” hit parade of Bible readings. Neither does the hair shirted bug eater John the Baptist get everyone in a warm Yule mood.
But then, Advent was never supposed to be, as the song goes, the “most wonderful time of the year.” What Advent is all about … is joy … deep, abiding joy … trust and hope in the coming again of the Messiah to earth, the One who came once, who lived our life and suffered our suffering and died our death but rose again … to give us the promise, the hope, the deep joy of eternal life THEN … one day … which gives us the courage to fully engage in this life, to live, to risk, to share with others NOW.
Ah … but that was the past three weeks.
Today we are at the final stop in our Advent journey … the fourth Sunday in Advent … and, most certainly, happiness and cheerful holiday spirit are definitely among us.
Why, our Advent Conspiracy message for today is certainly one of warm holiday fuzziness for us … LOVE ALL. Certainly that’s a beloved, blessed outcome of our baptism, walking wet in God’s forgiveness, that we would LOVE ALL. It sounds like one of those Christmas carols we hear … “Why can’t it be Christmas the whole year long?” meaning that, ah, people just seem to be nicer and warmer and more loving and love-ly this time of year, and wouldn’t it be nice if that feeling lasted, at least into February.
And our text for today … it’s the lovely story of Mary; first her conversation with the angel Gabriel, the words of promise and hope coming to her, that she is the chosen one of God, chosen to bear God’s Messiah, God’s deliverer to the world … God for us, Emmanuel … and then, the song we’ve sung so many times, throughout Christian history and our own history here, Nativity, people of new birth, people who love these words … the Magnificat … “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.”
How could we not be happy with this theme, these words before us?
How indeed.
So why don’t we take a deeper look at this text … there’s no harm in that, is there?
Yes … it’s true … we do know these words of Scripture quite well … but normally, they are inseparable from the music to which they are sung. There are many, many musical settings of Mary’s Magnificat … quite a number of hymns we have sung which include these words … but of course, it’s our dear favorite from Marty Haugen’s Holden Evening Prayer that likely rings in our ears loudest.
Today, though, different from past years, we’re deliberately not singing this Scripture-song … because I didn’t want the music to get in the way of our hearing what is, and isn’t, here for us.
So what is here?
There appear to be many deep contrasts in Mary’s words.

He has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant
Surely from now on all generations will call me blessed.
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

For Mary, these contrasts are directly related to the deep contrasts she saw in the world around her, and that she was experiencing personally.
First, in her own story … the visit from the angel, that great and terrible announcement to this poor little teenage girl … “You will conceive in your womb and bear a son … he will be called the Son of the Most High.”
Second, what she saw in the world of her time … the kings of the world, the wealthy and powerful rulers of Israel and the equally wealthy and powerful Roman occupiers, lording it over the poor and powerless of this backward corner of the world … especially this little rural backwater known as Nazareth.
We know Mary’s situation. It’s been painted and poured out in art and word and song for hundreds of years … God comes to poor lowly country girl, to announce that she will bear the Messiah.
The world is about to turn.
Those words … they are words of promise and hope, especially to those who are on the short end of things in the world … people like Mary, people who are poor, oppressed, suffering. Some would like this world-turning to happen on a speedier timeline … and on their own political terms. Mary’s words have of late been co-opted … watch out world; God’s deep reversal is going to be at work, cosmic Robin Hood-Jesus is coming to take from the rich and give to the poor and throw everything topsy-turvy … from the sound of some, you’d think Mary was the first century spokesperson for Occupy Nazareth.
Ah, but wait just a minute.
Is that what Mary’s really saying here?
We might think we live in a particularly unjust time in world history … but there have been plenty of other times when the inequality between rich and poor has been particularly striking.
Martin Luther’s, for example.
In 1522, right as he was being called before the Diet of Worms and the emperor Charles to defend his work in setting the church free from the tyranny of its powerful oppressors, Luther wrote a commentary on the Magnificat. From its early sentences, readers knew it would be a blockbuster.

[In these words] God breaks what is whole and makes whole what is broken.

With a start like that, people thought that here, Luther would write a work that would fan the fires of peasant revolt, turning servant and slave upon their master in revolution and world-turning.
But he didn’t.
Instead, he wrote of humility.

Those of low degree [of which Mary sings] are here not the humble, but all those who are contemptible and altogether nothing in the eyes of the world. It is the same expression that Mary applied to herself: “He has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.” Nevertheless, those who are willing to be nothing and lowly of heart, and do not strive to be great, are truly humble. Now when God exalts them, it does not mean that God will put them in the seats of those God has cast out any more than that when God shows mercy to those who fear him, God puts them in the place of the learned, that is, the proud. Rather God lets them be exalted spiritually and in God, and be judges over seats and power and all might, here and hereafter; for they have more knowledge than all the learned and the mighty.

Humility, then, is the guiding light of these words of Mary. Not ‘revolution.’ Not a call for a violent moment when “the world is about to turn,” at least, in a political or economic sense. But instead, here is a Word to encourage those who are willing to be nothing for the sake of God, for the sake of their neighbor, for the sake of the world. Those who put place, power, prestige aside, and live, as Mary did, “Let it be.”
A quote from Mother Teresa here comes to mind:

A sacrifice to be real must cost, must hurt, must empty ourselves. The fruit of silence is prayer, the fruit of prayer is faith, the fruit of faith is love, the fruit of love is service, the fruit of service is peace.

Humility … and here we see a tie in, a link, with both our seasonal series as well. For what, indeed, is “Love All” but a call and a cry for humility … setting aside our own agendas for the sake of being a vessel for love, a servant in the journey of Jesus.
To put it in the vernacular … who is the person who you can’t stand the most? Your boss? That jerk who cut you off in traffic? Your teacher? A student? Newt Gingrich? Barack Obama?
Humility calls for an emptying of that hatred, a humbling of ourselves, a setting aside of even our most self-righteous anger … and loving … not just the ones we find loveable, not just the ones we view as “mild inconveniences” on our path … but the most annoying, obnoxious, downright opposite-to-our-nature-and-way-of-living people in our lives.
Ah, but you might say … look further. There’s more of the Magnificat.
Yes, there is.
So don’t these verses call forth some kind of “world about to turn-ned-ness?”

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.

Again, I’ll let the words of Luther speak:

Those who are lowly … are those who are willing to be in such a state … especially if they have been forced into it for the sake of God’s Word. On the other hand … what hindrance was their riches to the holy fathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? Or their high station or great riches to those who had them or who have them today, provided they do not set their hearts on them or seek their own advantage in them? “The Lord weighs the spirit,” that is, God judges not according to the outward appearance, whether one is rich or poor, high or low, but according to the spirit and how it behaves itself within.

Our wretched unbelief always hinders God from working [good works] in us, and ourselves from experiencing and knowing them. We desire to be filled and have plenty of everything before hunger and want arrive. We lay up provision against future hunger and need, so that we no longer have need of God and God’s works. What sort of faith is that which trusts in God, when all the while you feel and know that you have goods laid up to help yourself? This is to esteem temporal goods more than God and to put them in God’s place as an idol.

You see, Luther says, the beauty of the words of the Magnificat, are that they are all about God’s work, not ours. Here, in the words of Mary, God is not laying out some kind of world-turning revolution, taking from the rich and filling the poor … “everything for everyone” … no, to God, wealth and power have no standing whatsoever. In the coming Kingdom of God … the Kingdom which has its here and now start with the announcement of the birth of Jesus … wealth and power have no place at all.
So all the stuff we count as being of worth and value … all the things we end up spending our whole lives scratching and clawing after … place, power, prestige … status, honor, rank … the number of years one has served in a place as pastor, or been members of a church congregation … it doesn’t count for diddly squat, folks.
That’s the message of the Magnificat.
See, this is God’s justice at work … God’s justice, not ours … it’s not about the lowly clawing up and pulling down, or the wealthy and powerful hanging on to what they have rightfully earned … God cares for us, but God doesn’t care at all for our stuff-lust.
And you get that from Mary’s words here … if we have eyes to see and ears to hear … they most certainly are forward looking words.

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.

Certainly, for anyone paying attention to the daily news of Mary’s time, this wasn’t the case. Certainly for anyone paying attention to the news of our own time, it’s not the case either.
That’s because these words are about life, life as seen through the lens of the Cross … yes, the Cross … here, even here at the height of the Advent season, we are called to view everything through the death of Jesus … the death of Jesus, into which our baptism has inextricably joined us …
in the words of the apostle Paul, “YOU, you who follow Jesus, you who are baptized into his baptism, YOU ARE DEAD, buried with him in baptism” … dead to all this, this worldly clawing and clutching, grasping and grabbing for place and honor … and stuff …
and “YOU ARE MADE ALIVE” … alive with Christ, for in your baptism, you have also risen with him, risen to a new life full of truth, forgiveness, giving and peace … in which you must LOVE ALL because nothing else matters anymore.

The beauty of the Magnificat is that Mary’s words make clear that God isn’t in the business of worldly revolution … but rather, the cosmic revolution of changing hearts forever. God’s politics are no more “Occupy Wall Street” than they are “Let them eat cake.”
Though … God hopes, God prays, God wills … in Christ … who calls us through our baptism into him to LOVE ALL … God calls us all to something new, a new way of living, here and now.
Again, Luther puts it so well:

How could one bring a more damning accusation against riches, or more grievously terrify the rich, than by saying that God sends them empty away? On the other hand, how could one be more strongly and comfortably moved to willing endurance of hunger and poverty than by these fine words of the Mother of God – that God will fill all the hungry with good things?
We have here such a promise of God and such strong comfort … for God’s own beloved people [us], for whose sake God also became man, to redeem [us] from the power of the devil, of sin, death, and hell, and to lead us to righteousness, eternal life, and salvation. That is the help of which Mary sings.

God’s promise … God’s help … God’s call, in Jesus, to a new way of living. For God is in the business of changing hearts … not changing politics … though, as hearts change, politics will surely, necessarily change too.
In other words … true love, God’s love, is a matter of faith. We don’t see it now fully, we don’t experience it now fully; and this life surely as we live it, will be more sad than happy, always, in all ways. This is the truth and reality of life in this world …
…Mary’s world, where the angel’s announcement to her, that she, an unmarried girl barely in her teens, would become pregnant with God’s son … this Word would bring her anything but happiness …
… and our world, where the words and actions of justice and peace, comfort and hope, are always, always in the minority.
But we have a deep abiding joy … a joy which will not be taken from us …
… for Mary, as Mary sings, as Mary says, we have a merciful God … or rather, that merciful God has us …
… and for us all, that same merciful God wants and works and wills that no one would be condemned to the hell of being sent away empty … neither the poor of this world nor the poor of the next … but instead, that God’s good and gracious will is that all … both the empty, and the full … the poor, and the rich … the powerful, and the meek … that all would be saved, to live, then in the future, and now as well, to live in the full-ness of God.
And so Mary’s song must be our song … Mary’s words, our words … heart changing words of Gospel truth … as we are called and gathered here to WORSHIP FULLY, fed on forgiveness and grace, sent forth to risk and to serve, to SPEND LESS but GIVE MORE, to tend relationships and not stuff, not just Conspiring together to overturn the Advent chaos and mess which we’ve made of this season … but to carry into the world a good Word, the best Word, of deep, lasting Hope and Peace, Joy and Love …

Blessed indeed are they who believe that there will be a fulfillment of what is spoken to us by the Lord.

Happiness is overrated but LOVING ALL is not … it is our call, our cry, our mission, not just in Advent, but all year through.

And so there’s nothing left to say this Advent … nothing more than … Merry Christmas …
… blessed Good Friday …
… Happy Easter …
… and may Jesus come again soon, to make IT, and US, ALL right. Amen.