Saint Luke 1:26-38
Saint Luke 1:46b-55
Almost everybody becomes a singer at Christmastime. Even those who don’t believe they can carry a tune in a bucket have a hard time not risking it and chiming in.
This is especially true in Lutheran congregations where often time the abilities of those in attendance have been enhanced by several glasses of glug at the Christmas Eve gatherings. Then, to add to the fire hazard, we give those very same glug filled parishioners candles to hold while they sway and sing. It is a wonder to me that there are any Lutheran churches standing in all of Christendom after such hijinks.
For many, if not most people, singing is why they come to church on Christmas Eve and it is good for preachers to remember this.
Dr. John McCormick Buchanan, now the pastor emeritus of Fourth Presbyterian Church, was stressing over the last Christmas Eve sermon he was to preach in that place before retiring. As he laboured over his lap-top he wondered if he could “say anything that would illumine or enhance a story everybody already knows and loves.”
His wife Susan took note of his struggles and reminded him. “Stop worrying about this. We don’t come on Christmas Eve to hear a sermon. We just want to hear the story, sing the carols, light a candle, and get home at a reasonable hour.”1
This year we won’t be doing any of that although I do hope the room you are watching this in has at least a few candles burning brightly. I also hope you’ll sing along with the carols providing that you have not had so much glug in you that your singing wakes the neighbours.
Music is central to the Nativity stories and leading the chorus was Mary whom Luther called Jesus’ first disciple.
Do you ever wonder what her voice may have been like?
I can’t imagine it was a big, booming voice like a Wagnerian Soprano. I have always thought of it as more Bel Canto, beautiful singing better suited to Mozart or the lighter, “champaign” operas by Italian composers.
Yet it has also suggested that Mary’s Song might have sounded like our modern day blues.
She would have had a great deal to sing the blues about when she made her visit to her cousin Elizabeth. She is not “Mary-with-a-halo” but rather a young girl who “lived in Nazareth, a small, backwater village of no account, population in the dozens, her family and neighbors eking out a hardscrabble existence. We would say that she married young – but so did most women back then.”2
That is why bible scholar Dr. Lynn Japinga thinks in “most of the paintings, she is looking down at her folded hands, her face a mask of prim piety.
She does not smile. She does not look happy, even when she is holds the baby Jesus. She looks as if she is carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders, instead of the Saviour of the world in her arms.3
Still she sang. She sang in faithfulness ... shaped by courage and love in equal measure: love for her child of promise and her courageous belief in the seemingly unbelievable promises of God.
In this Advent during a long, dark winter of worry over a virus and the daily death toll it brings, do we dare hope? Do we dare sing? Can we sing ourselves back into believing?
We can if we hold on to the hope, hold onto the belief, that God does not wait for a perfect time and place.
God does not wait for pandemics to end. God does not wait for all the messes to be tidied up. God does not wait because “Jesus is being born where people need him most.” God makes God’s home in the messiest of places—a stable—in the messiest of times— under the control of the Roman Empire—and with the most ordinary of people—a teenage girl and her fiancé and the shepherds. Jesus is being born where we need him most. In the messes. In the hard places. In the dark and desperate places. In the lonely and lost places. In the places and with the people who seem too far gone. Jesus is born into exactly those kinds of places and he spends his life with the most vulnerable and ostracized and brokenhearted of people.4
Jesus came for people like us and for such a time as this.
When we cannot sing together. When we have to light our candles and hold on to hope at home we are reminded that faith can be born again by saying “yes” to the promise of this one child’s birth. The child who is named, Jesus, Emmanuel, God with us.
He comes to a world that is overcome with darkness, separation, loss, grief to bring truth and grace in his light and life that will forever shine. He comes to a world of clanging discord and worried voices and invites us to sing a melody of peace. He comes to a world that was all consumed by the big and powerful but was brought low by a tiny virus. He comes as a testament to the quiet ways God goes about redeeming God’s creation.
He comes in the song of his mother and all who have joined in the chorus and had their lives illumined by the light of God’s love revealed in the love song of this birth.
___________
1. John M. Buchanan, “Christmas Eve Sermon,” Christmas Eve Worship. The Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago. (December 24, 2011).
2. James D Howell, “Weekly Preaching Notions,” Weekly Preaching Notions (blog. (Myers Park United Methodist Church, July 1, 2020), http://jameshowellsweeklypreachingnotions.blogspot.com/.
3. Lynn Japinga, “Saint Luke 1:26-38. Commentary 2: Connecting the Reading with the World,” Connections: A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Worship 1 (Louisville, KY: Westminister|John Knox Press, 2020): pp. 66-67.
4. Courtney Allen Crump, “Where Is God in This Mess?,” A Sermon for Every Sunday (asermonforeverysunday.com, December 15, 2020), https://asermonforeverysunday.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Courtney-Allen-Crump-Advent-4B-2020.pdf.
5. Christina Georgina Rossetti, "Love Came Down at Christmas." Hymn
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