Saint Luke 1:46b-55
Almost everybody becomes a singer at Christmas time. Even those people who don’t believe that they can carry a tune in a bucket have a hard time not chiming in.
Lutheran congregations make it easier for the musically shy because more often than not Christmas Eve Worship is preceded by Christmas Eve parties in which more than a few glasses of glug are consumed. Downing a couple of those can make even the timidest among us think they were Luciano Pavarotti and reach for high notes that would make Ariana Grande jealous.
It always amazes me that we foolishly hand lighted candles to these very same people 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.
Sometimes others, aided by the voices of those around them, find at such moments, that everything they had been told as a child was not true and they really could sing.
I was with two friends at a Lessons and Carols worship more than a few years ago where one of them who had been told by his music teacher in grade school that he didn’t have a good voice and really ought not to try and sing, found his voice.
He was seated between his partner who had been in several musicals in college and professionally around town and me.
I’m not sure my voice was ever the greatest and become less so as I’ve aged but still that hasn’t stopped me.
As a child my uncles described my singing as being “good and loud.” They said, “Sometimes he’s good and sometimes he’s loud. Now if we could just get those two together.”
So, there we were. The non-singer between the music major and me singing our lungs out. In one of the classic hymns I stopped and listened. The afraid to sing friend was singing. In a quite lovely baritone he was finding his voice. I’d like to think his attempt was buoyed up not only by his buddies on either side but by the 800 or so other people forming the chorus in the church that night.
Sometimes we just need others to sing to and sing with and that maybe why Mary went to see her cousin Elizabeth.
Someone in a bible study I was in asked why Mary left her home at all. “She was pregnant,” I remember the person saying. “Why didn’t she just stay home.” I wonder if she didn’t go to regain her confidence to sing. Mary may have needed somebody to sing to and sing with.
I know that when I feel saddened and downcast the best thing I can do is listen to music and maybe even sing along. Perhaps that is the case for you too. Music can be healing when life has had more than its fair share of surprises and nobody, but nobody, has had a bigger surprise in her life than Mary.
Some translations of The Good Book tell us that Mary “hurried to the highlands of Judea to the town where Zacharias lived, to visit Elizabeth.”1
When she arrived, Cousin Elizabeth was moved to speak words that have become a part of one of the most often recited prayers in Christendom. Along with Gabriel’s greeting that has been reduced to a simple “Hail Mary” Elizabeth’s response to Mary’s arrival moved her to blurt out, still recited from the old King James Version, “Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb.”2
It was just the greeting and affirmation that may have caused Mary to sing.
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. And I hope for Jesus and Joseph’s sake that she didn’t sound like Ethel Merman. 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.”3
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.4
The late Dr. Richard Jensen wrote once. “The entire Gospel of Luke is a commentary on this song!”5 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 the angel. So, she sang the story of these promises, out loud, to Elizabeth, to us.
I can’t believe she only sang it once, to an audience of one, and never sang it again. I think Mary’s song made it to Saint Luke because, in good times and bad she sang it. She sang it to Jesus and Joseph. She sang it to her neighbors; she’s singing it to us.
I like to think she sang it softly to her baby boy as she was cradling him off to sleep. I like to think that she sang it to herself as she looked out back and watched Joseph at his workbench. I like to think she sang it when she watched that boy become an adolescent. I bet she sang it a lot as he was going through those teenage years. I bet she sang it even more as she watched his ministry unfold and saw the mortal danger what he was saying and doing put him in.
Now she is singing it to us and inviting us to join in.
Mary’s {song} is an invitation never to give up the dream and hope of a warring world at peace and never to give up the dream of a divided society at one; never to give up the dream of excluded, discriminated-against, marginalized people embraced and affirmed and welcomed and included and all barriers of race, social class, gender, and, yes, sexual orientation gone, welcomed ...Mary, outsider, marginalized, is an invitation never to give up the dream of every child of God welcomed, loved, celebrated. Mary’s {song} is an invitation to you never to give up the dream.6
I’d like to think that Mary sang her song to remind herself, her friends, and us that God is in the mess, this life, with all of us.
This child she is carrying was born and lived 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 brokenhearted of people.”7
To all those people, in all those places Mary sings. And she helps us sing too as we hold on to hope in the child who will be named Jesus, Emmanuel, is 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 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.
Love came down at Christmas,love all lovely, Love divine;Love was born at Christmas;star and angels gave the sign.8
It’s a song that everybody can sing. It’s a song of hope that everybody can hold onto as they find their voice to sing again.
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1. St. Luke 1:39–40. (TLB) [TLB=The Living Bible]
2. St. Luke 1:42. (KJV) [KJV=The King James Version]
3. James D Howell, “Weekly Preaching Notions,” Weekly Preaching Notions (blog. (Myers Park United Methodist Church, July 1, 2020), http://jameshowellsweeklypreachingnotions.blogspot.com/.
4. 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.
5. Richard A. Jensen, Preaching Luke’s Gospel: A Narrative Approach (Lima, Ohio: CSS Pub, 1997), 25.
6. John M. Buchanan, “Where is God in This Mess.” Sermon preached at the Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago. December 21, 2008.
7. 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
8. Christina Georgina Rossetti, “Love Came Down at Christmas.”
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