Reclaiming a Voice

Advent 4

Year C

        It has sickened me this week to hear people of faith trying to make sense of the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary by claiming it is part of God’s plan.  Many have loudly proclaimed that God allowed these things to happen because God was taken out of the schools or because the state of Connecticut approved same-sex marriage.  One person in the paper yesterday compared the slaughter in Connecticut to the biblical book of Job saying that in Job God gave the devil permission to attack the righteous title character and to bring harm including killing children.  He concluded by saying God is sovereign and this is part of God’s plan.  I have been shocked and appalled and brought to tears whenever I try to talk about it with my children or anyone else.  It is into these events of the past week that these readings have come to me, to us.

        Mary, Elizabeth, and Micah were prophets.  We often understand prophets to be about predicting the future.  But these prophets were about naming the present—naming God’s activity in their very present lives and in their very broken worlds.  And they connected it to the history of God’s faithfulness and to the hope of what is yet to come.

        Mary was a young girl—a young unwed pregnant girl.  We often picture and sing about Mary as meek and mild—beautiful in her blue with a serene look on her face.  I challenge that.  I’m not saying she didn’t have those characteristics, but she also had a rebellious side—would probably fit well into the teenage world of my house.  Mary had to have known the danger of being an unwed pregnant woman—she could be killed because of it.  But Mary didn’t hide in her house—hide her pregnancy, dare I say it; hide what could bring her shame.  Mary took off with haste to her cousin’s house.  She must have known the dangers of traveling alone through the Judean countryside.  These were not safe time times; they were desperate times—desperate times make people desperate and desperate people can do horrible things.  The rulers of Judea and Israel were frantically trying to consolidate their positions of power—there were armies everywhere, bandits everywhere, and yet she set out with haste to her cousin’s house.  Mary’s daring actions as well as her song are responses to her faith. 

Mary’s song is—both deeply personal as well as for the world.  It connects her own experience of God and God’s faithfulness to God’s faithfulness in the world.  Her song is a response to God’s activity in the world; it is an interpretation of God in that moment, and it names who God is.  She names God a just, kind, humble, faithful, merciful—caring for the lowly, for the least of these.  That doesn’t sound to me like the God that is being proclaimed in the news—

        Being a prophet was and is dangerous—naming God’s activity in the world takes strength and courage.  It requires that we put ourselves out there and are possibly ridiculed, but speaking we must do.  Speaking our faith and naming what we see and what we know of God is powerful and essential.  We have to dig into our own faith and announce what our experience of a loving faithful God is.  I’ve said it before, words are powerful—think about the first time you told someone you loved them.  It was risky; you were vulnerable, and yet uttering those three words intensified the relationship.  You can act loving towards someone, but to say it makes it a reality; it brings a power and a force to a relationship.  In the same way, we must speak to the brokenness of this world with our faiths.  Like Mary, our faith is both deeply personal and also connected to the world; to the past, present and future of God and God’s activity in the world.

We cannot leave the speaking of our faith to the “experts”, and trust me I’m no expert.  Was Mary an expert?  Was Mary a powerful person who had the protection of graduate degrees or of body guards? 

I believe that we must speak up and speak loudly.  We must reclaim the prophetic voice that others are using and in my opinion bringing great harm to people.  We are called to respond and to participate in in the redemption of the world.  We must not only interpret God’s activity, but also name who God is—loving and merciful, just and kind.  God who cares for the lowly—who on that horrible day was with those small children caring for them, not using them as payback for kicking God out of the schools—because I’ve got news for you—you can’t kick God out.  It is our responsibility to claim that—to proclaim Emmanuel—God with us even in the darkness.  We have to not only live our faiths, act in ways that bring the light into the world, but we must also speak our faith—speak about the light and the hope.  My dear friend and mentor the Rev. Ben Maas says the goal is not to provide neat answers for why suffering occurs but rather to assure us of what is ultimately the message of Christmas.  “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness cannot overcome it, no matter how much it seems like the darkness is winning.”

God is calling each one of us to respond to the darkness, to bring light, and to participate in the redemption of the world in whatever ways we can.  This week I read of the funeral of a six year old boy—his uncle and cousin were firefighters in NY and it was his dream to become a firefighter as well. On the day of his funeral over 800 firefighters showed up from all over the country—they showed up in their dress blues and they saluted this young boy.  They responded—they brought light and hope to the darkness and the pain and the grief.  Those firefighters and many others were God’s hands and feet in this world—in their action they proclaimed loudly that God comes to forgive and to heal, to bind up the broken hearted and to wipe the tears from those who mourn, to put this broken world and these broken lives back together.

How is God calling you to participate in the redemption of the world?  What is God calling you to proclaim?  We are all too painfully aware of how broken the world is—let us each bring the light and hope to the world.  God works through us all—through the meek and mild, the lowly—through an infant born to an unwed teenage mother.  As we move into Christmas and celebrate, let us remember that we are celebrating God’s incarnation—God’s presence and activity in the world—we are celebrating the work of restoration.  Don’t just light a candle of hope, be a candle of hope.