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.
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