Mary's Protest Song

Luke 1: 39-56

December 20, 2015

Mother and Child
Pablo Picasso, 1902

I think for the time,

this would have been pretty amazing story

some because of its content,

but mostly because its only characters are two women:

Mary and Elizabeth.

The angel Gabriel had gone to

Zachariah, Elizabeth’s husband, first

to tell him about Elizabeth’s pregnancy with

John the Baptist and Mary’s with Jesus

But Zachariah didn’t believe Gabriel

so Gabriel took his voice away and

decided to go directly to the women.

The men don’t talk too much

in Jesus birth story after that.

When Gabriel visits Mary,

he purposely tells her that Elizabeth

is pregnant with a special child from God

then the two women could share in

their experience.

Two pregnant women.

They both know that the babies

they will give birth to are extraordinary.

They both know that God is using

each of them for a wonderful purpose.

And so they travel to see each other

and share their joy and hope

probably their fears and concerns.

And when they get together,

Mary sings:

“My soul proclaims your greatness O God,

and my spirit rejoices in God my savior.”

Actually the first couple of chapters of Luke

kind of seem like a musical.

Now some people have characterized Mary

as shy, reserved, passive, helpless even.

Maybe it’s the stereotypical view or hope of a mother.

And maybe the song that she sings

this very melodic song like an ingénue

at the beginning of a musical,

 lends to that  feeling.

But songs and music are not the

for the passive and helpless.

Songs can be brave and defiant too.

People of all times and places

have sung songs when things get desperate.

When there is tragedy, people sing.

Ad before great changes, people sing.

Slaves sang spiritual songs while they were working

they were songs of faith in God’s deliverance for them

They talked of hope during their unbearable situation.

In 1989 before the fall of the

Berlin wall, people gathered together

at St. Nicholas Church in Lepzig to pray and sing –

nothing more. And their numbers grew

from the tens to the hundreds to the thousands,

finally with 300 thousand people were singing

“We shall overcome” and things started changing.

Songs of protest against war, against aparthide,

against segregation, for freedom,

for peace, for hope, for a better future,

they stem from the people and

they exist in every country and civilization

from the earliest of times.

Oppressors know the strength of these songs,

and they often try to ban these songs

but they always seem to leak out and last.

These songs unite people, we share

our struggles and worries,

and also our hope for the future.

And that is what Mary’s song does.

Mary is a poor woman in a particularly unjust time.

And she is carrying a heavy responsibility:

she will bring God’s child into

a place where the people of her religion

live at the whim of an often brutal government.

But her song is of hope.

Not the hope that some brave man

will help the damsel in distress,

but hope in God, and with God leading,

she will see this task through:

“for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.
Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed”

And hope in God to right the wrongs that

plague her people and this world:

“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.”

If the emperor knew about it,

this song would be banned in Rome.

Mary is not a demure, passive, ingénue

she is a strong willed prophet.

And she is gaining her strength in numbers

by visiting the other woman who would

understand and collaborate with her

who could rejoice with her and share in her song.

Like humans,  birds sing

and other animals share sounds

back and forth to bond and communicate,

but other animals, when they get scared,

they stop singing.

Humans continue to sing

when we’re scared,

we sing louder when there is danger,

we sing in defiance and in solidarity and in hope.

- When death breaks our heart

we sing “It is well with my soul”

- When there is war and violence

all around, we sing “Silent Night.”

-When all seems lost, we sing,

“Rejoice, rejoice, Oh come, Oh Come Emmanuel”

When everything seems hopeless,

we sing “Joy to the World.”

Not because we don’t notice what’s going on,

but we sing in faith that God has acted, God is acting,

and God will act again in our world.

As we get ready for the coming of our savior,

let us join Mary in her song of hope and community,

and of security in God’s ways and presence.

Even as we struggle in this time and place,

let our souls magnify the Lord

and spirits rejoice in God our savior.

How Do We Get Ready?

Luke 3:7-18

December 13, 2015

We were at a party last week and a few of us

were sharing stories of restaurants

where the waitress and waiters insult you.

Apparently there is a market for this kind of thing

since there was more than one of these places.

John the Baptist could have worked

at one of these restaurants.

Because people seemed to like being

insulted by John the Baptist.

The restaurants do it in the name of fun and a good time.
But John is very serious. He asks them:

“Why did you come out here?”

“What are you looking at me for?”

Then he calls them a “Brood of vipers”

Children of snakes in other words.

He isn’t nice and doesn’t coddle them

or nurture them or make them feel good.

And yet they come to him.

They seem fascinated by him.

They still want to be baptized by him.

Maybe John seems like

the answer they’ve been waiting for.

The new life they had imagined.

The change that they had hoped for a long time.

was coming to the world.

He told them to repent,

not to rest on their laurels.

Not to simply rely on their heritage and birth-right

but to conduct their lives in a different and better way.
He told them to “bear fruit worthy of repentance.”

Don’t just say that you love God’s ways,

have your life show that you love God’s ways.

So they asked him “What exactly do we do?”

How do we do that,

what kind of things are you talking about?

John the Baptist's Breakfast Cereal

Now, I’m not sure what

they were expecting from John the Baptist,

but he was living like a wild man,

staying alone in the wilderness, eating bugs and

just whatever he could find on the ground.

Bob and I have a friend who is an entomologist,

a bug-man and he’s a big advocate for eating bugs

and when we ask him to come over and bring something

we know that we’re going to get cricket brittle

grub worm cookies and things like that.

It’s just what he does.

So when you ask John the Baptist what to do,

we might think that he would tell everyone

to drop out of normal life,

to wear a camel’s hair coat and

and eat locusts and twigs with him

in the wilderness.

But no. John tells them:

“If you have two coats, share one with someone who has none.

If you have any extra food, share that too.”

He’s not telling them leave their lives and

go into the wilderness,

but to go back to their cities and villages

and their families and the people they know

and treat them with kindness.

For tax collectors he tells them:

“Collect no more than what you’re supposed to collect.”

Tax collectors were apparently pretty

notorious for being unethical.

It was so bad that we know that

people were upset when Jesus even ate with them –

tax collector and sinner, almost synonymous

in the new testament.

But John didn’t tell them to leave tax collecting,

he just tells them to do it morally and ethically.

And soldiers apparently used their authority

to take advantage of other people.

But John the Baptist doesn’t tell them to

get out of the business, just do it without extortion,

to be satisfied with what they were paid.

To get ready for the one who would baptize us

with the Holy Spirit and fire,

John didn’t tell everyone to drop everything

and go into the wilderness to meditate

or for everyone to join monastery and being a hermit.

or to quit their job and go to seminary.

To prepare people for the one that is to come,

John doesn’t suggest leaving our world

in order to bear the fruits worthy of repentance.

He sends them back in the world,

to do what they’re doing, but to do it in a different way.

To change the world from the inside.

This is what Christians do.

Getting Ready for Jesus in the future means

acting like we know Jesus did in the past.

Like Jesus, we don’t retreat from the world

we are a part of it.

And like Jesus do what we do with a care

for all people, especially the least among us.

And like Jesus, we act this way consistently

no matter what the world throws at us.

Even when others are extorting and stealing

we respond with honesty and integrity.

Even when the world is filled with terror and fear,

we respond with welcome and peace.

Even when everyone is keeping everything for themselves

and watching out for number one,

we act with compassion and share what we have.

These aren’t passive things.

These actions can be radical.

They interrupt the way things are.

They effect other people.

It can even make them mad.

This is how we live out our baptism

We change the world from the inside,

starting with our inside, our minds and our hearts.

This is how John and Jesus will change the world.

He tells us to go back to our hum-drum lives and

let those lives reflect God’s grace

to the rest of the world.

This is how

“all flesh will see the salvation of God.”

Divine Road Construction

Luke 3:1-6

December 6, 2015

This gospel reading starts off in an interesting way.

Was Luke just focused on history?

Was he just putting us into right setting,

the proper time of Jesus ministry?

I think there’s more to it than that.

If we look at the names, we can see some similarities:

-Emperor Tiberius continued the typical Roman

Emperor’s mission of expanding the Empire to be

the largest in the history through military and economic might.

-Pontius Pilate, of course, would condemn Jesus to death.
-Herod was the Jewish king who consorted with the empire

and would kill anyone who was a threat to his power,

-Philip and Lysanias were part of the same family of

political and military strength that caused so much turmoil

in the life of the people.

-And Annas and Caiaphas  were the high priests who

sold out their beliefs in order to stay in good standing with Rome and maintain their power they would eventually be the ones to

arrest Jesus and turn him into Rome.

Each of these names represent the great powers that all tried

to stand in the way of the message of gospel.

This is the formidable deck that was stacked against Jesus in his life

laid out right in the beginning of the story.

But even with these stubborn, powerful obstacles –

all the power in the world at the time -

The word of God still comes down to John and

says “Prepare for the coming of the Lord.”

We live in a time now where the deck seems stacked

against God’s will and God’s reign.

The darkness seems to threaten the light at every turn

and there doesn’t seem to be any path forward.

We have stubborn obstacles in our time too.

I’m getting kind of tired of having to come

up here on Sunday and acknowledge another tragedy.

I kind of want to avoid it, but I can’t avoid it.

The gospels keep calling me to notice.

These tragedies lately seem to be all human-made tragedies.

Religious extremism, fanatics with guns, violent actions

against innocent unsuspecting people.

It seems like since they’re human made tragedies,

that humans should come up with a solution to all this.

but what could it be? I can’t figure it out.

Is it legislation, more force, gun control, more security?

Whenever I think it through

each of these solutions seems like it has

a road block in front of it.
It’s kind of like a prison that we’ve created

little by little around us, that we can’t seem

to figure out how to dismantle and get out of.

We can’t even decide on what to do in order

to get it started. Stubborn powerful obstacles.

Every time I think about it I want to

throw my hands up and give up.

The situation seems hopeless.

And along with this situation of terrorism

The Big Dig, Boston, MA
Prepare the way of the Lord,  make his paths straight.
Every valley shall be filled,
  and every mountain and hill shall be made low...

and gun violence, there seems to be

hundreds of other huge and complicated situations

that seem impossible to unravel.

No solution on the horizon,

no agreement, no way forward at all.

The situations seem hopeless. The job seems too big.

Almost like laying a mountain low

and filling a valley up.

almost seems impossible.

This is what the gospel tells us this is the kind of

work we have in store for us as people of God.

Prepare the way of the Lord.

Make the paths straight.

I don’t think that John talking about

road construction literally,

but it’s a good metaphor for us.

Even now, with power tools and heavy machinery,

building a road where there was none

is kind of an overwhelming project

before it’s started and as its going.

I mean just fixing that High street /270 mess up in Worthington

is taking at least three years  to construct

and includes a trench - Ohio’s first ever,

but this isn’t even near the largest road construction project,

like the big dig in Boston which included a tunnel

dug under the city of Boston and Boston Harbor.

They started planning in 1982 and sort of finished in 2007

that’s 25 years!

I know some of you do this or have done this for a living,

but I can’t even imagine how anyone

has the will and the focus to even

start the plans for something like that.

The obstacles must seem overwhelming,

and every solution brings up another problem.

It’s pretty audacious to even embark on that kind of project.

And just imagine what it was like

in bible times, to build a road from

one city to another, without power tools

and gas powered machines.

Just to dig by hand with shovels and wheel barrows.

  

Doing God’s will on earth is like building a road.

There are no quick solutions,

no magical fixes, no one-day projects.

The scripture writers knew about

hopeless situations and difficult problems

and insurmountable situations.

They knew that it seemed like moving mountains.

Like filling in valleys.

But they also know that with God there is hope.

God will get this done,

but for some reason God doesn’t want to do it alone.

As the great theologian John Dominic Crossan said,

"We're waiting for an intervention and God is waiting for collaboration."

John calls out and he makes the wilderness

a place of hope.

He says that the mountains will be

made low and the valleys will be filled.

The road will be built.

You see, even when we have doubt in ourselves,

God still has hope in us.

God chooses us: flawed normal sinners

God chooses the wild man in the wilderness,

the unwed young girl in Galilee

and all of us and has great expectations for us.

God doesn’t have another back up plan,

God’s plan is us -- humanity,

the people and things of this earth.

God wants to use us, our skills and gifts

ingenuity to make that road

to move the mountains and raise the valleys.

We might not know how we fit in

to the big picture, but following God’s

ways of forgiveness and justice and love

we can be part of the solution.

“Getting Ready”  for the coming of God

means knowing what our gifts are,

listening for the ways that God

is calling us to work and to help out.

Seeing what God is doing in the world

and being ready to jump in when we find it.

It also means having hope even when

it seems like there’s no reason to have it.

So in December 2015,

in a time of struggle and trial,

when there was terrorism and violence,

when there was corruption and polarization,

when we seemed divided and estranged

and there were floods and drought

and cancer and heart disease and poverty and hunger,

During a time of seemingly great darkness,

and great obstacles-

The word of God is coming down to you and to me

at Gethsemane Lutheran church

And it’s saying “Get ready,

all flesh will see the salvation of the Lord.”