A Revolutionary Song 12-11-22
A Revolutionary Song
Is 35:1-10; Luke 1:46b-55
Is 35:1-10
The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom; like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice with joy and singing. The glory of Lebanon shall be given to it, the majesty of Carmel and Sharon. They shall see the glory of the Lord, the majesty of our God. Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble knees. Say to those who are of a fearful heart, “Be strong, do not fear! Here is your God. He will come with vengeance, with terrible recompense. He will come and save you.” Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy. For waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert; the burning sand shall become a pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water; the haunt of jackals shall become a swamp, the grass shall become reeds and rushes. A highway shall be there, and it shall be called the Holy Way; the unclean shall not travel on it, but it shall be for God’s people; no traveler, not even fools, shall go astray. No lion shall be there, nor shall any ravenous beast come up on it; they shall not be found there, but the redeemed shall walk there. And the ransomed of the Lord shall return, and come to Zion with singing; everlasting joy shall be upon their heads; they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.
Luke 1:46b-55
And Mary said, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name. His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. 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. He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever.” And Mary remained with her about three months and then returned to her home.
Prayer – God of Advent and of all of the seasons of life, we come this morning, as we continue our journey to Bethlehem and the manger, we are reminded that your calling upon a young woman, Mary, to bear the Christ child left her in a precarious position within her community. A position fraught with judgment and disdain. And out of that calling, she responded with not only a yes but with a songful declaration that you are doing great things, showing mercy, bringing down the powerful, transforming her world. Remind us O God of advent, that Mary’s song bring hope to the despairing, life where there is little life and a promise that renews each day – amen.
This is the season of singing. Christmas isn’t Christmas without singing Christmas carols. I can remember as a kid our family driving a short distance to McAdenville, NC, also known as Christmastown, USA, for every single house, business, church in the community had Christmas lights – all paid for by the local mill owners. And as we drove through the town with windows rolled down despite the winter chill, we could hear people walking the streets singing Christmas carols. And as we would drive home each time, our car was filled with Christmas songs from a family of terrible singers, but we didn’t care, it was our way to spread joy in the midst of the season.
In our gospel lesson this morning, we hear the song that Mary sang in response to her cousin Elizabeth’s declaration of faith in the birth of her son. Mary’s song is called the Magnificat because that is the first word in the Latin version. Remembering that at this time, Rome occupied Israel, there was oppression and despair at every corner; and yet, Mary’s song of joy and hope about the coming birth of her son is about what God has already done. Mary describes the overturning of the current system of consumption and oppression and violence by the norms of God’s kingdom – mercy, justice and most importantly, love. And she sings for joy as if these things have already happened.
Perhaps one of the reasons she can sing this way about the future is because it repeats the song of God’s revolutionary restoration that has been sung throughout the ages. From the song of Hannah in the days before King David a thousand years before Christ to the song of the Psalmist in Ps 146, we hear again and again that God’s work in this world consists of setting things right. Mary’s song of joy joins that chorus of every age as she sees her son’s birth as the fulfillment of the hope that people like her had been singing about for generations.
Have you ever noticed how often Luke employs songs in the first several chapters to his story about Jesus. Mary sings when she is greeted by her cousin Elizabeth as noted in our passage this morning. Zechariah sings when his son John is born and his tongue is finally loosened. The angels sing of peace and good will when they share their ‘good news of great joy’ with the shepherds. And Simeon sings his farewell once he has seen God’s promises to Israel kept in the Christ child.
Why, one might wonder, all these songs. Because singing is an act of resistance. That’s not to say that all singing is resistant or revolutionary, of course. Sometimes it’s an act of joy and sometimes of camaraderie, but it’s also an act of resistance.
The slaves knew this. When they sang spirituals they were both praising God and protesting the masters who locked them out of worship but couldn’t keep them out of the promise of deliverance of the Bible. And the civil rights leaders knew this, too, singing songs like “We Shall Overcome,” when so many in the society didn’t give them a chance to advance their cause of justice, let alone triumph.
The protesters in Leipzig in 1989 knew this as well. While that element sometimes gets overlooked in the histories of the ‘velvet revolution,’ it’s a striking note that for several months preceding the fall of the Berlin wall, the citizens of Leipzig gathered on Monday evenings by candlelight around St. Nikolai church – the church where Bach composed so many of his cantatas – to sing, and over two months their numbers grew from a little more than a thousand people to more than three hundred thousand, over half of the citizens of the city, singing songs of hope and protest and justice, until their song shook the powers of their nation and changed the world. Later, when someone asked one of the officers of Stasi, the East German secret police, why they didn’t crush this protest like they had so many others, the officer replied, “We had no contingency plan for song.”
But no song is quite as startling as the one young Mary sings after meeting up with her pregnant older cousin Elizabeth. C.S. Lewis famously labeled this a “terrible song,” playing on the Latin word terribilis, which means “dreadful, frightful, fearsome.” In fact, Mary’s “Magnificat” was outlawed from being sung or preached in Central America during the 1980’s because the ruling class knew the lyrics of “Mary’s song” was about the rising up of the oppressed, the overthrowing of the oppressors. The lyrics of Mary’s song themselves shake the foundations of all we know – more on that in a moment – but the fact that they emanate from the larynx of such a young girl as Mary stuns our imagination on yet another level.
I think Mary and Elizabeth knew this as well. I think, that is, that they knew just how ridiculous their situation was – two women, one too old to bear a child, one so young she was not yet married, yet called to bear children of promise through whom God could change the world. And they probably knew how little account the world would pay them, tucked away in the hill country of Judea, far from courts of power and influence. And they probably knew how hard life was under Roman oppression. Yet when faced with the long odds of their situation, they didn’t retreat, or apologize, or despair, they sang. They sang of their confidence in the Lord’s promise to upend the powers that be, reverse the fortunes of an unjust world, and lift up all those who had been oppressed. When your back is up against the wall, and all looks grim, one of the most unexpected and powerful things you can do is sing a revolutionary song.
It has been nearly 10 years ago this coming week when the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting took place in Newtown, CT. And I can remember that the Sunday following that shooting we happened to sing, O Come, O Come Emmanuel in church that Sunday morning and one of the verses gave such powerful and poignant voice to both despair and hope so many of us felt: O come, thou day spring, come and cheer Our Spirits by thine advent here Disperse the gloomy clouds of night And death’s dark shadow put to flight. Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel Shall come to thee, O Israel. And I can remember the tears trickling down my cheeks as our voices were lifted in this song that Sunday, realizing that singing of light in a world of darkness is, indeed, nothing short of an act of resistance.
A contemporary and prolific hymn writer, Gracia Grindal, started one of her Advent hymns with a line that captures this sentiment as well, “We light the Advent candles against the winter light,” she penned. Not ‘because of’ or ‘during’ but ‘against,’ reminding us that the light of Advent, like the light of Christ, is a veritable protest to and resistance of the darkness that can gather around us at any given moment.
Given how much darkness seems to have taken hold in our world today, Mary’s song could be seen as revolutionary even by today’s standards. Hymns of Advent and Christmas manage to combine the realism of the world with the promise of Christ, and in this sense provide such a needed counterpoint to the dread headlines to which we’re subjected via news outlets, on the one hand, and ‘cheery Christmas songs’ blared across the cultural airwaves we hear everywhere we go.
Caught between the false dichotomy of despair and hope, Mary and Elizabeth remind us that of another way, the way of hope. Hope, you see, implies circumstances that are dark or difficult enough to require us to look beyond ourselves for rescue and relief so that we might hear again and anew God’s promise to hold onto us through all that might come and eventually bring us victorious to the other side.
While Mary’s revolutionary song is a song of hope and joy, there’s just no way to avoid the fact that there is a barb in good news that God is working to restore the human family. Mary’s song of hope is a joyful one for those who are lowly, humble and humiliated, the least and the last. Mary sees in the birth of her son, Jesus the Christ, the establishment of justice that makes it possible for all people to thrive, to reach their God-given potential, to experience the joy and the vibrancy that God intends for all of humankind.
Mary’s revolutionary song is also a calling out of those of us who are full and rich. We are called to join into God’s work at lifting up the lowly, filling the hungry and restoring those who are disenfranchised. That was what Jesus came to do – to begin God’s work of making all things new, of setting right the wrongs and lifting the burdens we carry. The season of Advent and Christmas is a reminder that God is still working, God is still creating, that God is still needing our help in transforming despair to joy, helplessness to hopefulness. In Advent, we sing because we look forward to something better than the brokenness we see everyday. We sing because we look forward to ‘peace on earth and mercy mild;’ it is the heart and soul of our faith – to sing a revolutionary song that in Jesus Christ, God has entered this world definitively to set everything right and to make all things new. That is the kind of song we all can sing – thanks be to God – amen.