Advent 4 – Luke 1
It is not often that we get a full fourth week of Advent. Next year, we’ll light the fourth blue candle on Sunday morning and by Sunday afternoon it will be Christmas Eve. But this year, we have a full week until Christmas Day, a full week to savor this theme… from Generation to Generation, we see God in each other.
I love the poem that Rev. Sarah Speed shares in the daily devotion for today called Where I Saw God Last[1]… and then she describes person after person from her city life—teenagers who cannot control their laughter, the saxophone player at 42nd street, the woman at the end of the block with her yappy dogs and her books in the window, the abuelita, the Perisan man at the grocery who tells me to be safe when I leave…
If we were going to write our own poem of all the God sightings in the last couple of days, I wonder who you’d name? Take a moment and picture who’ve you met who has been a God-in-flesh or maybe God-in-disguise. Just before the funeral on Friday, Thaly Cavanaugh showed up and my heart leapt with gratitude even before she spoke and let me know how to correctly pronounce Bos Klan’s name. We’ve been saying Bos for years… but it’s Bos (bo). It happened again when I looked up and saw members of Christ showing up for Bos’ family and when her grandson shared his memories and gratitude. We are well-trained to see God in creation, like the incredibly beautiful snowy branches heavy with 30 degree snow all week, but this week, we’re invited to watch for all the sightings of God that we’ll encounter this week in the people we encounter in daily life.
Dr. Christine Hong, who writes tomorrow’s devotion, shares the story of her parents being Korean immigrants. Her mother said that whoever met you at the airport decided your destiny. In other words, however greets you at the threshold as you become a new immigrant determines the direction your life moves.
She makes this connection—“Elizabeth greets Mary on the threshold, not only of her door but the threshold of something new in Mary’s life and for the world. Mary is met by her cousin who greets her with welcome, anticipation, and a powerful blessing.”
Whatever fears these two women had about the births to come, they were met by the courage of the other. The courage of a young woman who braved travel in perilous times, the courage of a woman giving birth when giving birth is dangerous. “They were one another’s spiritual midwives”—singing transformation into being, grounded in each other’s courage and steadfastness. “They wondered together in liminal space, on the threshold of a new world. And through their spiritual and relational partnership, Mary and Elizabeth framed the path of partnership for their children too.”[2]Beautiful.
Next week, we’ll hear the Christmas story from Luke 2, told in the context of Joseph and Mary traveling to Bethlehem for the census of the Roman empire. There were two main motivations for requiring a census: to count the number of able-bodied men who could be drafted for war, and to determine the number of taxpayers in every location. In other words, the census was designed to consolidate the empire’s military strength and economic power. In contrast, Mary and Elizabeth sing about dethroning the powerful and lifting up the lowly. Her song is a song that both comforts and unsettles, just depending on our perspective. Just depending on what we are most concerned about needing to protect.
The song of these women has been used by liberation theologians in various times and places as part of their resistance to oppressive regimes—in the 1970s in Argentina, the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo used Mary’s words to publicly protest the disappearance of their children and the song was sung throughout Latin American in the 1970s and 80s. Before that, in the context of resisting the Nazi regime, German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer called the Magnificat, “the most passionate, the wildest, one might even say the most revolutionary hymn ever sung.” Throughout the generations, Mary’s words have become a rallying cry for those deemed “lowly” or “outcast.” How can we honor the revolutionary power of her words?
Next month on the second Saturday, the Books & Brunch group will talk about Cole Arthur Riley’s book This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation and the Stories That Make Us. Arthur Riley writes this in a chapter called Belonging, “We need other people to see our own faces—to bear witness to their beauty and truth. God has made it so that I can never truly know myself apart from another person… I want someone to bear witness to my face, that we could behold the image of God in one another and believe it on one another’s behalf.”[3]
For so many of us, it is life-changing, revolutionary for someone to truly see us. It is life-changing, revolutionary to belong to a community where we are looking for God together, looking to experience God’s presence in one another. And this is what Mary invites us into today, in the presence of her dear cousin, to see God in each other—and to prepare to be what she became so long-ago, a God-bearer in a world that so needs each of us to show and share and see God.
In a few moments we’ll speak together these words—
We know that this life of connection is easier said that done, which is why we gather in this space, week after week, generation after generation, to be reminded: We see God in each other.
We’ll say, “Plant this story of love so deep in our bones that we cannot help but share it from generation to generation.”
And we’ll say, “No matter where we go, no matter what we say, no matter what we do, we belong to God. We are held. We are loved. We are forgiven.”
Let us take all this into this fourth week of Advent— a full week to savor this theme… from Generation to Generation, we see God in each other.
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