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Singing the Song of Mary in a week of tragedy: A Sermon for Advent 4, 2024

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December 22, 2024

Over the years, I’ve come to recognize that there’s a certain rhythm to the season of Advent. The scripture readings of the season begin ominously, with emphases on the Second Coming of Christ, urging us to watch, prepare, and to get ready. Then there’s a shift to John the Baptist, who is no less ominous in his warnings, but brings our expectations and waiting closer to the present, as he prepares us for the coming of Christ. Finally, on the fourth Sunday, we come even closer to the great events of Bethlehem and the Nativity, as we hear stories related to the coming birth of Christ.  Most years, our attention on this Sunday is even more relentlessly, more expectantly, more joyfully toward the blessed events of Christmas.

This year, that rhythm has been broken by the events of the last week. We are reeling, unmoored. The shock of the national scourge of school shootings has come to Madison. We know the grief and the horror that so many other communities have experienced over the last few decades. Many of us are also consumed by anger and frustration by the impotence and unwillingness of our political class, our society as a whole to prevent these heinous acts. The Onion headline speaks the truth for many of us: “No way to prevent this,’ says only nation where this regularly happens.”

As we struggle to regain our footing after this week’s events—I won’t say “as we try to make sense of them”—it may feel like Christmas is further away if not temporally, then spiritually, further away than it’s ever been. We may find it difficult to put our hearts and minds into the final preparations for our celebrations, it may all seem a bit hollow. And that’s where a refocus on the themes of Advent might be just the bracing challenge we need.

In my Advent sermons and meditations I always emphasize that Advent is about Christ’s Second Coming as well as his first. By now, you may be tired of this constant message. But it bears repeating, especially now. It’s not just the way in which Christmas has evolved in our culture; the drawing out of the season, this “most wonderful time of the year,’ when we are likely to be watching holiday or Christmas movies in November, or even earlier.

Christian liturgy has made its own peace with the expansion of the Christmas season, so we often hear about the four Sundays of Advent being about “hope, peace, joy, and love.” Lovely, pious sentiments, these, but a far cry from the traditional Advent themes of the four last things: “Death, Judgement, Heaven, and Hell.” 

At the heart of the traditional observance of Advent is a cultivation of a sensibility that the world is not as it ought to be, that it lies in thrall to the forces of evil. We know that, but too often, especially as Advent is eclipsed by Christmas, the four last things ignored in favor of inflatable santas. Unfortunately, Amazon doesn’t sell Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse inflatables which would be much more appropriate for Advent décor. Too, often, we allow ourselves to be distracted from those realities. Sometimes, like now, we may need such distractions.

And so, even when we come to today’s gospel story, we overlook the judgment in favor of the saccharine. 

The familiar story we have heard today has been painted thousands of times throughout history. Two women, one young, one elderly, both of them pregnant, greeting each other. Often, the elderly one is deferring to the younger one, kneeling before her. Other times, the two are embracing. It’s such a familiar image, such a familiar story, that we tend to pay it little attention. Certainly, it does not factor largely in our devotion. Though it’s the occasion for two of the most common hymns or devotions in Catholicism—the Ave Maria and the Magnificat—we probably rarely reflect on the narrative context from which these hymns come. And really, it’s hardly shocking that we don’t pay closer attention to the Visitation, for it’s a brief episode, not more than a couple of verses (not including the magnificat itself). 

Two women, well, an elderly woman and a teenager, Their words seem hardly natural; they are carefully composed, more reflective of the Gospel writer’s concerns than in any way the actual conversation of two pregnant women meeting for conversation.

The tradition has shaped Mary’s image in so many ways that’s hard to get back to what Luke is really about. We think of Mary as a passive recipient, someone who accepts what happens to her without complaint. The tradition has turned her into a model for a certain kind of discipleship, a femininity that is meek and mild, passive, receptive, quiet. 

But that’s wrong. Listen to her song again: 

         
He has shown the strength of his arm, *
    he has scattered the proud in their conceit.
He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, *
    and has lifted up the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things, *
    and the rich he has sent away empty.
He has come to the help of his servant Israel, *
    for he has remembered his promise of mercy,
The promise he made to our fathers, *
    to Abraham and his children for ever.

These are not words of pious sentimentality, docility, or humility. The faith Mary proclaims is a faith in a God who takes decisive action on behalf of God’s people, a God who vindicates the righteous and condemns the wicked. The God to whom and of whom Mary sings is a God of liberation, a God who intervenes for the oppressed, the powerless, the poor and hungry. These are words proclaiming in a God who saves, but the salvation on offer is not for individuals, it is a salvation for all God’s people. 

Indeed, so powerful is this God, so vivid the imagery in the song, that it is hard to imagine they are the words of teenager, a young woman who has just learned she is to be a mother by miraculous means. And the fact of the matter is that Mary’s words are not hers alone. They are also the words of another woman from the history of God’s saving acts, another woman who found herself with child, almost miraculously.

The Magnificat, Mary’s wonderful song, is a reworking of the Song of Hannah, which Hannah sang when she learned she would give birth to Samuel, a boy who would become judge, priest, and prophet over all of Israel. Like Mary after her, Hannah sang in praise of her God, confident of her people’s salvation through God’s continuing care for Israel, confident that God would bring justice and righteousness to the world.

Hannah’s words were put in the future tense. Her song of praise was a song of hope that God would one day make things right. Mary’s song is in the perfect tense, suggesting that God’s liberating action has already begun to take place, but that it is not complete. God’s reign, with its promise of justice for the poor and the oppressed still lies in the future, though Mary can see signs of that reign in the world around her.

God has scattered the proud in their conceit, cast down the mighty from their thrones and lifted up the lowly. God has sent the rich away empty and filled the hungry with good things. It’s hard to hear these words without thinking of our own society and economy where income inequality is greater than at any time in a century, where the elderly and the poor risk losing what few benefits they have, where money equals power and our political class seems oblivious to the deep need in our nation. It’s hard to think of these words, of a God taking such action when people are grieving across the city, frightened, angry, frustrated.

When we sing or reflect on the Magnificat our tendency is to see these words as Mary’s words, not our own. We lack the imagination and faith to make these statements ours. But if we believe in a God who comes to us in a manger in Bethlehem, it shouldn’t be beyond our capacity to believe in a God who acts in history on behalf of the poor, powerless, the hungry and the oppressed. But more than that, we need to do more than sing the song, to proclaim the greatness of the Lord. Luke reminds us that a true follower of Jesus is one who hears his word and obeys it. This Advent and Christmas, this year and beyond, we should proclaim our faith that God is acting in history to vindicate the oppressed, and we should do all in our power to usher in God’s reign.

Stir up your power, O Lord: Reflections on the Abundant Life Shootings

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I sent the following to the congregation yesterday:

Dear friends in Christ,

The collect for the Third Sunday of Advent reads:

Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us; and, because we are sorely hindered by our sins, let your bountiful grace and mercy speedily help and deliver us; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom, with you and the Holy Spirit, be honor and glory, now and for ever. Amen.

Our hearts are breaking; our hearts are broken. The scourge of school shootings has come here to Madison. We are confronting the horrific violence, the trauma, and the grief that so many communities across the nation have experienced over the years. Many of us are also reacting with anger and frustration over the inability of our nation and our society to take the common-sense steps that could prevent such tragedies in the future. It might seem like this is the final straw; that on top of all the other events of the last years, the anxieties, fear, and despair that many of us are feeling, that we cannot go on. The burden is too great, the way forward too difficult. 

Yet the collect above and the Season of Advent reminds us that all is not lost, that we should not allow our fear and despair to overwhelm and immobilize us. Christ comes among us in humility and weakness, revealing God’s power and love, preaching the coming of God’s reign. Even as we grieve the deaths and injuries and condemn the violence, we can also come together to work for change, to stand in solidarity with the suffering, to gather for comfort and consolation.

Christ comes to a broken and hurting world, to a broken and hurting humanity. Christ comes to us in our grief and pain. His coming offers joy and hope in the midst of our sadness, anger, and grief. May his joy and hope sustain us in these difficult days, and may his boundless love transform our lives and the world.

Silence, Songs, Prophecy: A Sermon for Advent 2, 2024

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December 8, 2024

This past Sunday, on the First Sunday of Advent, we began a new liturgical year, and with that new beginning, we also began reading a new gospel—the Gospel of Luke, which will be our focus throughout the coming year. Because of the different gospels emphasized in each year, each liturgical year takes on a different aura and different themes predominate.

For Luke, one of those themes, and it’s consistent with what I emphasized last Sunday, is to place the story he is telling in a clear historical and geographical context. We get that emphasis very clearly in today’s gospel reading, which a newcomer to the gospel might assume is the beginning of the gospel as a whole. John the Baptizer is situated in the reigns of emperors, governors, and other rulers, and his ministry is firmly located in Judea, the region around the Jordan river.

But there’s another theme that emerges in this year’s gospel readings, and it’s one of my favorites. Each Advent Sunday moving forward, our readings will include canticles—songs, taken from scripture that have been used in Christian worship for centuries, and in the case of today’s canticle, and the Song of Mary, which we will hear in two weeks, likely derive from Christian worship that predated the writing of the gospel. But they have also been used in Christian worship over the centuries—especially the Song of Mary, the Magnificat, and today’s canticle, The Benedictus or Song of Zechariah.

The latter has been a fixture of Morning Prayer in the Anglican tradition for centuries; used almost daily for many years, and still used that way for those who pray Morning Prayer following Rite I. Over the years, I have come to know the Benedictus almost by heart, although without ever trying to memorize it: 

Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel

He has come to his people and set them free

He has raised up for us a mighty savior

Born of the house of his servant David…

One of the miracles to me each time I encounter this canticle in Advent is how a text with which I am intimately familiar becomes new and illuminating in a new liturgical context of Advent. In a season of waiting and watching, this canticle takes on new meaning as it proclaims what God has done in the past and continues to do, and promises that God’s saving work will continue.

More than the words themselves, it is the context in the story that helps to deepen the meaning and power of this canticle. You may recall the story. Zechariah was a priest, serving in the temple in Jerusalem when he is visited by the Angel Gabriel who tells him that he will have a son who will become a prophet like Elijah and call the people to repentance. 

Zechariah finds this hard to believe as he and his wife are elderly and responds to Gabriel’s words by saying: “How can this be so?” In response to his incredulity, Gabriel strikes him speechless for the duration of Elizabeth’s pregnancy. When their son is born, Zechariah writes on a piece of paper that his name should be John, and immediately his voice returns to him. He began to speak, praising God. Then Luke writes, Zechariah was filled with the Holy Spirit and began to prophesy. This song, the Benedictus, was his prophecy.

It’s quite remarkable, if you think about it. We rarely think of prophecy and song as being connected in any way, even if, in our bibles, the prophetic books often appear in verse form. Songs are for entertainment, enjoyment, relaxation, and diversion. But they do so much more, as well. There are protest songs of course: the great legacy of Woody Guthrie, the songs of the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement, Bob Dylan. When we encounter a song like this one, however, we may be inclined to think of it rather differently.

One other thing I would like to point out. If you were voiceless for nine months, and your voice returned only upon the birth of your child, what would you say? Would you have spent those nine months thinking about what you might say if you got your voice back? Would you release all of your pent-up anger and frustration, blurt out all the things you had wanted to say but couldn’t? Well, whatever Zechariah was thinking and planning over those nine months, according to Luke, this is what came up out of his mouth when he had the chance: “Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel…”

Think of the waiting, the silence. Think of the hope that Zechariah had. As a Jew, a priest, living under the Roman Empire, dreaming of the restoration of Israel, doubting it would ever happen, going about his routines; chosen out of all of the priests in the temple to perform the daily office of sacrifice, and in that moment an angel comes to him and offers him new hope—had he and Elizabeth given up hopes of children years ago, decades ago?

And now, because of his disbelief, doubt, ridicule, silenced. Unable to share with Elizabeth the miraculous joy; the hopes and planning for a child, lost in his own thoughts.

It’s a powerful story, a powerful evocation of the Advent experience. Waiting in silence and hope; hoping in the midst of doubt and fear; meditating on the coming events, preparing for joy. 

Perhaps, this Advent, instead of focusing on the man whom Zechariah’s son would become, John the Baptist, the voice crying out in the wilderness; instead of focusing our attention on the coming of Christ, we might focus our attention and meditation on Zechariah, the silent one, the voiceless one, waiting, wondering whether his voice would ever return, but in that silence, preparing himself for the miracle that might come, that could come, when his voice was restored and he was free to say what he wanted, to sing his song, to prophesy about God’s goodness and redemption.

Advent, the weeks leading up to Christmas can sometimes seem overwhelming—the bustle of activity, all the things to do, holiday concerts, and parties. It can be a time of eager expectation and bitter disappointment. It can be a time of tears as well as joy as we think of loved ones who are no longer present in our lives, broken relationships, a world full of tumult. Finding time to spend with God, deepening our relationships with Jesus, preparing our souls and hearts for the coming of Christ may seem like an unnecessary luxury or even a burden of guilt.

Zechariah’s example may inspire us. As he waited in silence, the voiceless one, perhaps he had room to listen for God.

Perhaps in his silence he came to a deeper knowledge and experience of God, that enabled him to sing his song. Perhaps he experienced the tender compassion of God. May this Advent be for us a time to listen for God, to look for God’s presence in our lives and in the world, and to cultivate God’s tender compassion.

Apocalypse, Dystopia, and the Coming of God’s Reign: A sermon for I Advent, 2024

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There’s something about the coming of the Season of Advent that always takes me back to the first year I spent in Germany in 1979-1980. Maybe it’s because it was then that I first really felt the darkness of the season. Marburg, where I was studying was much further north than the part of the Midwest where I grew up and the constantly gray skies and short days combined to create a gloom that seemed to encompass everything. 

But it was also then that I first encountered the powerful themes of Advent in the Lutheran tradition; not just the Advent wreath but the great German hymns, like the Bach Chorale “Wachet Auf” which we will be singing later. Lutheran theological reflection on Advent also shaped me deeply: the theological reflection on Christ’s comings—at Christmas, at the end of times, and in Word and Sacrament. A few years later, I would listen to the great Swedish New Testament scholar and later bishop of Stockholm, Sweden as he preached to a tiny congregation of students at Harvard Divinity School on the symbol of lighting candles in the midst of deepening darkness. As darkness descends in the Northern Hemisphere, to light candles is not only a necessity but an act of hope in a time that can seem disorienting when the darkness seems overwhelming.

In the twenty-first century, we have the luxury of electricity that helps us keep the darkness at bay. It’s hard for us to imagine, unless we’ve experienced lengthy power outages, or are accustomed to camping in the wilderness far from human habitation, the ubiquity, intensity, and sheer power of darkness, especially as it was experienced in previous centuries. For those of us who are sighted, it is hard to imagine how blind people experience the world—the darkness in which they are enveloped all of the time.

As rich and powerful as the imagery of darkness and light is—and we will see it not only now in this season of Advent but right through Christmas and Epiphany, it is not without its problematic side—it can easily slip into the binaries of white and black, good and evil, that have had such a pernicious and persistent effect on our culture. Can we imagine other ways of relating to darkness—its mystery, its infinity, its unknowingness, the way it has of disorienting and reorienting us?

While the language of darkness and light is almost ubiquitous in our liturgy, other themes dominate our scripture readings and theological reflections in Advent. Chief among these may be time. 

We see that theme emphasized in the beautiful collect for the First Sunday in Advent:

give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty

This beautiful and powerful collect for the First Sunday of Advent stresses that this season is not only a time of preparation for Christmas; an opportunity to get a head start on Holiday festivities. Advent directs our attention to Christ’s second coming and teaches us that we live as Christians between that time of Christ’s incarnation, his death and resurrection, and the consummation of our final hope in Christ’s return. As Christians, we have experienced the first fruits of Christ’s transforming work, but we languish in this world, in this time, enmeshed in the powers of evil that surround us and seem to hold sway.

In a very profound sense, all of Christian life lives in that tension between Christ’s coming and the Second Coming. It’s often said that Christians are “Easter People”—the reality is that we are also Advent people, living in the interstices between Christ’s first coming and his second. Of course, we usually do what we can to reduce that tension between time past, time present, and time to come, and we most often do that by ignoring or downplaying that focus on the future, on Christ’s second coming. 

Those of you who grew up Evangelical in the 70s, and perhaps even in the decades since, may still bear with you the trauma of endless warnings on the imminence of Christ’s second coming and the rapture, much of it precipitated by Hal Lindsey and his bestselling book—The Late Great Planet Earth. Lindsey died this past week, but his legacy lives on.

Now, however, It may be that our visions of the future are dominated by dystopian nightmares : the movies of the Mad Max franchise, or the Handmaid’s Tale; and the dystopian future may seem ever closer and more realistic. In the gospel reading, we have hints of such dystopias: signs in the sun, moon, and stars, the roaring of waves and the sea.

We may be tempted like so many in the past and in the present, to see in those signs evidence of the nearness of the Second Coming. Certainly, however we interpret those signs, we may be full of fear as we look into the future of the next few months, or the next four years, or beyond.

This morning’s gospel comes from Luke’s version of Jesus’ apocalyptic warnings to his followers. Present in all three synoptic gospels, though with significant differences among them, this speech is located in the last week of Jesus’ life, when he is preaching and teaching in the temple, and confronted by his opponents. In fact, it comes from Luke’s version of the story we heard from Mark just two weeks ago. To set the context a little more clearly, the chapter began with Jesus’ prediction of the destruction of the temple, followed by the disciples asking him when all this would take place. Then Jesus gives lists of things to look for, warnings of what will happen to those who are his followers—arrest and persecution.

Now, here, Jesus gives his followers advice. Be on guard! Be alert! Stand up and raise your heads! But there’s another piece of advice that seems to contradict what else he says. Jesus refers to the fig tree. He points out something every gardener knows, that when a plant begins to show signs of growth in the spring, the summer is on its way. On one level, that’s obvious and might be interpreted as another sign of what is to come. But as every gardener knows, a tree that leafs out and blossoms in the spring, may not bear fruit until the late summer or fall. In other words, the new growth may be a sign of things to come. But there is also a lot of time to pass and probably some hard work to do. 

Most importantly however, the signs Jesus mentions are not signs of doom and destruction. They are signs that our redemption draws near. They are signs of the coming of the Reign of God.

There’s a sense in which all that we do in this season of Advent, all that we do in the run-up to Christmas, is about the nearness of God’s reign. The promise we hear in the words of the prophet Jeremiah, that God will keep God’s promise and restore justice and righteousness,–that promise beckons still. 

But the reality is rather different. God’s reign draws near but the world knows it not. God’s reign draws near but the shoots of new life are only that, faint signs in the midst of a turbulent and difficult world. God’s reign draws near but it is easy to miss those signs and to fall into despair and disappointment.

We shouldn’t interpret Jesus’ instructions to be alert, stay awake, as warnings. We shouldn’t lapse into fear and foreboding. Instead, we should look for the signs that God’s reign draws near, signs of promise and hope, signs of new life in the midst of our troubled world. Advent is a time when we should look for such signs, cultivate and nurture the signs we discover, and be signs of the coming of God’s reign to the world around us. 

Among those signs, but more than a sign is the third way that Christ comes to us in Advent and throughout the year. In the proclamation of the Word, and in the sacrament of his body and blood, we experience Christ’s coming among us, to us, in us, even as they are signs of Christ’s second coming and signs of God’s coming reign. Truly our redemption draws near. May this season of Advent be a time when we experience and see Christ’s coming to us and to the world. 

Advent Poetry: A homily for Advent 3B, 2023

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December 17, 2023

There’s something about the season of Advent that always draws me to poetry. It may be the ambiguity of the season, the idea that we are waiting for Christ coming to us in multiple ways. It may be the binary opposites of light and darkness, goodness and evil, that permeate the traditional imagery of the season, of our hymnody and scripture readings.

This week I’ve been reading the latest work by Christian Wiman, a poet and theologian who now teaches at Yale Divinity School. For many years, he was the editor of Poetry magazine. He writes with beauty, power, and elegance about his ambivalent faith and his decade-long struggle with cancer. His latest book is entitled Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries against Despair. 

While there is a great deal that is worthy of reflection, the thing that stopped me cold—and keeps drawing me back, is a poem by Anne Carson that he includes and upon which he reflects. It’s entitled “God’s Justice”

I love that image: “on the day He was to create justice God got involved in making a dragonfly and lost track of time.” It alludes to something that I have come to believe more and more strongly—God’s boundless and infinite creativity, a joyfulness and play at the heart of creation and at the heart of God. 

But there’s something else here that’s poignant and sad—perhaps. The sense that there is something fundamentally wrong with the world as we experience it—that it isn’t just and right. We know that all too well—the suffering in the world and in our lives, the pain inflicted on human beings by other human beings and the inability, unwillingness to try to make this right. We know the evils of the world and, as the prophet does in today’s reading, we cry out for justice. 

In the beginning there were days set aside for various tasks
On the day he was to create justice 
God got involved in making a dragonfly
and lost track of time.

It was about two inches long
with turquoise dots all down its back like Lauren Bacall.

God watched it bend its tiny wire elbows
as it set about clening the transparent case of its head.
The eye globes mounted on the case.

rotated this way and that
as it polished every angle.
Inside the case

which was glassy black like the windows of a downtown bank
God could see the machinery humming
and He watched the hum

travel all the way down turquoise dots to the end of the tail
and breathe off as light.
Its black wings vibrated in and out.

Our lessons today remind us of where our focus should be, where and how we should proclaim Christ, where and how we should work for justice. 

The reading from Isaiah, the first verses of which provide the text for Jesus first public proclamation in the Gospel of Luke, offer both reassurance and command. As Christians, we read these words as promise of Christ’s coming, of the future reign of God that he proclaimed and for which we hope. We see ourselves as recipients of that good news, and of the promised healing and release.

At the same time, we must see ourselves in this story, not just as recipients of God’s grace and justice but as participants in the coming of that justice. We are called to rebuild the ruined cities—and here we might think not only of literal cities, but of all the ways that human community, the common good, have been undermined and attacked in recent years.

Even stronger are the words from the Song of Mary. It’s always helpful to remember just who she was—a young woman, likely a teenager, mysteriously, shamefully pregnant, as vulnerable in her historical context as a similar young woman would be in our day. Yet from that small, unlikely, reviled person, comes this powerful hymn that witnesses to God’s redemptive power:

My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord,

my spirit rejoices in God my Savior; * 
for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant.

From this day all generations will call me blessed: *
the Almighty has done great things for me, and holy is his Name.

He has mercy on those who fear him *
in every generation.

He has shown the strength of his arm, *
he has scattered the proud in their conceit.

He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, *
and has lifted up the lowly.

He has filled the hungry with good things, *
and the rich he has sent away empty.

This familiar hymn has suffered for its popularity and familiarity. Its use in worship over the millennia has numbed us to its revolutionary power. We need to reclaim it today, sing it with meaning. We need to do more than sing it, we need to work so that it comes into being. We need to imagine the possibility that God is working in this way, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, in spite of all our fears, doubts, and despair. We need to believe that the words of a first-century teenaged single mom can inspire to see God at work in the world around us. For remember, the world in which she lived was unjust and violent as well, and for many people hopelessness and terror were ways of life.

Like the poem with which I began, Mary’s song is a thing of beauty, sung in the midst of injustice. It calls us to see beauty in the broken world around us. It calls us to see God at work in those beautiful things created by God, even in us. It calls us to to the hope that in spite of the ugliness and suffering in the world, God’s beauty and justice are present, making all things new, and through God’s grace, remaking us as well.

The Wildness of Advent: A Sermon for Advent 2B, 2023

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On Monday, I had the opportunity to spend a few hours with poet, theologian, trans activist, and faithful Christian Jay Hulme. I have been following Jay on Twitter for many years. I’m not sure how I got connected but over the years, in addition to sharing his spiritual journey and some of his poems, he posted photos of many of the old churches he visited, and whose towers he climbed. He is currently churchwarden of St. Nicolas, Leicester, England, one of the oldest, perhaps the sixth oldest continuing church in England. Dating from the 8th or 9th century, it is built on the ruins of a sixth century church, which in turn is built on Roman ruins. 

Jay’s poetry is fierce and powerful. He writes about the many places he visits, about holy wells, and saints, and sacred places. There’s a wildness about his poetry and personality. He is courageous and frank. We talked about the very different senses of history that come from being among buildings that date back 500 years or a millennium and the relatively newness of our own buildings. I showed him Grace Church and sent him up the bell tower and I expect we might see a poem one day about that experience or about the cheese curds we shared at the Old Fashioned over lunch.

Listening to him read his poems brought home to me the wildness of the God he encounters in those strange places, on holy islands like Lindisfarne, or in the saints like Joan of Arc about whom he writes. So I was thinking about wildness when I reread the gospel for today, Mark’s take on John the Baptizer. 

In fact, there’s a wildness about Mark as a whole. Probably the first of the gospels to appear, Mark begins in the middle of things and ends abruptly, with an empty tomb and frightened women. In between, there are stories of Jesus encountering people possessed by evil spirits, by demons, Jesus taming storms, and there’s a sense that Jesus himself is doing battle with Satan and demonic forces. 

But wildest of all may be John the Baptizer himself. As Mark tells it, John suddenly appears in the wilderness, preaching and baptizing and attracting large crowds. He is clothed in camel hair and ate locusts and wild honey. Did the crowds come out of curiosity or a desire to hear the words of a prophet? Ultimately, his wildness, his uncontrollability will lead to the inevitable result, his arrest by the authorities, in this case Herod, and his execution.

Our observance of the season of Advent is complicated and contradictory. It is a season of preparation and waiting, preparing for Christ’s coming at Christmas, but as our scripture readings and hymns remind us, it is also about the Second Coming-Christ coming in majesty.

 We tend to downplay that aspect of the season. It can make us feel uncomfortable and inappropriate in light of the larger cultural focus on the coming of Christmas, the round of holiday concerts and get-togethers; the ways in which the advent wreath, for example, originally intended for use in homes, has found its way into churches and given liturgies that focus on themes like love and joy. 

And then we encounter John the Baptizer, with his wild hair, his wild dress, and his wild preaching—Repent! For the kingdom of God has drawn near. John breaks in on us and our complacency. John breaks in on our self-satisfaction and our delusions. John breaks in on the certainties of our lives and our of our seasonal celebrations and cries “Repent.”

This is wildness, uncontrollable. Like the images of the second coming that have dominated our readings over the last month. Like the threats of judgment and warning given to servants, and to bridesmaids, and to us.

That wildness surrounds us—wildness of our own making and not of God’s. The threats of climate change. Are we at a tipping point, with the threats of the melting of the Greenland icesheet while politicians dither over concrete actions, in of all places, Dubai, a monument to our thirst for fossil fuels and conspicuous consumption?

Are we at a tipping point, with thousands already dead in Gaza, and threats to hundreds of thousands, while politicians and pundits debate “genocide” and silence critics of the devastating war that is taking place in front of our eyes and with the support and weapons of the US.

We look around and see all of the crises that continue to threaten us—and the ways in which we threaten the lives of others and all the while we make our plans, do our shopping, plan our menus. The chaos of it all, the wildness, threatens to overwhelm us and so we grasp at those familiar rituals that help to center us and to stave off those feelings of fear and despair.

Wildness, chaos is often understood to be a product of evil yet it’s worth remembering that in the story of creation, God was there, in the midst of chaos, bringing order, speaking the universe into existence, bringing light, and life and creativity. The voice of John crying in the wilderness is not a sign of chaos but a call to repentance, a call from God to us.

Advent reminds us that God is coming into the world, a world beset by evil, threatened by chaos, changed and degraded by our own human actions, our hubris, greed, and rampant desires. But God is coming into the world, coming to us. Indeed, if we pay attention, as we should, we will realize that God is already here, in the wildness, and in the chaos, remaking us in God’s image, bestowing grace in our lives and in those we love.

We may be fearful; we may be disheartened; we may lose hope. But God calls us from the wilderness and the wildness, God calls us in our own wildernesses and wildnesses, when our steps falter, our faith flags, our strength fails. God calls us, comes to us and leads us into the future where there is hope, and justice, and peace.

November 27, 2022

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I’m not one of those people who complains every spring and fall when we have to change our clocks for daylight savings time. Sure, it’s a hassle, and there used to be the stress of wondering whether we’d forget and get to church either an hour early or an hour late—but cell phones have done away with that anxiety. I don’t really care about losing or gaining an hour of sleep, for truth be told, I never sleep well on Saturday nights—I’m always worrying about my sermon and about what’s going to happen on Sunday morning.

Still, there’s something shocking about that first Sunday evening when it gets dark an hour earlier than it did the night before. Whatever the temperature outside, the fact that it grows dark around 5:00 is a reminder that winter is coming, and I feel my body and spirit coming to terms with that fact.

We’re deep into it now in late November. We had a little over 9 hours of daylight yesterday; thankfully it was sunny and warm, so our spirits weren’t oppressed by the dreariness of a cloudy November day. We know it will get darker; that the days are still getting shorter. 

One of the realities of modern life is the extent to which the electric lightbulb has changed our lives and cultures. The inevitability, the ubiquity, the sheer pervasiveness of darkness has been overcome permanently. It takes a power outage to remind us of the human struggle against darkness, the futility of that struggle, and all the ways that darkness limited and continues to limit human life and culture in so many ways.

Light, darkness. In spite of our technology that keeps absolute darkness at bay most of the time, we all know what it’s like when we turn on a flashlight in a dark space and are able to orient ourselves to our environment. We also know what it’s like when the light suddenly goes out and we don’t quite know where we are. This experience, the contrast of light and darkness are definitive aspects of human experience. We may tend to think of them as oppositional and there’s temptation to give them moral qualities—light is good, dark is evil. Certainly, one can see such tendencies in scripture.

Light and darkness is a leitmotif of our season and those that are to follow—Christmas and Epiphany. Think of the opening verses of the Gospel of John that is read on Christmas Day each year: “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot comprehend it.”

The collect for the First Sunday of Advent highlights this theme: “give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light…” It is a quotation from the epistle reading, in which Paul urges his readers to pay attention, to wake up from their sleep for the night is far gone, the day is near, by which he means Christ’s coming.  

There’s something about the advent wreath that conveys the tentativeness, the vulnerability of the season, and of our hope. Around us, the world grows darker as the days grow shorter. Around us, the world is dark—literally so in Ukraine where Russian missiles and drones knock out the power grid, forcing millions to shiver in the cold and struggle in darkness. The world is dark, the relentless march of mass shootings across our country. The light of hope seems nearly extinguished. 

But in the midst of that darkness, even as we know more darkness is to come, week by week we light the candles of Advent, and as we do the Advent wreath grows brighter, its witness stronger, even as the darkness of the season deepens. 

The witness of a single candle burning in a space shrouded by dusk or darkness. That is a metaphor of our Advent experience. St. Paul was writing a couple of decades after Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection. We sense already in this text some of the uncertainty that arose as Christ’s expected return, in majesty as the collect says, was delayed. Stay awake, he admonishes, the night is far gone.

For us, that urgency, that expectation is even more distant. Oh we know all about those Christians who look for signs of Christ’s imminent return; those who interpret every historical event in light of the Book of Revelation or other biblical prophecies. But really, do most of us think that the loudest exponents of Christ’s imminent return believe it, or rather that they are using it to gain power, prestige, and wealth?

Do we believe it? We say we do, every Sunday, when we recite the Nicene Creed: “He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.” Still, the second coming of Christ, is one of those doctrines with which we might struggle, even as we acknowledge, as we see in the gospel reading as well as in the epistle the centrality of that belief to early Christianity and to the teachings of Jesus as well.

It may seem so farfetched that we press it from our minds, leave it to those other Christians to ponder, to reflect on, and to exploit. Our feet are on the ground, we take comfort in the rational world in which we live, and so we push away those beliefs—even if, from time to time, our minds may wander and wonder. 

The images are gripping aren’t they? Two people in the field, one taken, one left. When we hear it, our mind goes to the stories we’ve heard or the movies we’ve seen that claim to depict Jesus’ second coming and the Rapture—a 19th century invention that has gripped the fascination of generations of especially American Christians.  

If not that, then what? I don’t mean to demythologize or downplay the Second Coming. It is, after all, a central concept in Christianity. One way of thinking about it is that it highlights the contrast between what is and what should be. We know all about what is: the violence, the evil and hatred, I won’t recite the litany. We have a sense that things aren’t right and when we hear the words of scripture as the vision described in Isaiah 2, we feel in the marrow of our bones the disconnect between the world we inhabit and the world that God intends: a world of peace and justice, where swords are beat into plowshares.

At its core, the Second Coming is an expression of our hope that God will make all things right, that God will bring justice and peace, an end to suffering. 

And so, in Advent, we light week by week the candles of the advent wreath, expressing our hope that even in the darkness of our world and of our lives, we can discern the light of God’s presence. And as the candles burn, they proclaim our faith that Christ will come and make all things new. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness cannot overwhelm it. Amen.

Singing after Silence: A Sermon for Advent 2C, December 5, 2021

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Of all the things the pandemic has deprived me of, deprived us as humans, as members of a congregation, none may be more significant than the loss of song. From the early days, when we learned of the rapid spread of covid among choir singers, we have remained largely silent in church—the rich hymnody of the Christian tradition, which speaks to and for us and our faith, has been laid aside except for halting attempts like virtual choirs or our zoom hymn sings when we gather virtually to raise our voices. But the sheer joy and emotional depth that comes from singing together has been largely absent from our worship. We are slowly, haltingly, reintroducing hymns to our worship, but at the same time we recognize the challenges we face when we do sing.

Still, as Mark and Berkley know, I refused to go through a second Advent without singing “Lo, he comes with clouds descending” which will be our closing hymn today at our later service. 

Song has been a central part of Christian worship from the beginning, as it was and remains for Judaism—evidenced in the presence of the Book of Psalms in our holy scripture. 

Today, we sang the Song of Zechariah as our psalm or response. It’s one of four songs that Luke includes in his story of the nativity.  One of those songs, the Gloria, sung by the angels when they appeared to the shepherds, has traditionally been a central part of our Eucharistic celebrations. The other songs appear regularly in the daily office, morning and evening prayer: the Song of Mary, the Magnificat, the song of Simeon, the nunc dimittis, which is sung at Evening Prayer, and the Benedictus, the Song of Zechariah, which we just said together.

These songs likely were not composed by Luke, but were taken and adapted by him from songs that Christians were already singing in their worship. Whether or not they come from the people or angels, in whose mouths Luke placed them, they reflect an even deeper tradition for all of them are bathed in the language, imagery, and poetry of Jewish worship and Hebrew scriptures. 

Still it’s important to pay attention to the context and to the lips where Luke places these songs. In Zechariah’s case, he hadn’t been able to sing, or speak for nine months. You may recall the story. Zechariah and his wife Elizabeth were elderly, childless. Zechariah was a priest. The story goes that he was chosen by lot to enter the sanctuary and offer incense, quite likely a great honor and probably the only time he did it in his life, and while he was there by himself, the angel Gabriel appeared to him and promised that he and Elizabeth would have a child. Zechariah was rather skeptical about the probability of this ever happening, and when he expressed his doubts, Gabriel struck him speechless for the duration of the pregnancy. 

The child was born and on the 8th day, as he was about to be circumcised, and still speechless, Zechariah wrote out instructions that the baby should be named John. As soon as he did that, his voice returned and he began to praise God. Luke continues, “Then his father Zechariah was filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke this prophecy.” 

For nearly two years, our voices have remained silent of song. We have been able to speak, unlike Zechariah who remained totally silent for nine months. Now, I can’t imagine being silent for nine months, and I can’t imagine that after nine months of silence, the first thing I would do would be to praise God. But I do know this about silence, that it allows us to think and reflect before we speak, and with nine months of silence, and uncertainty about whether the silence was just temporary as Gabriel said, or would be permanent, I think I probably would think carefully, very carefully about what words I would speak when the ability to speak came back.

But Luke doesn’t say that this song was the product of careful reflection and composition over the course of nine months. He offers a rather different account of its composition—Zechariah, Luke says, was filled with the Holy Spirit and began to prophesy. This prophecy, this Spirit-filled song, fairly bursts with scriptural allusions. It’s as if Zechariah, having nine months of silence to reflect on his experience and on his promised son, has internalized all of salvation history, the whole story of scripture, and recasts it in light of the hope he now has. 

It’s fitting that the name Zechariah means “God remembers” for Zechariah sings of God’s remembering God’s people. Zechariah sings of God’s promises, to raise up a mighty nation, to save “us”—Zechariah includes himself in this promise of salvation—from our enemies; to show mercy to our fathers; to set us free to worship God without fear.

In the last section of the psalm, Zechariah turns to the promises embodied in his own son, John the Baptist, who would be the prophet, not only of God’s promises, but also prepare the way for the one who was still to come, the one who would usher in God’s reign. 

This one, Zechariah’s son, John the Baptist, would be a harbinger, a sign of that which was to come, the dawn of salvation, not salvation itself. John offered hope and pointed away from himself to the Christ. But through him, we begin to see, recognize, and experience “the tender compassion of our God.” That lovely phrase not only evokes images of a mother embracing her new-born child, as the joyful and incredulous Elizabeth was likely cradling her infant son John, it also invites us to imagine God’s maternal, nurturing love for us and for all creation, a love we experience and know in and through Christ’s love for us. 

“Tender compassion” reminds as well that God’s love and mercy for us, as powerful as it may be, is also an invitation, not an imposition. It requires us to pay attention, to be vulnerable and open, to allow ourselves to see and experience that tender compassion in spite of the noise and violence of our world. Like the breaking dawn that we see only if we ourselves are already awake, and if we lift our eyes away from ourselves and our concerns to the horizon, God’s tender compassion is easily overlooked, missed in the noise of all that competes for our attention. God’s tender compassion is a melody played on a single note, not the cacophony of a rock band in a stadium.

Zechariah sang his song after nine months of silence, imposed on him as punishment by Gabriel. Song has largely been absent from our voices, our lives over the last couple of years and our lives have been less rich because of it—our spiritual experience perhaps less full, less rich because of our inability to sing.

And the world may make us feel like we cannot sing. We may feel hopelessness, despair, oppression as the world around us careens from one disaster to the next. Images and stories from across the globe make real the suffering of our fellow humans, the fact that like Zechariah, they too, cannot open their mouths to sing, or if they do, their songs are laments or the blues.

Such songs can also be prophesies—they can call us out of our complacency, our stupor, our self-deception. They can wake us to the pain and suffering of the world around us; they can also, like Zechariah’s inspire us to action and to hope. 

God’s tender compassion comes to us in many ways and in many forms. May we pay attention, open our ears to hear its sweet melody, and may it help our hearts sing as we experience God’s mercy and salvation.

Our redemption has drawn near: A Sermon for Advent 1C, 2021

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November 28, 2021

What a couple of weeks it’s been! The shock of the Rittenhouse verdict; the carnage in Waukesha last weekend, during which the good people of St. Matthias led by the rector David Simmons, opened their doors to offer refuge and comfort to victims and bystanders. Then this week the convictions for murder of the defendants in the murder of Ahmad Aubery. And even as we were trying to observe the annual rituals of Thanksgiving, Good Friday, and the end of the college football regular season, news of a new and worrisome COVID variant threatening to upend our lives once again.

We continue to struggle, individually, as a community, a nation, a world, with ongoing pandemic and our deep desires to return to the world and the lives we had two years ago. News of the omicron variant sent shockwaves through the financial system on Friday, and I daresay, has caused many of us to worry again what the future, the next weeks may hold for us, even as we look ahead to Christmas and other holiday plans that were beginning to look rather like celebrations of past years.

With all of that on my mind, I didn’t have the fortitude to go back through my past sermons on Advent I, to remind myself of past years, of the themes I stressed. For me, the beginning of Advent has usually been a wonderful moment in my personal spiritual life and in the life of the congregations of which I’ve been a part. There’s the excitement of the build-up towards Christmas but more than that, the central themes of the season: waiting, watching, hope have tended to strengthen my faith in Christ’s coming—not only at Christmas but on the Last Day, and strengthen my resolve to look for signs of his coming, and his presence already in the world around us and in my life. 

But this year, I feel like I’ve had enough of waiting. Haven’t we all been waiting, for nearly two years, for life to return to some semblance of normal? Is it possible to maintain hope in the face of all that’s going on in the world? 

How do we make sense of it all? How do we enter Advent this year with all of this uncertainty, fear, and, let’s face it, sheer exhaustion? I don’t have answers for you—I think asking these questions, wondering how to prepare for Christ’s coming, how to open ourselves to his presence in the world, experiencing his entrance into a world like ours all that pondering search; well, that all maybe Advent discipline enough for now.

Still, as I reflect on our readings and collect, there’s something that intrigues me this year. As I was thinking about today’s sermon, something a commentator wrote caused me to stop and ponder. They said something to the effect that the gospel reading in Advent begins with a focus on time expanding outward, toward the Second Coming, and over the course of the four weeks, time begins to slow down, to shorten, until we come (this is me, not the commentator) to the moment of Gabriel announcing to Mary the coming of the Savior of the World in her body.

There’s something profound in that observation that says something about the Gospel of Luke and about us. We are in Year C of the lectionary, when we read the Gospel of Luke which has a very different tone, and certainly different perspective on time, than the Gospel of Mark which we read this past year. If there’s a single word that describes Mark’s attitude toward time, it is “Immediately” one of the most common words in the gospel, often used to introduce a new scene or episode. There’s an urgency to Mark’s gospel, a sense that everything is happening at a break-necked pace. And that extends to his perspective on Christ’s second coming, which as you heard last Sunday, Mark seems to have expected to happen very soon, in his lifetime.

 Luke has a very different tone. As we will see again and again throughout the coming year. The story he tells is not limited geographically in scope to Galilee and Jerusalem, as with Mark. Instead, Luke puts the story of Jesus in a global context. He begins by contextualizing his story in the Roman Empire, and ends the Book of Acts, the second volume of his work, with St. Paul’s arrival in Rome. 

Even here, in this text, Luke ratchets down Mark’s urgency. Whether it’s because he’s writing at a later date, further removed from the events described in the text, Luke’s version of Jesus’ words lack the intensity of Mark’s.

We are actually hearing from Luke’s version of verses taken from the same episode in Mark’s gospel that we heard last week, the so-called Little Apocalypse. Both gospel writers place in Jesus’ mouth in the last days of his life as he is teaching in and around the temple. He predicts the destruction of that very temple, an event that would take place some forty years after Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection. It was a cataclysmic event both for Judaism and for Christianity.

Mark was very likely written shortly after the temple’s destruction, and his version of this apocalypse shows urgency and immediacy. Luke, writing at least 15 years later, has a longer perspective. Clearly, the destruction of the temple did not inaugurate Christ’s return, so Luke leaves out references to wars and rumors of wars, references to people fleeing the destruction and fleeing persecution. Instead, he mentions signs in the skies and stars, and in the seas, nothing so specific as an earthquake.

Luke’s version may not seem quite so urgent, but there is desperation, nonetheless. The language used is evocative—“People will faint from fear and foreboding”—we might also say, it is enough to take one’s breath away, feelings we are familiar with these days.

But in the midst of these signs, all is not lost. There is hope. God’s reign is still entering into the world, still coming. Our redemption is drawing near. 

Over the course of the next weeks, as we move back from nearly the end of Jesus’ life to the beginning, and before, time will contract; the scope of Luke’s story will narrow to Bethlehem, and to the coming of Christ into the world. Our focus may narrow as well, as the business of the season, the world-historical events swirling around us give way to the intimate rituals of family, friends, and community.

But those small, intimate moments bear witness to the larger truth—that Christ’s coming into the world ushers in a new age—God’s reign of justice and peace. And signs of that coming are not just in scripture, or in re-enacted stories but in the world around us.

Our redemption draws near. Even when it seems most unlikely, when things seem to be at their worst, when there are signs in the skies and in the seas, when the powers of the heavens seem to shake, and we cower in desperate fear, there are signs of God’s coming reign. 

Our redemption draws near. There is hope for all who live on the face of the earth. This Advent, even as we struggle with all of the world’s ills, struggle with pandemic, with injustice, oppression, and racism, when all seems lost and the world seems to be spiraling into chaos, our redemption draws near. 

May this Advent be a season when our hope is rekindled like the candles of advent wreaths are lit; when our faith is strengthened and our eyes opened to see those signs of Christ’s coming, signs of God’s reign breaking in upon us, signs of God’s future entering into our present. 

A Disrupted Advent: A Homily for Advent 4B, 2020

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It’s a familiar story. They are words we’ve heard many times year after year. A story depicted in countless paintings; gestures and words mimicked in devotional practices. It has settled into our memory like other stories that have shaped us—stories told in our families that seem to capture something of the essence of who we are and where we came from; stories of our nation, mythic stories that define us. Such stories are often so familiar, so beloved, their meaning so fixed in our memory that we rarely explore them more deeply.

There’s so much we don’t know about this story; so much more we want to know. We don’t know who Mary was, not really. We don’t know how old she was, although it’s likely she was a teenager. In first century Palestinian Judaism, girls were often betrothed at age 12 or so, and married no later than 19 or 20. We don’t know, can’t imagine, what this encounter, this new reality did to her. The gospels are largely silent about what she does later in life, about her response to her son. John tells us that she was present at the crucifixion; Luke says she was among the group of disciples that gathered in Jerusalem after the ascension, and presumably right through to Pentecost. Tradition has filled out the story. Theological reflection and devotional creativity have answered questions raised by Christians for 2000 years.

We have this story. A young woman, her life suddenly disrupted by the appearance of an angel; her world shattered and remade by events out of her control. That we know something about. So many of our certainties, so much of our lives have been disrupted over the last nine months; who could have imagined back in March that we would be here, the pandemic still raging, our lives on hold, fear, and weariness, and anger, still overwhelming us? Exhausted, fearful, the lives we led, the world we lived in nine months ago seem distant memories, faint whisps of dream we once had, with no connection to reality in which now live. Our hopes for the future cling by a slender thread. Oh, yes, we know what disrupted worlds and lives are like.

An angel came to Mary, saying “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.” Her world upended, first by the very appearance of an angel.. And then came more, that she would bear a child who would be the Savior of the world.  

I’m always fascinated by her response to the angel. First, when he appears to her and greets her, Luke she was perplexed and wondered what sort of greeting this might be—perplexed and wondering, not by the appearance of the angel to her, which would no doubt shock and surprise us, but by his greeting, by him calling her “Favored one.” And then when told the rest, she asks the question, “How can this be?” 

The tradition of devotion and theology, and perhaps going back to Luke himself, has tended to portray Mary as a passive recipient of God’s grace and favor, as someone who accepted her fate quietly, submissively. Often she has served as a role model for passive, submissive femininity, and certainly in Luke’s gospel, she functions as something of the ideal disciple, one who follows meekly and obediently.

But here we see something else. Surprise, wonder, questions. Mary’s faith is not that passive, unquestioning faith. She wants to know more, she wants to understand. And then, in the midst of her disrupted world and disrupted life, something else. We know the scandal of unplanned, unwanted pregnancies, of teenaged mothers left on their own with no resources, forced to struggle to provide for themselves and their little ones. We can imagine how hard it would have been for a teenager in first-century Palestine, with all of the shame and stigma, traces of which remain in the accounts of Joseph’s response to the news of Mary’s pregnancy. We can, I think, imagine the fear, the future she imagined as she heard the angel’s words.

But can we imagine also the hope? In the middle of this disruption to her world and to her life, Mary visits her elderly cousin and during that visit, sings a song that has echoed throughout history down to our day:

My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior 

He has shown the strength of his arm, *
he has scattered the proud in their conceit.

He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, *
and has lifted up the lowly.

He has filled the hungry with good things, *
and the rich he has sent away empty.

And while it has become a song of pious devotion, it is a profound prophecy of God’s power, justice, and mercy. It is a song of hope in the midst of fear, hope for justice in the midst of oppression, a cry of resistance against the forces of evil and inequality.

Mary is an example for us. In the midst of our disrupted and upended lives and world, nothing seems the same, and our wishes for a return to normalcy, to turn the clock back nine months or a year, or simply an exhausted desire to ignore what’s happening around us and get on with our lives, when we are beaten down, Mary is an example for us.

We can’t know what her life was like, what she thought or felt. But we know her faith, her hope. We know the God in whom she trusted. And the words she sang can become our own as we hope for a new world, a better future, for ourselves, our nation and world. 

Into our disrupted world, into our disrupted lives, Christ is coming. The angel’s greeting comes to us and in that greeting, in Mary’s song, we may find strength and hope for the coming months. The world being brought into being by Christ’s coming, is a world disrupted by God’s justice and mercy, where the mighty have fallen, the hungry are filled with good things and the rich are sent away empty. 

Mary sings of and shows us the world as God intends it, a just and equitable world, not the old world of wishful thinking and faint memories. Mary points us toward the future, a future full of hope, a future where God reigns. May we raise our voices with Mary, in hope and faith that God is with us now and reigns in justice and mercy.