Magnificat Hope
tl;dr: Advent, Mary, and eschatological liberatory hope.
Scripture
Video
Video from YouTube is available below:
Transcript
The Gospel text today is a common part of the story in Advent leading up to Christmas. Mary has just found out she's a pregnant virgin, goes to visit her cousin Elizabeth, and then breaks out into song. I'm always amazed by this reaction. Most people finding out about an unwanted pregnancy as a teenager or young adult do not respond by singing a song about God's liberation. And that's not even factoring in the whole virginity thing. Before the reading today, Mary does ask how that is going to work, but then at least as far as Luke tells it, she moves quickly to celebrating.
That always makes me wonder how many women God pitched this idea to before finding one that said yes. Maybe God had been trying to do this whole incarnation thing for decades and hadn't gotten somebody to agree to it yet. In the Eastern Church, Mary is called the Theotokos, which means mother of God. I'm not going to pick apart the theological implications of that; I just like it because it makes her sound like a superhero, and I do think what little we learn of Mary is pretty heroic.
Anyway, Mary does not run away. Instead, she agrees, and delivers this song we call the Magnificat. That label has nothing to do with magnificent cats, which is what I always think of when I hear the word.
The name comes from the word magnify, from the first line that sometimes gets translated as "my soul magnifies the Lord.” This song is Mary's way of amplifying what she believes is the core message of God. So what does Mary think is of central importance to God?
Holy is his name. He shows mercy to everyone, from one generation to the next, who honors him as God. He has shown strength with his arm. He has scattered those with arrogant thoughts and proud inclinations. He has pulled the powerful down from their thrones and lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty-handed. (Luke 1:49b-53 CEB)
It is a song of hope. It's not a fluffy hope. It's not a romantic Hallmark movie song about getting married and having a baby. Neither is it depressed giving up because of how hard this will be for her, and it will be hard for her.
We're almost at the end of 2020. There's a pretty strong consensus that it has been a rough year, and I don't even know what other bad news might come through between me recording this Tuesday night and you watching it Sunday morning or later. In the middle of these challenging times, I've found myself thinking a lot about how important hope is, and what the Christian tradition has to say about the idea of hope.
Hope is something that has felt to be in short supply in our world, especially in the past few years. I don't think of myself as feeling hopeful very often. At best I'm just trying to get through one day at a time. If I do think about the future, it can be hard to be optimistic.
But on the first day of Advent, Pope Francis tweeted this:
#Advent is a continuous call to hope: it reminds us that God is present in history to lead it to its ultimate goal and to its fullness, which is the Lord Jesus Christ.
I saw that and thought it basically summarized my homily for today and summarized the Gospel text today.
What is Christian hope?
The Magnificat is a song of hope, and it is a song of judgement. The two ideas go together. You can't really have hope without justice.
Mary's not the first to express hope in God's justice. Mary is clearly steeped in the Hebrew Scriptures and community that came before her. She even says that in the song – these hopes have been passed down for generations. Throughout the Hebrew prophets, this is sometimes called the Day of the Lord, when God would come and make everything right.
There will be a judgement, they believed, and this will be a good thing. We often think of judgement in terms of punishment, but that's the wrong framework. When we talk about God's judgement, we are talking about restoration. It is a vision of healing. It is fundamentally an act of God's love.
This God steps into history. This God identifies things wrong with the world, like wealth and power inequities, and then does something about them. That means lifting up those on the bottom of our power structures, but it also means knocking down those on the top.
Sometimes these prophetic visions of the future are downright threatening. It will be uncomfortable, even painful, for those benefitting from the inequities of the world. And we do all need to ask ourselves in what ways are we the powerful that will need to be cast down. For example, our congregation is mostly white. Most of us have benefitted greatly from systemic realities that make our lives consistently a bit easier. In line with Mary and the other prophets, I can say that white supremacy will be cast down from its throne on our world. There's no room for that kind of inequity in the judgement of God. As much as it can be painful for those of us learning to let go of our privileges, this is a beautiful hopeful thing to be liberated from the ways that we oppress others as well as the ways that we are oppressed by others.
This hope is also fundamentally physical. The prophetic visions of future hope are always in terms of justice on this planet. This world matters. Our bodies matter. Our social interactions and systems matter.
N.T. Wright put it this way in his book Surprised by Hope:
The word eschatology, which literally means "the study of the last things,” doesn't just refer to death, judgment, heaven, and hell, as used to be thought (and as many dictionaries still define the word). It also refers to the strongly held belief of most first-century Jews, and virtually all early Christians, that history was going somewhere under the guidance of God and that where it was going was toward God's new world of justice, healing, and hope. The transition from the present world to the new one would be a matter not of the destruction of the present space-time universe but of its radical healing… We mean, rather, the entire sense of God's future for the world and the belief that that future has already begun to come forward to meet us in the present. Surprised by Hope chapter 7
Grounded in Hope
So if that's what we mean by a Christian hope, how do we live in light of that? What does it look like to be grounded in this hope of a new world?
This ties into the Philippians text we also read today. In this text, Paul encourages his readers to focus on what is good. It is absolutely necessary to talk about what is wrong with the world. If we don't acknowledge things like the structural racism built into our daily lives so much that we don't usually think about it, then we'll never be able to do anything to dismantle it. But being angry at the injustices of the world only gets us so far.
When I was a Cabin Leader at a summer camp several years ago, one of the things I remember was in our training about leading programs teaching skills to the kids. The camp director said that at least 90% of the feedback we give needs to be positive, what the kids were getting right. Then you can sprinkle in a little bit of things that they were doing wrong. The basis is what's good. The priority is helping them visualize doing it right.
Along these lines, I recently came across a devotional called "Imagination: the Most Underrated Spiritual Discipline” which I accessed through the Our Bible app. The author, Laura Jean Truman, said this:
Without hope, we can burn out. Prophets have been yelling about injustice for years, but they've also been preaching about the Beloved Community, the High Country, the Kingdom of God, shalom. We sometimes feel like that part of prophetic ministry – the ministry of future hope – isn't as important as the dismantling of the structures of evil. But the imaginative painting of the world we're aiming for is just as important as naming what is broken in this one. The world needs your imagination. The world needs your creativity. The world needs you to tell a better story… about the future. … Promises of beauty can tear apart what's ugly. from Laura Jean Truman, in devotional "Imagination: the Most Underrated Spiritual Discipline” in Our Bible App
This has some neurological basis to it as well. A central rule of understanding the human brain is Hebbian learning, which can be summarized as: "neurons that fire together, wire together.” The more that we have a certain negative thought pattern, the more we reinforce that negative thought pattern, and we'll go back to that even more easily next time. The more that we have a certain positive thought pattern, the more we reinforce that, and we'll go back to that even more easily next time.
In other words, hope is a choice, a discipline, not just a feeling.
And I'll be honest: it's not a discipline I'm good at. This homily started with 90% raging against injustices of the world and pulling out lots of biblical texts to back me up. Then I read that devotional, started writing this section, realized how much I needed this message for myself, and started cutting back the rage.
We need to be able to hope for a good future. We need to be able to think on what is good. We need to be able to imagine things like living in a world with racial equity. We need to be able to imagine what it would look like if the church was providing an early taste of that Kingdom reality, if we were a community where people of colour were fully included and fully equal in every way. We need to be able to imagine if that equity emanated out from us so much that people were energized by the hopeful vision of a better world that they see.
N.T. Wright again in Surprised by Hope said this:
Hope is what you get when you suddenly realize that a different worldview is possible, a worldview in which the rich, the powerful, and the unscrupulous do not after all have the last word. The same worldview shift that is demanded by the resurrection of Jesus is the shift that will enable us to transform the world. from Surprised by Hope, chapter 4
Advent is a season of waiting, but it isn't just waiting for the sake of waiting. It is a waiting hopefully for the Kingdom of God. As we say when we light the candle every week, we wait in darkness, o lord, for the coming of your light. My hope for this Advent is that we are able to spend some time dreaming about the Kingdom of God, to have our worldview shift, to be a bit more like Mary.
Wrapping up, I'd like to suggest taking a couple of minutes just to try this. I'll leave about 30 seconds of just the fireplace on when I'm done, but feel free to pause it and spend longer before continuing to the next part of the worship service. Allow yourself to daydream a little. Allow yourself to imagine something that makes you feel hopeful. If you have to, start with something negative, but don't stay there. Move on to imagining what it would be like to no longer have that problem. It can be something in your personal life or something broader in society, like the racial equity example I've been using. Allow yourself to soak in that vision of a better world. It might feel silly at first, but the more you try it, the more you can slowly start to align your brain toward that hopeful visionbibles.. And that will help fuel you to put that vision into practice, empower you to join with Jesus in transforming the world.
I'll end with the words of Beth Carlson-Malena in a recent newsletter for Generous Space, a ministry focused on LGBTQ inclusion in the church:
This hope is dangerous. It shows up when we're not expecting it. It's born right in the middle of our mess. And it's all we've got.
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