Our season of waiting and expectation is almost done. The final Sunday of Advent. The final Sunday before Christmas. The next time we gather together, it will be to celebrate the birth of Christ. We gather at Christmas to celebrate God coming into the world, tearing down the ultimate barrier between us. But we’ll get to that next time.
Today, we continue to think about what it is that we are waiting for. What is it that we are hoping for? What does God coming into the world mean to us?
Our readings for today paint a certain picture for us (see Micah 5:2-5a and Luke 1:39-55). In today’s readings, we see God choosing the least likely. Our readings show God choosing those who would be considered weak, outcast, marginalized as those most deserving of honor. Our readings show God giving preferential treatment to those most in need. Our readings show us that God does not choose the ones that our culture tends to tell us we are supposed to value.
The prophet Micah points us to Bethlehem, a tiny town in the least powerful province of the land. This is the town from which God will call the one who is to lead Israel into a better future. But just like the vision we heard from Zephaniah last week, Micah’s vision subverts what it means to be strong. Micah tells us that this leader will shepherd the people in strength and majesty. He will become great through the earth.
He will become one of peace.
Just like Zephaniah, Micah equates strength and greatness with peace. These visions from God show us that strength as God wills it is not like strength as we might normally think of it. We lift up the superheroes of our comics and movies, like Thor or Captain America or Superman, because of their strength, because of who they can defeat. When was the last time we were satisfied reading the story of one who walks in the ways of peace?
And it’s not just in our fictional stories. We do the same in our everyday lives. It is the guy (because it usually is) who talks and acts in strength and power that we so often turn to. It is rarely the one who speaks peace and calm who gets chosen as a strong leader.
And yet, this is who God chooses. God chooses the ones we would most likely overlook. God chooses the ones on the margins. God doesn’t show up in the palace or the temple. God shows up in the least of these. Over and over. And Mary sings a song, a version of which we sang this morning, making it clear exactly what she knows about who God is and who her son will be. “The God of Mary’s song clearly holds in highest esteem those who are poor, hungry, oppressed, and marginalized, in particular, the people forced into poverty by the same systems that prop up the wealthy and powerful” (Schwartz, 33).
If we want to talk about divine love, God’s primary expressions of love are for those most in need. If we read the stories that we have this season, the stories from the prophets, the stories from the Gospels, the stories of a world longing for God to make an appearance, this is what we keep hearing. This is the kingdom that God is building, the kingdom that Jesus comes to tell us about, to teach us about, to show us how to live into. When we hear Mary’s song, a song that is the culmination of her agreement to become the mother of God, we can’t help but recognize that the world that is being brought into being as a result of God being born in the world is not the same old world we have always known. It is not a world where the powerful continue to rule over those without power.
“Mary’s song is an anthem to the God who wants a nation where the hungry will have abundant food and the rulers who have not fed the people will be thrown off their thrones. Mary does not sing of a God whose political order mirrors Rome [or of a God whose political order mirrors our modern world for that matter], but of the God of a people who knew hunger and fear as they wandered through the desert, people who once were enslaved and people who once were immigrants and refugees” (Schwartz, 34). Mary’s song is a praise to the God who does not forget those who have been pushed to the sides, stepped on, oppressed, left for hungry or worse; a God who instead sides with the very people that often get trampled underfoot and ignored.
Now before we start wondering what that means for a people of relative privilege and plenty, God does not exclude us from what is coming into the world...if we are willing to allow it. But it doesn’t look the same for us. The center of Mary’s song makes it clear to whom God will show mercy. In the Bible text, Mary sings that God “shows mercy to everyone…who honors him as God.” (Luke 1:50, CEB) Or, as we sang it this morning: “From age to age to all who fear, Such mercy love imparts, Dispensing justice far and near, Dismissing selfish hearts.”
God includes the lowly and the forgotten in the gift of love and mercy, but it is not God’s choice that excludes anyone. It is the idols we choose for ourselves. It is the things we let get between us and God. It is our own selfishness that stands to exclude any of us from God’s love and mercy.
As much as I love the song of Mary, for sure my favorite Advent reading if not my favorite Biblical text overall, a clue to what this all means for us is hidden in plain sight in the other portion of today’s Gospel reading, the portion that we read. After hearing from the angel, a part of the story that we did not read today, Mary immediately rushes off to see her relative, Elizabeth. As we noted a couple of weeks ago, Zechariah was an old man, and Elizabeth was no longer young herself. And yet, here she is, 6 months pregnant in her old age. As some of you surely know, carrying a baby at any age is not necessarily an easy thing. Add to that being of advanced years and having a husband who can’t talk probably doesn’t make it any easier. Well, I don’t know, maybe some of you might think having a husband who can’t talk would make things easier.
But seriously, I want you to consider being old, finding yourself 6 months pregnant, and suddenly your teenage cousin shows up at your door. I doubt very much that hospitality is the first thing on your mind. And yet, Elizabeth opened her door to welcome Mary in. The verse right after Mary’s song tells us that Mary stayed about 3 months, so perhaps long enough to see little John being born.
So you’re old, 6 months pregnant, and your teenage cousin shows up at your door pregnant and stays for three months.
And Elizabeth's response? “Why do I have this honor…?” (And I am sure that was said completely unsarcastically.)
God’s divine love may work on a larger scale, setting captives free, feeding the hungry, lifting up the lowly, but when it comes to us, we can often only love the person right in front of us at any particular moment. By opening her door to Mary, this is exactly what Elizabeth did. She loved the person in need standing at her door and considered it an honor to do so. That is exactly what this story encourages us to do.
As we round out this season, we worship and honor the one who comes into the world to save the poor and the hungry and the outcast, the lowly and the hurting and the lonely. “[If] we choose the God who blesses the poor, the hungry, the immigrant, and the stranger, our everyday actions as Christians should reflect that choice.” (Schwartz, 34)
That is why the charitable giving of our local congregations is so important. That is why the various ways that we serve our local communities is so important. We may not be old and six months pregnant, but in the chaos of the last almost two years, our churches have opened the doors to the ones in need in our communities and offered a gift of love and hospitality. It may not change the whole world, but it sure can change the life of those on the receiving end.
That is why we continue to open our doors and open our arms. That is what God’s love is meant to inspire in us. God’s love for all inspires us at the very least to love those standing in need right before us. The lost, the least, the hungry, the poor. These are the ones that our stories about Jesus tell us over and over matter to God. And therefore, they should matter to us as well.
God comes into the world, offering love far and wide. Jesus’ birth changes everything as God breaks into our world, offering us a kingdom unlike any we have ever seen. All we have to do to live in that kingdom, is love the people standing in front of us each and every day.
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B. Yuki Schwartz, Reimagine Advent: Discover the Liberating Christ (General Commission on Religion and Race of The United Methodist Church, 2021).