December 13, 2020    Advent 3

Isaiah 57:14-19

¹⁴ It shall be said,
“Build up, build up, prepare the way,
remove every obstruction from my people’s way.”
¹⁵ For thus says the high and lofty one
who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy:
I dwell in the high and holy place,
and also with those who are contrite and humble in spirit,
to revive the spirit of the humble,
and to revive the heart of the contrite.
¹⁶ For I will not continually accuse,
nor will I always be angry;
for then the spirits would grow faint before me,
even the souls that I have made.
¹⁷ Because of their wicked covetousness I was angry;
I struck them, I hid and was angry;
but they kept turning back to their own ways.
¹⁸ I have seen their ways, but I will heal them;
I will lead them and repay them with comfort,
creating for their mourners the fruit of the lips.
¹⁹ Peace, peace, to the far and the near, says the Lord;
and I will heal them.

Luke 1:1-4

1 Since many have undertaken to set down an orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled among us, ² just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word, ³ I too decided, after investigating everything carefully from the very first, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, ⁴ so that you may know the truth concerning the things about which you have been instructed.

Luke 1:26-56

²⁶ In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, ²⁷ to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. ²⁸ And he came to her and said, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.” ²⁹ But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. ³⁰ The angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. ³¹ And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. ³² He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. ³³ He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.” ³⁴ Mary said to the angel, “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” ³⁵ The angel said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God. ³⁶ And now, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren. ³⁷ For nothing will be impossible with God.” ³⁸ Then Mary said, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” Then the angel departed from her.

³⁹ In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, ⁴⁰ where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. ⁴¹ When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit ⁴² and exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. ⁴³ And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? ⁴⁴ For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy. ⁴⁵ And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.”

⁴⁶ And Mary said,

“My soul magnifies the Lord,
⁴⁷     and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
⁴⁸ for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.
Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
⁴⁹ for the Mighty One has done great things for me,
and holy is his name.
⁵⁰ His mercy is for those who fear him
from generation to generation.
⁵¹ He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
⁵² He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;
⁵³ he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.
⁵⁴ He has helped his servant Israel,
in remembrance of his mercy,
⁵⁵ according to the promise he made to our ancestors,
to Abraham and to his descendants forever.”

⁵⁶ And Mary remained with her about three months and then returned to her home.

Breath of Heaven, singing that song this week helped me to identify with how Mary must have felt.  “Hold me together, help me” she pled.  The reality she faced as a young woman pregnant, who runs to a relative for comfort once she knows God’s plan for her life.  Joy doesn’t wait for struggle to be over. Mary “rejoices” during her pregnancy, a state of affairs that would have put her in a position of dishonor among her people. Instead, she sings out powerfully because she knows that this turn of events will usher in the Presence of justice for the oppressed and freedom for the captive.  Let’s listen to Luke tell of Mary’s courage, faith and joy.

There is a Peanuts cartoon strip which goes like this:

Snoopy the dog is feeling great, feels like dancing. He dances into the first frame saying to himself: “Sometimes I love life so much I can’t express it!”

In the second frame he continues to dance: “I feel that I want to take the first person I meet into my arms and dance merrily through the streets.”

Then, in the third frame, he meets very grumpy Lucy. Snoopy is silent.

In the fourth frame, he is dancing again: “I feel that I want to take the SECOND person I meet into my arms and dance merrily through the streets.”

When you think about the possibilities that God offers us through the babe of Bethlehem it makes you want to dance.  Joy should be that magical desire to dance.  But often life throws us a Lucy that takes the fun out of things.  COVID is certainly the Lucy of this Christmas season.  The wet blanket thrown over our holidays.  On this Sunday of Joy, we want the dancing joy, yet we all know that joy is different from happiness.  Happiness is dictated by circumstances while joy is more like a deep abiding.  Theopedia describes joy as “a state of mind and an orientation of the heart. It is a settled state of contentment, confidence and hope.”  Rick Warren adds his own definition: “Joy is the settled assurance that God is in control of all the details of my life, the quiet confidence that ultimately everything is going to be alright, and the determined choice to praise God in every situation.”

So what can we learn from Elizabeth and Mary about joy?  When Elizabeth hears Mary’s greeting three things happen, her baby leaped, she was filled with the Holy Spirit and she cried out.  The Hebrew root for “joy” used 54 times in the Hebrew scriptures–ranan means “to shout, to cry out” and to “overcome.”   Her very exuberant greeting is a joyous one, as she declares all that God has done for Mary.  Notice too that Elizabeth is filled with the Holy Spirit which feels a lot like settled assurance, that deep knowing that all will be well.  To live in joy means we can rest in the beauty of God’s plan and celebrate all that God has done.  Finally, her baby leapt in her womb.  Leapt for joy at the sound of Mary’s voice.  The baby Elizabeth is carrying after being barren, responds to the mother of Jesus with joy, the first heralding of Jesus that John does even before he is born.

Mary, for her part, calmly receives an angel, hears an amazing witness to her part in God’s plan, is told of Elizabeth’s pregnancy all before being told, “nothing will be impossible with God.”  Sounds like the definition of joy, settle assurance that God is in control and everything will be alright.  Mary might have started out afraid, but now with this assurance, she owns the future God has planned for her.  She pledges herself, “Here I am, the servant of the Lord.”  Luke does not describe her emotional state, but it feels like one of acceptance, of willingness, of hope and of joy.

Then Mary shares her own Ode to Joy, the Magnificat.  An ode is a poem that is meant to be sung.  Christians have sung these words for centuries, magnifying the Lord even when circumstances might feel daunting.  Mary sees her baby as part of God’s plan, part of a larger picture.  Her spirit rejoices in God and she praised God for all God has done for her, and then she proclaims what her child will do, as the agent of God.  Mary’s baby will bring about a change in circumstance with three contrasting parallels:

the proud are reversed by the low estate,

the mighty by those of low degree,

and the rich by the hungry.

The ones struggling will be elevated.

This is one of our hardest Advents, as we cannot travel, see family freely, or celebrate with our favorite holiday traditions.  But joy is not about all those things.  Joy is about the love we have in our hearts for God, the confidence we have that God is with us, the faith we have in Jesus Christ, the baby born to show us God’s enduring love.

Ode to Joy is another song meant to be sung.  It comes from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and is the basis for our hymn Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee. This week we will discuss the movie Following the Ninth which tells the story of how this ode has been a powerful witness to the human spirit to overcome adversity in many instances around the globe.  I hope you will watch it on your own, information in the worship email and then join us at 7:00 on Wednesday.  It opens with British punk rock star, Billy Bragg.  He once wrote an alternative translation of the original German choral score for a school teacher to teach the children in her classroom, and it soon became a popular anthem, even being performed for the Queen. We will sing these new words in our closing hymn.   You can hear the call to resist division, to raise our voices, to “furnish every heart with joy and banish all hatred for good. It truly is an Ode to joy, the words that call us to more than happiness, but to the deep lasting hope and peace we find in God and work for in our daily lives.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu who helped end Apartheid, reminds us of the power of joy. “As we discover more joy, we can face suffering in a way that ennobles rather than embitters. We have hardship without becoming hard. We have heartbreak without being broken.”  This Advent season we have had more hardship as a nation than we have in a long time.  May we lean into the joy we have in Christ so even when we have heartbreak we will not be broken.

In closing I would like to share a story about how we might find joy during our COVID Christmas?  Long before Frederick Buechner was a well-known Christian author and Presbyterian minister, as a young man he sat in the dead of winter in Army fatigues somewhere in Alabama.  He was eating supper out of a mess kit as part of his infantry training.  There was a cold drizzle of rain, much like this morning, and everything was mud. The sun had gone down.

He was still hungry when he finished and noticed that a man nearby had something left over that he was not going to eat. It was a turnip. He asked if he could have it and the man tossed it over to him. He missed the catch; the turnip fell to the ground. But Buechner wanted it so badly that he picked it up and started eating it anyway, mud and all.

And then he had a transforming moment. Here is how he describes it, “as I ate it,” he says, “time deepened and slowed down. With a lurch of the heart that is real to me still, I saw suddenly, almost as if from beyond time altogether, that not only was the turnip good, but the mud was good too, even the drizzle and cold were good, even the Army that I had dreaded for months.”

He concluded: “Sitting there in the Alabama winter with my mouth full of cold turnip and mud, I could see at least for a moment how if you ever took truly to heart the ultimate goodness and joy of things, even at their bleakest, the need to praise someone or something for it would be so great that you might even have to go out and speak of it to the birds of the air.” (Sermons.com, Brett Blair)  I would add, the joy would inspire you to sing a song.

“Mary sings a song that can be, should be, our song in this Advent season. As we have prepared for the coming of the Christ Child, we too can sing in thanksgiving, in celebration, and in remembrance. (Even if it feels like we are eating a turnip, we get to rejoice in God.)  This is the time for us to indulge in unadulterated, celebratory joy in the promises that come to us in Jesus. Let us raise our voices in a great cry, magnifying our God.” (Working Preacher Karl Jacobson, 2012)  Amen.