"Earthquakes and Emmanuel"

Luke 2: 1-20

Dec. 24, 2020 

Sermon by Rev. Caela Simmons Wood

First Congregational UCC of Manhattan, KS

The Good News of Jesus Christ begins and ends with earthquakes and angels. There’s the actual, literal earthquake at the very end of the gospel of Matthew: After the Sabbath, the women go to Jesus’s tomb and we are told there’s a violent earthquake as an angel descends from the heavens and rolls away the stone at the entrance of the tomb. The angel says, of course, what angels always say. Who remembers what the angels always say? Type it into the chat if you remember.

That’s right. “Fear not, Mary! Do not be afraid.”

I guess angels must be used to humans looking like this (big eyes) because that’s pretty much always their opening line. 

Many years earlier, an angel appeared to another Mary. The angel Gabriel finds a teenage girl in a town called Nazareth and bestows greetings of God’s favor upon her. She looks at him like this (side eye) and he says to her, “Fear not, Mary! Do not be afraid.”

And then he brings the earthquake: News of an unplanned pregnancy. Under unusual, unbelievable circumstances. Total disruption. Total disbelief. Total disarray. 

Fear not, Mary. Do not be afraid. 

Easy to say when you’re an angel, I suppose. But harder to do when you’re a human. 

Every single one of us gathered here tonight knows what it’s like to have that feeling Mary must have had when she learned her life was being turned upside down. An accident. A loss. A diagnosis. An unplanned pregnancy. A betrayal. A mistake. An act of violence. A natural disaster. A pandemic. 

Total disruption. Total disbelief. Total disarray. 

There are these things that come along in our lives and just shake the foundations, aren’t there? Earthquakes. When the very ground beneath our feet goes wobbly and we lose our footing and we can’t quite tell which way is up and which is down and we’re just trying desperately to find our North Star so we can refocus and catch our breath and stand back up on our feet. When we’re just desperately willing the world to slow down, stop spinning, speed up, go back to normal. 

Earthquakes. When the things that we thought were certain are suddenly not so certain after all. 

My guess is most of us have learned more about uncertainty in 2020 than we ever wanted to learn. We felt the assuredness of the ground beneath us give way. We lost our footing. We lost sleep. We lost loved ones. We may have even lost hope at times. At times this year has felt like one excruciatingly-long earthquake-unfolding-in-slow-motion. 

And now here we are on Christmas Eve. It’s not like it usually is. We aren’t crowded into our sanctuary with our candlelight and children in their Christmas finest. Many of us won’t be able to sit around the tree tomorrow with the people we love most. Instead we’ll be Zooming or quickly sending a hug from six feet away behind a mask while standing on each other’s porches. 

Can this be Christmas at all? When the ground has shifted beneath us? When our traditions and rituals are disrupted? When we still wake up some mornings in disbelief at all that is unfolding? When our hearts are in disarray? 

Come with me to the manger, friends. Draw near on this silent night as we crouch down low to greet Newborn Love. See the exhausted mother as she holds Love to her breast. Look at the furrows in the worried father’s brow as he brings another blanket, another glass of water, another prayer of thanksgiving. 

This is Christmas: A small circle of love that disrupts completely. 

A gasp of realization, the shock of disbelief as our hearts grow four times larger than we ever thought they could. The disarray of new life come to find us in the most inconvenient of ways - in the blood, the sweat, the tears, the stink, the messiness of being human. 

This is Christmas: God come to us, among us, in us, through us. Emmanuel. God with us disrupting - birthing the Beloved Community among us. Pulling down the mighty from their thrones and lifting up the lowly. Filling the hungry with good things and sending the rich away empty. Bringing good news to the poor, release to the captives, the end to all oppression and fear. 

Emmanuel. 

God with us in our churches, in our homes, on the streets. God with us the children and the elders. God with us the uncertain and the over-confident. God with us the downtrodden, the left-out, the reviled. God with us the comfortable, the celebrated, the admired. God with us the grieving, the angry, the depressed. God with us the content, the peace-filled, the elated. 

Emmanuel. 

Good news for all people everywhere. And that means you. 

Merry Christmas. 

“Magnificat: The Prophet Sings”

Sermon by Rev. Caela Simmons Wood

First Congregational UCC, Manhattan, KS 

December 6, 2020

Sermon Text: Luke 1:39-55

Like many of you, I love music. And there is perhaps no time of year that I love music more than December. I’ve already shed several tears about the grief I feel when I realize we cannot be together safely in our sanctuary this year to sing Silent Night - even as I’m looking forward to singing it with you via Zoom. When it comes to Christmas music, I love it all. The hymns and the pop music. The cheesy and the elegant. Give me Donny Hathaway and Handel. I will hum Carrie Underwood and stuff in Latin. It all brings me hope, peace, joy, and love this time of year. 

How about you? Do you enjoy Christmas music? What are some of your favorites. Drop them in the comments or text them to 785-380-7772 so we can share them in the comments. And don’t worry, it’s okay if you don’t like Christmas music….we’re an affirming church and Jesus still loves you. I just can’t promise that I won’t burst into Mariah Carey singing this time of year and I hope you can still love me, too. 

Music is powerful. The songs we sing shape us. 

I know Jesus said that there’s nothing that can go into us and defile us – only the things that come out of our mouths can do so. But anyone who’s ever found themselves unwittingly humming aloud a pop song that they absolutely despise (and yet, mysteriously, know every word to) knows that if you listen to something over and over again, it becomes a part of you, whether you like it or not. 

My husband has often said to me that our hymns become our scripture. Most of us don’t memorize great portions of the Bible these days, but many of us can sing a few verses of this and that. And as those texts and tunes swirl in our heads and hearts, they shape our knowledge of who God is and our experience of the Holy. 

And there are perhaps no sacred songs we know better than those that are sung at this time of year. So it is especially appropriate that each year in Advent we hear a powerful song of resistance and hope sung by none other than Jesus’s mother, Mary. 

Now, you likely know that Jesus’s father, Joseph, was a….(carpenter). But did you know that Jesus was also the son of a prophet? Mary, mother of Jesus, is introduced to us in the Gospel of Luke in a formula that the original hearers would have immediately recognized. 

It’s clearly the introduction of a prophet: an angel comes to tell Mary about the task at hand, she is a bit incredulous and says she doesn’t feel qualified for the job, the angel does a bit more convincing, and then she says yes. It’s a classic formula, familiar to us because of the stories of Moses, Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah – all of whom followed a very similar trajectory on their way to reluctant prophet-hood.

Like mother, like son. 

Is there any wonder Jesus would grow up to become a great prophet when his mother was filled with fiery songs of resistance and hope like the one we heard today?

God has shown strength with his arm; 

he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. 

God has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; 

God has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away hungry.

It’s a song of reversals – one in which the status quo is flipped upside down. A world where the last are first and the first are last. A world where swords are beat into plowshares. A world where a nobody-teenage-girl-from-nowhere is chosen to bear a great Ruler – the one who has come to bring good news to the poor, proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of Jubilee.

Mary, powerful prophet that she is, is not the first one to sing this powerful song of hope. Oh, no. She is simply remixing the songs of her faith into something new for the day at hand. 

Somewhere in Mary’s past there must have been a parent or auntie who sang freedom songs to her. 

Perhaps her daddy gently rocked her to sleep while humming that song of another prophet, Hannah, who sang a song so very similar to this one at the birth of her son, Samuel: 

The bows of the warriors are broken, 

but those who stumble are armed with strength. 

Those who were full have hired themselves out for bread, 

but those who were hungry are hungry no more.

God raises up the poor from the ash heap, 

to make them sit with royalty and inherit a seat of honor. 

Or maybe an older sister sang aloud to Mary as they tended the fire or hung the laundry out to dry. Perhaps sissy sang the words of the prophet Miriam, who led the Israelites in singing on the day when they finally made their escape from slavery:

God is my strength and my might; and God has become my salvation. 

This is my God and I will praise him, my mother’s God and I will exalt her.  

Freedom songs. Songs of resistance and hope, passed down from generation to generation. 

These were, perhaps, the songs Mary sang to her firstborn son as he did somersaults in the water of her womb, the words she whispered to him as she paced back and forth under a starlit sky, the songs she dared to hope and dream and pray and wish as she prepared dinner while young ears played underfoot – listening and learning; inheriting the songs of resistance and hope that were his birthright as an anointed child of God. 

Each year when I begin to pick out music to sing during Advent and Christmas, I am excited to learn new songs for the season. In the next few weeks in worship we’ll be hearing old favorites and new-to-us songs. Next week David and I will be sharing a piece that was new to me a few years ago and reminds me a bit of Mary’s song.

Awake! Awake, the Greet the New Morn was written by Marty Haugen, a prolific contemporary hymn-writer. Haugen wrote this song because he wanted to combine many of the beautiful images that we hear from the prophet Isaiah each year with an easily-singable tune that could be learned quickly and would echo in our heads throughout the season – an ear-worm, if you will. 

It’s a song of hope – as the days grow shorter and colder in our part of the world, we proclaim that a new day is dawning. As we await the birth of the Christ child, we sing with those who came before us – with Mary, with Hannah, with Miriam, and with all the others who sang songs of freedom and resistance. 

We will also be hearing a song I just discovered this year and have fallen in love with: Waiting for You by The Many. The bridge to that song goes like this:

Let us be a sign of hope 

Let us be your arms of love 

Let us be the ones that say 

There is another way

Okay, okay. You have to come back next week and the week after for all this yummy music. In the meantime, as we wait for a world where the weak are raised above the strong, and weapons are broken asunder….as we wait for the dawning of that world, let us remember that we do not wait passively. 

As we wait, we sing songs of freedom, songs of hope, songs of resistance, and we actively bend the arc of the universe into God’s great Reign of Justice and Peace. 

Let us be a sign of hope 

Let us be your arms of love 

Let us be the ones that say 

There is another way

We are waiting for you...

May it be so. Amen.