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.
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