First Sunday of Advent

Luke 1:25-55

It turns out that Thursday would have been author Madeleine L’Engle’s 100th birthday; L’Engle’s probably best known for Wrinkle in Time which won a Newberry Medal in 1962. While I had heard Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories and Charles Dickens’ Pickwick Papers as a child, I didn’t discover L’Engle’s books until about four years ago, and I’m delighted at how she weaves her understanding of God into her writing. She writes often about story as truth in the same way that we read parts of Scripture as myth or metaphor and yet hold them as sacred texts. But as I discover more of her writing, I can’t help wonder, “Who else have I missed?” “Whose voices haven’t I heard?”

In the same way, one of the questions I am learning to ask when I read Scripture is, “Whose story are we hearing?” and, perhaps even more importantly, “Whose story is missing?”

This week we begin a new church year, and a new year in the three-year cycle of the lectionary – the selection of Scripture texts we hear read in worship each week; in the coming year, often our Gospel texts will be from the Gospel of Luke.

But Luke’s gospel was written after the destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D., and it shares the accounts of witnesses to Jesus’ ministry nearly forty years earlier. Scholars tell us that Luke had access to Mark’s gospel, and to Matthew’s, and to still another unnamed source, so we cannot simply listen to his gospel as though there’s only one person speaking.

Asking whose voice we hear in Scripture isn’t new. Preachers have crafted sermons that tell the Christmas story from the perspective of one of the shepherds or even one of the stable animals, and sermons have been preached in the voice of minor characters in the gospels like Simon of Cyrene who carried the cross on the road to Golgotha before the crucifixion.  The ELCA’s Book of Faith initiative that began here in North Carolina eleven years ago teaches us to read Scripture with devotional, historical, literary and Lutheran lenses, and paying attention to the characters is part of that literary reading. Comparing and contrasting their experiences and understandings with our own, we discover meaning.[i]

More than any other Gospel writer, Luke included the voices of women in his gospel. Just in its first two chapters we meet Elizabeth who becomes the mother of John the Baptiser; Mary who becomes the mother of Jesus; and Anna, the prophetess who is in the Jerusalem temple when Jesus is presented there and there are still more women both in the remainder of his gospel and in the Acts of the Apostles which is the second volume of his gospel.

This Advent season, I invite you to listen to the voice of Mary.

You have a bulletin insert with the gospel text, or if you’d like to open up the Bibles in the pews, Luke’s gospel begins on p. 830. We meet Mary in verse 26 of the very first chapter.

Typically, Lutheranism doesn’t include the same kind of devotion to or reverence of Mary that is given by our Catholic brothers and sisters, but Mary’s story is still an important one for us to know. That’s part of why I have shared the weekly Advent devotion with you. “Mary’s Song” is the song of praise that we hear later in that chapter. We’ll hear the song during next Sunday’s Hanging of the Greens, and it’ll show up in our lectionary readings in the fourth week of Advent, too. But, as frequently as we hear her song in worship, I don’t know that we pay that much attention to Mary herself.

So, who was Mary? She wasn’t royalty and she wasn’t from a powerful family or city. She was an unmarried young woman in the unimportant village of Nazareth, in Galilee, several days travel north of Jerusalem.

What do you imagine what she looked like? Not from the museum portraits by Renaissance painters, or from Christmas pageants and plays, but in your own words and images?

I think she would have had olive or brown skin and dark hair, and she probably would have been barefoot. If she had a house, it would have had bare dirt floors and mudded walls. She wouldn’t have had fine robes; her clothes would have been simple and unadorned. She wouldn’t have had the chance for a formal education so she wouldn’t have been able to read or write; instead she would have learned what she needed to know at the knees of the mothers and grandmothers and aunties in her village.

What else do we know about Mary? In her song, she calls herself a lowly servant. We know that slavery and servitude were prevalent in the first century and more than thirty percent of the populace were slaves or bond servants.[ii]

And yet this unmarried pregnant young woman was entrusted to bring the Son of the Most High, the Son of God, into the world.

Like Mary, we are invited to participate in bringing about the Kingdom of God here on earth. God invites us to stand up and be alert to what God is doing.

Like Mary, we are invited to use our voices to praise God for the unexpected ways that God uses us and the unexpected places where God shows up in the world around us.

Like Mary, we are invited to speak with hopefulness into the uncertainty of the world around us.

Let us pray…
Holy God of righteousness,
Thank you for giving us the promise of a Savior, that gives us hope in a hurting world.
Thank you for inviting a lowly servant girl to bring the Savior into the world, shaking up our expectations and awakening us to the possibilities of your Kingdom on earth.
By your Holy Spirit, enliven our souls that we too may magnify Your love and grace in all we say and do.
We pray in the name of our Savior, Jesus Christ.
Amen.

[i] “Bible study methods”, Book of Faith Initiative. http://www.bookoffaith.org/biblemethods.html, accessed 12/1/2018
[ii] Merritt, Carol Howard. I Am Mary: Advent Devotional (Kindle Locations 120-121). CBP/Chalice Press. Kindle Edition.