Advent IV: Love Came Down

In Advent of 1962, Karl Barth was invited to preach in a prison. He chose as his passage the Magnificat, Luke 1:46-55, the song of Mary. In his sermon Barth remarked, "A house in which the weary and heavy-laden, the poor and needy who are really hungry live – that is, a house like the one in which we find ourselves – is the right match for Christmas." For Barth, if Christmas doesn't come to the poor house, rest assured it does not come at all. 

It is crucially important that Gabriel did not appear to a queen. God did not make his entrance into the world through a family of means and social standing. The baby Jesus didn't come to the kind of family who could send their kid to Harvard. Instead, Gabriel appeared to a young girl from a podunk town in a Galilean backwater. The angel makes it clear that she has found favor with God, and so after a clarifying question Mary responds, “I am the Lord’s servant. Let it be with me just as you have said ” (Luke 1:38 CEB). The angel departs, and Mary rushes out to pay her cousin Elizabeth a visit. After Elizabeth pronounces a blessing over her (the angel's words and Elizabeth's words make up the majority of the "Hail Mary" prayer, popular in Roman Catholicism), Mary bursts into celebratory soliloquy: "Μεγαλύνει ἡ ψυχή μου τὸν Κύριον.../Magnificat anima mea Dominum../My soul magnifies the Lord..."

Mary hymns her joy at the God who saves, who looks with favor upon the lowly, who shows mercy and strength as he turns the world upside down: filling the hungry with good things and sending the rich away empty. Somehow this mercy has reached a climax right here in this pregnancy; somehow this is God definitively coming to the aid of Israel and fulfilling his promises to Abraham in a way that opens up his mercy not only to Israel but to everyone who honors him as God.

Mary's song would not be very interesting - indeed it would be pretty boring - if it was just a proof text that we're supposed to love the poor, or that God cares about the poor, or that we're supposed to vote a certain way or think a certain way or live a certain way. The song may very well have implications for some of these things - and we should take it seriously where it does - but it happily goes much deeper. 

John Wesley once remarked that "religion must not go from the greatest to the least, or the power would appear to be of men." Here it isn't so much "religion" as it is God who moves with clarity of purpose, starting at the bottom: with a young woman in a society where youth and femininity were not valued, with a poor young woman in a society in which social mobility was rare - especially for women who don't marry rich. Mary married a construction worker.

But Gabriel comes right there, to this woman, and announces this birth. No man seeking to establish a kingdom would have done so in this way. But God does, because God is not bound by the rules of conventional wisdom or polite society or status quo politics or poverty and wealth. God exists outside all of these things. And because God exists beyond these things, when God steps into the midst of them we have real, material reason to hope that these things might be redeemed. 

And so this is the meaning of Christmas: not a moral command, a mere cute story or a bit of advice, but God, for the love of his creatures, steps into the world - and now the world cannot stay the same.

Advent III: Planting Joy between Memory and Expectation

We live out our lives between verses 3 and 4 of the 126th Psalm. 

Verse 3 is the conclusion of a song describing the time when God changed Zion’s circumstances for the better. The reader should probably be thinking of the return from exile under the Persian Empire to rebuild the temple, but echoes of the Exodus and of any other time when God’s people were saved from trouble are appropriate here too.

This song must be intentionally generic in order to engage the whole history of Israel, and to engage the even the contemporary reader thousands of years later - it should call to your mind a time when all seemed lost, but when God came through for you in a way that felt like a dream. 

When God acted in this way, trouble was replaced by laughter and joyful shouts, and the excited notice of bystanders (the nations in v. 2), a notice with which verse 3 heartily agrees - “Yes, the LORD has done great things for us, and we are overjoyed” (Psa 126:3 CEB). The psalmist - and the reader recalling her own joy - is overjoyed because of the LORD having changed circumstances for the better, because the LORD has done great things. 

Something changed, God did it, and it was really really good; it made a real difference.

Verse 4 comes next, and should just about you whiplash if you’re paying attention. In the first 3 verses, "the LORD changed Zion’s circumstances for the better” (v. 1) leading to “and we are overjoyed” (v. 3). Verse 4 cuts in the opposite direction, changing from rejoicing and praising back to petitioning: "LORD, change our circumstances for the better, like dry streams in the desert waste!” 

The LORD has changed circumstances, but apparently there are yet more circumstances in need of changing. Our world in some ways still resembles dry streams in the desert waste. But what follows verse 4 isn’t a hopeless wallowing in that desert waste, but a hopeful and expectant planting. God has moved and objectively changed things for his people. God’s people expect him to do so again.

And so the psalm closes with an agricultural image. In memory of the dream of changed circumstances past, there in the midst of the lifeless desert waste, God’s people plant seeds. Verses 5 and 6 are in parallel - both start with sadness and planting, and move to joyful shouts and an abundant harvest. We look all around us, and all we see is desert waste. And yet, right there, in the midst of our tears in that wasteland, we plant seeds. And we do so in the expectant hope that even here in the desert God will see to the harvest.

All is not yet fully well. God has saved in the past, and what joy that brought, but God’s people still need some saving in the present. We remember what God did, and we pray for God to do yet more. It is that space, the space between memory and hope, between faith and expectation, in which we live out our lives under the sun. 
 

Once in Royal David's City

two verses from Cecil Alexander's Once in Royal David's City (1848), as sung by Sufjan Stevens (2002):

He came down to earth from Heaven, Who is God and Lord of all, And His shelter was a stable, And His cradle was a stall; With the poor, oppressed, and lowly, Lived on earth our Savior holy.

And our eyes at last shall see Him, Through His own redeeming love, For that Child so dear and gentle Is our Lord in Heav’n above, And He leads His children on To the place where He is gone.

The King came. But the King didn't come to kings, other rulers, smaller lords or governors. The King didn't make his entrance in the halls of power, didn't visit the wealthy or the religious or the righteous. This King entered the world as a stranger and an outcast whose parents were forced to travel across country so caesar could have a better idea how big his empire was and how best to tax it. Then this King was born in a barn because his parents couldn't even find a hotel room.

And that's the drama of the incarnation. The King of kings and Lord of lords doesn't enter our world in the company of the well-to-do. Indeed if he had that might have reinforced their pretension. Worldly kings and lords don't tend to appreciate other kings and lords, except perhaps as peers. But this King is peerless, and is famously underwhelmed by the lifestyles of the rich and famous (with apologies to Robin Leach). And so, in a scandal to our values, in an offensive disruption of the things we prize most, this King appears as a "dear and gentle" child.

I don't want to overstate my point - this kid who was born in the company of cattle to a relatively poor couple was also supposed to descend from the line of king David. But David himself came from humble beginnings - short, young, shepherd chosen above all his older brothers. David, however, gradually moved away from those beginnings and eventually took on the role of the classical king that he was chosen to counteract (cf. the Bathsheba incident and the census). But this new King, God's true and ultimate King, represents a totally new vision, a vision he never corrupted nor ever will corrupt (in spite of how regularly his later followers would corrupt it).

The scandal of this King's birth, the scandal that "With the poor, oppressed and lowly, / Lived on earth our Savior holy," is eventually carried forward and brought to a climax when this King, this Prince of Peace, is publicly executed by lesser (false) kings in order promote a lesser (false) peace.

May we remember this season that we are not our own king, and that the kings we revere are at best pale imitators of the True King. And may we live in the light of the scandal that this effectively homeless child is the "Lord in Heav'n above", and that this is, in the words of the angel in Luke 2, "good news of great joy that will be for all the people."

painful steps so slow...

from Sara Groves' adaptation of It Came Upon a Midnight Clear (2008):

You beneath life's crushing load, Whose forms are bending low, Who toil along the climbing way With painful steps so slow;

Look now, for glad and golden hours Come swiftly on the wing; Oh, rest beside the weary road And hear the angels, and hear them sing:

"Peace on the earth, goodwill to men From heaven's all gracious King!" The world in solemn stillness lay To hear the angels, to hear them sing.

Life is not all sunshine and rainbows. It's sorrow, striving, struggling, suffering (and, undoubtedly, other words that start in 'S'). In Romans 8 the apostle Paul seems to think that the world itself is taken up into this struggle: he says that creation is groaning - like from childbirth! - in anticipation of what one day will be but has not yet come to be.

And, in spite of whatever alternative messages we may conjure, this is where we live as well. This groaning awareness of what is not, of what God has left unfinished. This is the first part of what Advent is about, waiting in (sometimes painful) anticipation of what is not yet.

But - and this is a big 'but' - Advent is never celebrated without knowing that Christmas is right around the corner. Though we still live in an unfinished world, we live in a world that is being finished, a world that God has inhabited in a human person. And in a sense he's done so simply to say, "Peace on the earth, goodwill to men / From heaven's all gracious King!"

The world that is still being finished is here in the humility - or humiliation? - of a baby reduced to being born in a filthy barn, really, finally, fully finished. May the scandal of this good news haunt our waiting in the coming weeks; indeed may it haunt our every thought until Christ is born anew in our lives and in our world. And may the materialistic pretensions of this season be undercut by the material reality of what we're celebrating - the Savior of the world being born surrounded by dead grass and animal feces.

Animal feces? I'm pretty sure there's an apt metaphor for much of what we do around Christmastime somewhere in there...