AN OLD SONG MADE NEW
A sermon by Rev. Jack E. Skiles

December 20, 2009

Micah 5:2-5a; Luke 1:39-55

I stand at my window out in Brown County surveying the creek way down below, the hillside rising up steeply on the other side. I do this standing and looking at the great expanse of nature several times a day. My desk with the computer sits between two large windows. Most days I can see the flash in my peripheral vision. Most days it is a mother deer, her young ones following her, coming up and down the hill into the valley below. Just recently, it was a red flash, as a fox sped across my driveway trying to escape being publicly exposed. Many times I see the shadows floating across the ground and look up to see the hawk circling. I've heard it said that God is on the move and is very close. I hope to see God passing through the trees.

On this day on which this congregation is being so kind as to note and celebrate my 30th anniversary of being ordained into professional ministry, I will try to avoid too much mindless memory recall. I don't live in the past very often and yet this week's marking of thirty years working in this profession has been a wonderful time of remembering long past events.

Just in case you don't remember 1979, it was the year that movie cowboy John Wayne died. The record and song of the year was by Billy Joel, “Just the Way You Are.” The album of the year was by the Bee Gees, “Saturday Night Fever,” and perhaps most auspicious and barely noticed was a piece by the Sugar Hill Gang entitled “Rapper's Delight,” which was the first rap tune to cross over into popular music. It was the year that the Three Mile Island reactor in Pennsylvania was threatening to melt down and, most memorable for me, I can still remember that the big excitement was the NCAA Basketball Championship game between Michigan State and Indiana State with Larry Bird and Magic Johnson.

None of us get to choose when we come of age and probably most of our coming of age times get to be rather embarrassing as we discover what we once thought was stylish and sophisticated now hanging in our closet as nothing we would dare adorn ourselves with. My young adult years were the 1970's and how well I remember the song of the decade that would be played over and over from those huge speakers that the women in our dorms at Ball State would hoist up to their windows to blare the sound out into the surrounding courtyards. It was a song sung by Helen Reddy entitled, “I Am Woman Hear Me Roar.”

The 70's became a decade where, in our culture, there began a turning upside down of expectations of women and men as has rarely ever happened. Glass ceilings for the advancement of women were not cracking in the 1970's and tragically, many of those ceilings remain firmly in place still today. In that regard I confess my participation in the reality that as a white male I have arrived at a thirty-year mile marker that few women in professional ministry have been allowed to achieve because of some of the most absolute and ugly misogyny that exists anywhere in culture. Churches have been and remain a place where women still have the fiercest struggle to be seen as equal to men, as called by God.

While we have much forward progress to be proud of, please do not lose sight of the greater reality that women in most churches are still considered second-class citizens and not worthy of carrying the mantle of full humanity, as men are. The three largest church bodies in our own country still deny women equality with men as being able to be called as professional ordained clergy. Those three groups are the Southern Baptists, the Roman Catholics and the large body of evangelical churches under the banner of leadership structures like the Willow Creek Association of Churches, including churches in this town like Sherwood Oaks that continue to deny full rights of ordination to women to be pastors. We have come far, but as long as one person remains burdened by patriarchy, the Good News of Jesus Christ calls us, demands that we roar forth in defense of our sisters..., many of whom languish under burdens and weights of religious and spiritual abuse.

We do hesitate today to view the horrid treatment of African Americans in our country and the intellectual and spiritual systems that gave support to slavery and segregation as totally inappropriate. Still we allow churches, major groups of churches, to easily continue to exist and teach that women remain subservient to men and unable to rise to full leadership in their organizations. It remains shocking to me that we are not more angry and demanding of full human rights for our sisters, especially within organizations like ours that believe that God is a respecter of all persons, equally and fully. It has been two thousand years since Paul first penned that great faith affirmation that we are neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female; we are all as one in God's eyes. In churches, equality of men and women remains a minority report and it is tragically sad.

It has not always been so. In the most ancient church structures women were often the most significant church leaders. As so much history does, it is written by the survivors, the winners of many types of battles. Strong and able women have been erased from much of church history. Of the four gospels, there is one that consistently raises up the reality of the Good News of Jesus for the most marginalized, the poor, the lame, those held in least favor by mainstream culture, and it is Luke's Gospel. It is from Luke this morning that Mary's song, most often sung in sweet sounding refrains, is truly to be seen alongside Helen Reddy's, “I am woman, hear me roar.”

If you have not ever allowed yourself the spiritual discipline of studying a single gospel, I hope you join Caela and me as we spend this next year getting to know this author named Luke. And, if it has escaped your attention, we have adult education opportunities for Bible study throughout the week and specifically on Sunday mornings, we have an adult class that studies the same Scripture lessons used in worship. It is an incredible discipline to join in the study of scriptures with a group. I hope you might consider joining in one of our studies.

After discovering herself pregnant, Mary hurries to a town in the hill country of Judah. She doesn't talk to her parents; she doesn't talk to her fiancé. Mary has talked to an angel and she runs off immediately. If we allow ourselves to take away the romantic haze that surrounds the birth stories of Jesus, we understand how a twelve-year-old girl, after finding out she is pregnant, runs away to her favorite aunt's house, probably for physical protection and some instruction about how to be pregnant. She stays for several months.

If there is one thing that is recurrent in the Christian stories of Jesus' birth, it is that his conception was outside of the traditional cultural norms of the time. It was a consistent embarrassment, Jesus' conception and birth to a young girl who was not married, and Jesus is made fun of all through his life for his lack of known paternity.

That Mary ventures out on her own is an act of initiative, independence, and some courage. As we would expect of Luke, two simple, unpretentious women in an unnamed small town, offer an important interpretation of the birth of Jesus. Luke, you will discover this year, gives a prominent place to women, using them as a means of revelation, as those who reveal something significant about God. (There are grounds for calling women as pastors, don't you think.)

Deep theology comes from the chatting of two pregnant women in a small home out in the country. Elizabeth, as the elder woman, celebrates what God is doing in Mary's womb. Elizabeth gives a blessing to Mary. This is not normal, incidentally. Blessings were to come from the family's father. We might well assume that there was no blessing coming Mary's way from a male figure and Luke has Elizabeth fill that role most ably.

Notice that Luke says that Elizabeth is filled with the Holy Spirit and that as a result her words carry power and credibility. Luke honors the process of reproduction and the role of women bearing children.

We can be permitted, can't we, a gentle smile at the image of two women getting together for a visit when one of them suddenly erupts into a tightly woven poem/song full of scriptural allusions? We are grateful to Luke for this touching scene, for placing this masterpiece in Mary's mouth and for the powerful theology of Mary's song.

Mary's song is both structurally and in terms of content very familiar to Luke's audience, for whom he first wrote this gospel. Luke has gone to his CD collection of old Jewish tunes and taken from I Samuel a song first written for a woman named Hannah and customized it to Mary's situation. He has taken an old song and made Mary sing it new, (which is a beautiful allusion to another 70's hit by Neil Diamond) but those who first heard it said, “Ah, yes, we remember this song and we still love what it says today.” Hannah, Mary, and Elizabeth are prophets who remind us of what God's dream is for our children and our children's children, and all the children of the world that will ever be. How appropriate that we would be reminded in like manner of future generations as we ponder as a world of individuals how to address the current population and environment issues. Luke tells in song form coming from Mary's soul, the dream that will be made real through the life and the work and the play of Mary's to-be-born son, whose name will be Jesus.

Elizabeth and Zechariah are the first to hear the song of Mary, but it is a song for everyone who has forgotten the reality that God loves you, values you, and promises you fresh and endless life full of value.

We linger for a moment on the meaning of Mary's song about God filling the hungry with good things and sending the rich away empty. Scholars agree that this wasn't just a "My God is stronger than your god" song. It wasn't a call to violent uprising or bloody vengeance either, then or now, even though New Testament scholar Scott McKnight notes that “in the 1980s, the government of Guatemala banned this song" of Mary's because, "[u]nlike 'Away in a Manger,' this song of Mary's was apparently considered subversive, politically dangerous. Authorities worried that it might incite the oppressed people to riot." I remember hearing years ago that in the Latin American base communities, the people read the Bible and heard in the Good News that God did not want their children to die of hunger and disease, or their husbands and sons to be disappeared, or their daughters lost in poverty. All sorts of "trouble" can start when the people get their hands on the Bible, it seems. Maybe the governmental authorities of Guatemala were just paying more attention than most of us pay as we sing our hymns. What, for example, does it mean when we sing this Christmas that the baby born this day "rules the world with truth and grace, and makes the nations prove the glories of God's righteousness and wonders of God's love"?

Wouldn't it be something if our Christmas dreaming led us to begin the New Year with a new vision for our economy and environment, one of generosity and abundance and salvation? After all, Mary's song is "not intended to raise violent resistance or to drive the wealthy and powerful to despair," Stephen Cooper writes. Instead, "the well-off are exhorted to deal with their wealth in a way that brings them into a positive relation with the poor in order to partake in the same promised salvation" (Feasting on the Word). Even this kind of conversion would take considerable courage. Richard Ascough asks, "I wonder whether we would dare to sing the Magnificat today.  What would it mean?" Michael S. Bennett writes, "The development of hope within community takes time."

But, it takes first singing the song, listening to the song, allowing the song to give birth in our souls to new life.

We all long for a time when suffering will end and everyone will have enough, when nations and families will live in peace, and the earth will be restored and healed of the damage that has been and is being done. This is a vision for the future, but we live in the present, counting on the promises of God. Interesting: Mary had the nerve and the imagination to claim such a future for herself and her people, but Barbara Brown Taylor says that "she was singing about it ahead of time “not in the future tense but in the past, as if the promise had already come true. Prophets almost never get their verb tenses straight, because part of their gift is being able to see the world as God sees it not divided into things that are already over and things that have not happened yet, but as an eternally unfolding mystery that surprises everyone" ("Singing Ahead of Time," Home by Another Way).

Might we be able to mix up our tenses, too?

We are now in the last week of Advent, on the verge of another Christmas celebration, learning from Mary, one who was ordained by God as woman to give a message of hope and birth to a child would live forth that hope. Fred Craddock asks us to "stand expectantly at hope's window" (Preaching through the Christian Year). Some of us look back longingly on Christmases past, hoping to re-create better, more secure, less troubled times. Many folks are grieving or depressed or lonely during the holiday season, and the church's call is to tell the story once again, to comfort and inspire and just be with those who need help in looking forward.

When I stand at my window looking out, I am looking for the very presence of God and I have it on good authority that God is on the move and is indeed very close.

And might we be the hope that the world is waiting for.

Amen.