The Magnificent Child Luke 1:46-55

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1 Samuel Gunter, pastoral resident Fourth Sunday of Advent Wilshire Baptist Church December 23, :00 service Dallas, Texas The Magnificent Child Luke 1:46-55 I ve always been taken by the musical. I can think back to hearing David Balsamo singing Gethsemane, or Idina Menzel teetering at the top of her alto range with Defying Gravity, or Colm Wilkinson singing Bring Him Home and I melt. If you don t recognize any of those names or songs, I have some great music to recommend to you and we can talk after the service. I think it s because I ve grown up in the Church. For those of you who grew up in a place like this, think back on your childhood. When were you singing? I remember Vacation Bible Schools, children s choirs, and hymn sings. If you had an emotion there was a song for it and it was OK to sing it. Think about your average workplace or social club and except for maybe your Christmas karaoke party, when do you hear people singing? If you wanted to teach children a Bible verse, we could slap a melody on it and make it so. You sing in worship, you sing in Sunday School. We have songs for baby dedications and songs for funerals. Musicals take a story you may know, or you may be hearing for the first time and tell it in such a way that gets you humming it out the door and keeps it rattling around your head the next day. The details of the story may be a bit fuzzy after some time has passed since its telling, but as soon as the melodies begin to play in your head, the story orders itself once again and becomes clearer. I ve been re-reading Les Misérables by Victor Hugo. That s what I tell myself, but that s not entirely true. I m actually listening to it as an audio book, and in the process have discovered that I had never actually read it before. When I was a kid I had this really bad habit of trying to look smarter than I actually was. One of the ways I did this was to read books way above my comprehension level and press on to the end of them not understanding a thing. When I finished I could say I read it, but couldn t really tell you much about it. This was one of those books. I bought this very copy when I was in middle school and apparently pressed on to about page 250 or so and then abandoned my effort. Victor Hugo was apparently a bridge too far for a seventh grader. And for those of you who have

2 read it, I m sure that s not shocking in the least. As I m hearing it again for the first time I understand why I would think I had read it before. Like some of you, hopefully many of you, I have seen the musical and can sing just about any part on demand: Fantine singing about the tigers coming at night to tear her hopes apart Jean Valjean singing, Who Am I? Inspector Javert singing about his lack of sympathy for Jean Valjean because he too is from the gutter The songs activate the memory, evoke an emotional response, and draw out and solidify what is most crucial to understand in the story. And when the story falls apart in your mind, you can sing it back together again. Now there are songs embedded in our Scripture songs sung by Moses, Miriam at the crossing of the sea, songs sung by David in both victory and defeat, a song sung by Zecharaiah at beholding the Christ child, and the song of the angels and elders at the marriage supper of the Lamb. Our passage this last day of Advent is one of the most significant of these. Known as the Magnificat, and placed by the Gospel-writer Luke in the mouth of Mary the Mother of God, this is the last prophetic word that points us to the birth of the Messiah. What is this journey all about? What is it exactly that we are waiting for? Dim the lights cue the orchestra Mary is about to sing us to heaven My soul magnifies the LORD, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name. His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty. He has helped his servant Israel, according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and his descendants forever. Amen. What manner of song is this? It is clearly a song of praise for her soul, my soul, our soul, magnifies the LORD and rejoices in God our 2

3 Savior. Blessedness God doing great things with the lowly mercy being on those who fear God. All of this sounds pretty standard and quite confessional it sounds like a statement of faith. It reminds me of the words of the author of Deuteronomy: Know therefore that the LORD your God is God, the faithful God who maintains covenant loyalty with those who love him and keep his commandments, to a thousand generations (incidentally this is one of those verses I learned in song as a child) Deuteronomy is a promise. It is forward looking, though, and speaks of continued action. Mary s song is littered with these storytelling, past tense verbs he has brought down, he has filled, he has helped. She is singing of something accomplished on account of the one growing in her womb. The themes that follow should not be a surprise to us for we should have encountered them over and over again reading through the Old Testament, but they inevitably shock us. The powerful are brought down and the lowly lifted up. The hungry are fed and the rich are given nothing. Let s pause for a moment. The powerful are brought down and the lowly lifted up. The hungry are fed and the rich are given nothing. For those of you in the Foundations of Faith Sunday School class, you ve been going through the New Testament and have hit the Beatitudes by now. They are words most of us would recognize, but the ones we memorize are Matthew s, Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of God. They are beautiful words that we would do well to recite on a regular basis and I m sure most of you have heard quite a few sermon series on the various clauses of the Beatitudes. There is only one problem we are not in Matthew right now we re in Luke. Luke gives us a drastically different rendition. Blessed are you who are poor full stop for yours is the kingdom of God. There is no easy spiritual back door in Luke. We don t get to twist our way out of facing these powerfully sung verses of Mary s by speaking of the lowly in spirit, or the hungry in spirit. Jesus says, Blessed are the poor, and Mary 3

4 sings, He has sent the rich away empty. This is a song about economics. This is a song about politics. This is a song about a new world. Let me say it another way Mary is singing the Gospel. If some of you are shifting a little bit in the pew waiting to hear what I m going to say about economics, or politics, or hunger and how that s going to affect your bank account or political party, shift a little bit more. Pay attention to that discomfort my insides are squirming along with you. I swear it s not my sermon. This text won t let me put us at ease. If you, like me, hear Mary s song, think of yourself as rich, and don t really know how to rejoice in being sent away empty, my recommendation would be to keep singing it again, and again, and again as you reflect on what the Gospel is asking of you. Sing it over again and then we can gather to talk about wealth disparity in our city. Sing it over again and then we can gather to talk about incarceration rates in Texas. Sing it over again and then we can gather to reflect on the role that the legacy racism has played and continues to play in our city and state. Sing it and sing it again and stay uncomfortable with me because if we aren t uncomfortable singing this song, then we may just have forgotten that the world doesn t need tweaking here and there, but needs to be remade. We are in the season of Advent a season of expectation and waiting. This is our last Sunday as we await the Christ child liberation. And I m not talking about the shufflingoff-of-this-mortal-coil/when-icross-jordon and fly away kind of liberation. The baby that is the response of this song is Emmanuel God with us. God took on flesh and dwelt among us full of grace and truth. This child, this magnificent child, comes to teach us just what magnificence is. God didn t save us by pulling us out of the world, God saved us by going in! In Victor Hugo s novel, the plight of les misérables the wretched of the earth is brought into sharp focus. At every turn the author shines his artistic light on how the systems of his day in 19 th century France press down on much of the population. Our landscape has changed since then, but Hugo s 4

5 words are shockingly relevant more than a century and a half after they were written. For the protagonist, Jean Valjean, a 5-year hard labor sentence for stealing a loaf of bread is extended to 19 years on account of escape attempts. While we live in the most incarceration-happy place in the world, I think all of us can be appalled at that. This isn t early- 19 th century France after all. However, you switch the loaf of bread to a TV maybe you put a knife or a gun in Jean Valjean s hand and the length of the prison sentence may just edge a bit closer to making sense in our context. After all private property must be protected otherwise it all falls apart and no one gets to prosper. We are law-abiding citizens. We are responsible people. We are fill in the blank. For Jean Valjean the loaf of bread was to feed his sister and all of her children. With the bread-winner of the family incarcerated, the sister and the children disappear from the novel never to be heard from again. No one knows what happened to them. Who are Valjean s family in Dallas and how does this world need to be remade for them? I m sure that most of the people in this room strive ever so hard to be good parents, good spouses and partners, and good at your jobs. We want to work for the promotion, we want a good life for our families, we don t want to worry about hunger. We strive as we were taught to. I read ridiculously difficult books that I didn t understand among other things to feed that impulse. The problem is that we end up sounding more like Javert I came from horrible conditions and I made it out. You have no excuse and we forget Mary s song. We forget the Gospel. Mary sings of a thing accomplished, and yet we do not clearly see it accomplished. The lowly are still lowly. The hungry are still hungry. And most of us do not find ourselves in either of those categories. Many of us probably have our own stories of striving through difficulty, success in spite of the odds, and so on. We love those kind of stories because it restores our faith in the world as we know it. We don t know what to do with stories of striving and failure. We don t like those stories but those stories should remind us that 5

6 there is a not yet about Mary s song. This deliverance has not yet been fully manifest, and yet we sing it because the baby that is the response of this song is Emmanuel God with us. When we will speak the next two days of the Christ child being born in a manger in such lowly estate it is no accident. When we speak of no room at the inn, it is not just a nice anecdote. When we read of Mary and Joseph fleeing to Egypt because of the royal massacre of innocent children we should be on the edge of our seat paying attention. The Church needs to sing this song to remind ourselves that we should not be OK with the state of our world whatever our station may be. Do not forget how Mary throws Advent into sharp focus with her song. Sing this song again and again so that we can imagine together with each other and with the Holy Spirit how we can participate as the body of Christ in remaking the world as we await the resurrection and the new creation. We often tell the story as if it was Jesus preaching that the world rejected and killed him for, and yet the rejection began before he was born. God with us came into this kind of world and took on this kind of flesh. And in his very Incarnation is beginning to remake it. It was this magnificent child who would teach us to say what you do or do not do for the least of these you did or did not do for me. Rarely will the things we love our families, our jobs, and our hobbies take us to the heart of the lowly and the place of deepest hunger. Yet here is where the Christ child enters our story, on the heels of this song. 6