A Little Christmas A Sermon by Jeff Carlson, St. Pauls UCC, Chicago December 23, 2012 4 th Sunday of Advent Texts: Micah 5:2-5 & Luke 1:39-55 (at end of sermon) Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us, sinners, now and at the hour of our death. That s not a prayer you hear very often at St. Pauls, but it s said millions of times a day around the world. It runs second only to the Lord s Prayer in the number of times it has been spoken by Christians. And I know that there are some folks at St. Pauls who say the Ave Maria quietly to themselves. Although the Protestant reformers spoke against all the trappings of the veneration of Mary that built up around her throughout the Middle Ages, Martin Luther saw Mary as a model of faithfulness and he even thought that in some way she does intercede for us. Intercession. That s really what the Ave Maria is about. It asks Mother Mary for prayer, just as we ask for prayers from each other every week on our prayer page. The writer of the book of Hebrews says that we are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, people who have run the race of life before us, and they re cheering us on. If Mary is one of those witnesses praying for me, I will gladly accept her prayers on my behalf. I have learned that a mother s prayer is a powerful thing. Today we don t hear Mary praying so much as singing. There are two versions of the Christmas story one from Matthew, who likes to quote the Old Testament, and one from Luke who likes his characters to sing songs. Luke wrote his version of the birth of Jesus as if he were writing musical theatre. Throughout his Christmas story, the action stops and characters burst into song. Luke was the Andrew Lloyd Webber of the Bible. From Mary s Magnificat, which I imagine her singing while spinning around like her namesake Maria Von Trapp, to the angels singing Gloria in Excelsis Deo, it is a story full of music. Magnificat is a song of pure joy. Mary s singing with her cousin, Elizabeth. She has traveled from her hometown of Nazareth to share the news of her pregnancy with Elizabeth, who you might remember is pregnant with John the Baptist, and Luke shows us the moment when the two cousins greet each other for the first time. One cousin is very young, the other is quite old, and they re both expecting babies, and there is electricity in the room. They re not important or famous women. They are little women who believe in a great God.
Mary sings: 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. In our staff meeting on Wednesday, Kurt noticed that in the New Revised Standard Version of Magnificat, which we just said together, Mary calls herself a servant, but in the older English versions of Magnificat she calls herself a handmaiden. It was a good observation. The older version is more accurate. The original word is doule and means a female slave. It s where the word doula comes from, someone who helps a woman through childbirth. Mary has a small and humble estimation of herself, while at the same time she magnifies her God. She sings of a God who raises up the low and the humble, who fills up the hungry and people running on empty, while casting down the arrogant and proud, the rich and the powerful. Mary believes in a God who notices the little people of the world, the doulas, and who raises them up. Every Christmas something new jumps out at me in the story of Jesus birth. This year it was the littleness of the story. The prophecy we heard from the book of Micah was written several hundred years before Mary sang her song. Yet Micah contains many of the same themes that Mary sings about - God s judgment of the powerful who act in arrogance, accumulating wealth at the expense of the poor. Micah has especially hard words for powerful city-folks, the urban elite. Micah was a country boy, and so he prophesies that the Messiah will come not from the city but from a small town. The little in O Little Town of Bethlehem comes from Micah. When God comes to us in Jesus, God chooses to be born to a teenage girl, who calls herself a handmaid, and born in a small town, barely on the map. And Jesus grows up in another small town, Nazareth. When God is born into our world, God is born among little people in small, backwater towns. What a strange God we have. If you could choose in advance where you d be born, and I m assuming God had some choice in the matter, there are plenty of other options available. Christ could have been born in Rome, at the heart of the Empire, into a fine, patrician family, the son of a Senator, or even among the upper classes of Jerusalem. Jesus could have been born in a palace to the likes of William and Kate. But the God we meet in Jesus is a humble God, a God who is content to just be little. The creator of the vast expanse of space, the stars spinning in their galaxies, is a God who loves little things: birds, flowers, handmaidens, small towns, things that are easily overlooked, passed by, stepped upon. Our world is a tiny speck in the universe and we are grains of dust, yet God comes and enters into our smallness in order to be close to us, to be with us. When I was growing up, my mother used to tell me a story about something that happened when she was a little girl. Her father had the solid name of Enoch Ahlberg. Enoch emigrated from Sweden as an adult. His older siblings had led the way and he was the last of his family to cross the Atlantic. He was a tailor. But when he settled in southern Minnesota, for some reason he
became a farmer. I don t know why he changed professions. He probably should have remained a tailor, because he had horrible luck at farming. Even before the Great Depression began, he lost his farm and had to rent land in order to eke out a living for his family. My mother was a little girl during the Depression, the youngest of five, and she vividly remembers one Christmas. She was absolutely convinced, she had unshakeable faith, that God was going to give her a doll. Children are like God in that way; they love little things. They love little cars, little houses, little people. Dolls. Shortly before Christmas, she announced to my grandmother Mabel that she had prayed and asked God to give her a doll, and she believed that he would. Being the practical Swede that my grandmother was, she quickly attempted to put the kibosh on that idea. Realism was a far better way to cope with the poverty of the Depression than the inevitable disappointment of a little girl s prayer; so she told my mother that dolls come from parents, and her parents had no money for any dolls. But my mother, who has remained a persistent woman of prayer throughout her life, was not dissuaded in her faith that the Lord would provide. On Christmas Eve, the mailman drove up to the farmhouse and delivered a large box. The return address said Eva Carlson, Chicago Illinois. My grandparents did not know any Eva Carlson in Chicago, Illinois. How they had the patience, I have no idea, but my mother insists that they put the big box on the bare floor under the Christmas tree. And they waited all day to open it. They waited until nighttime, when they had lit all the candles on the tree. Inside was a letter from this woman named Eva, whom my grandparents had never met. She wrote that she was a niece, the daughter of one of Enoch s older sisters, who had married a Carlson. She had heard that her uncle Enoch had lost his farm and had five little children. She said that God had put it in her heart to send them gifts. Inside the box were presents for each of them. Now, how do you think this story ends? Doll or no doll? Do you believe? Of course there was a doll! It wouldn t be an old fashioned Christmas miracle story without it. But this story raises questions for me, as old fashioned Christmas miracle stories do. Did God answer my mother s prayer? What about all the little girls in 1930, living in poverty, who did not get what they were praying for? I love sentimental stories, but whether they are about a doll or a baby in a manger, unless a story changes us, then it remains cheap sentiment. What I do know is that it was Cousin Eva who became an answer to my mother s prayer. The longing of a little
girl s heart was answered because a woman whom she had never met had a heart of compassion like the heart of God. It was thirty-five years before my mother would meet her cousin. In all those years she held on to that memory, and it was with joy that the younger cousin greeted the elder and thanked her for being the answer to her prayer. Like Mary and her cousin Elizabeth greeting each other wih joy, my mother and her cousin Eva believed in a God who loves little ones. When we believe that little ones are important to God, it makes a difference in how we live. It makes a difference, as the prophet Micah knew, in whom our society values and how we take care of the most vulnerable among us. Our world is full of little ones, and God has given us the gift of becoming the answer to a little one s prayer. Later on in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus will tell us that in order to receive the kingdom of God, we must become like little children. Jesus clearly learned his theology from his mother. I wonder if Mary sang her song, her Magnificat, to Jesus when he was a little boy, 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 empty. Our pride and our self-sufficiency will only leave us empty. And so Jesus says to us: become like little children, with arms stretched out to receive. It s in our place of humility, our hunger and emptiness that God meets us with grace and lifts us up, like a mother picking up her child. St. Paul said, Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave. Jesus took the form of a slave. It s the exact same word that Mary uses for herself in her song handmaid, doula. Jesus takes the form of a doula. In the coming of Christ, God comes into our little lives and becomes little right along with us. Our humble God meets us in the low places our fear, our insecurity, our emptiness, our need, and God looks upon our lowliness and lifts us up. Tomorrow night is Christmas Eve, and Mary s story continues. The doula herself will give birth to another doula and they will name him Jesus. In the readings, we will hear, once again, the prophecy from Micah about the little town of Bethlehem. But tomorrow night, when you are listening to the story, pay attention, because we will hear Micah quoted from the Gospel of Matthew. i Listen for what Matthew does. Matthew was no fundamentalist when it comes to quoting scripture. He changes the prophecy of Micah and adds one little word. Listen for it, because with God, it s the little things that make all the difference. i Matthew 2:6
Scripture Readings: Micah 5:2-5 But you, O Bethlehem of Ephrathah, who are one of the little clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to rule in Israel, whose origin is from of old, from ancient days. Therefore he shall give them up until the time when she who is in labor has brought forth; then the rest of his kindred shall return to the people of Israel. And he shall stand and feed his flock in the strength of the Lord, in the majesty of the name of the Lord his God. And they shall live secure, for now he shall be great to the ends of the earth; and he shall be the one of peace. Luke 1:39-55 In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary s greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud cry, Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord. And Mary said, 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 shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. 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, in remembrance of his mercy, according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever.