Rev. Chandler Stokes Luke 1:39-56 The Fourth Sunday of Advent December 20, 2015 Opening Sentences Thomas said to him, Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way? Jesus said to him, I am the way, and the truth, and the life. (John 14:5 6) Scripture Introduction Today our text is Mary s song, called the Magnificat. If we take her historically, she s at the age of betrothal. So Mary is likely an uneducated, pregnant twelve-year-old. If we take this as Luke s literary creation, written some fifty to eighty years after the events, what then? Luke s text and Mary s song each speak with confident knowledge of God, but they re not easy to trust. But one of the great Christmas lyrics is O holy Child of Bethlehem Descend to us, we pray Cast out our sin and enter in Be born to us today. Be born in us today: we sing it so easily, but wouldn t that require our getting pregnant ourselves? Wouldn t that require some alteration in us? In this season of the sounds of The Nutcracker, of Dickens A Christmas Carol, and of football rivalries, listening to what God is saying. Scripture Luke 1:39-56 39 In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, 40 where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. 41 When Elizabeth heard Mary s greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit 42 and exclaimed with a loud cry, Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. 43 And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? 44 For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy. 45 And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord. 46 And Mary said, My soul magnifies the Lord, 47 and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, 48 for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; 49 for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name. 50 His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. 51 He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. 52 He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, Because sermons are prepared with an emphasis on verbal presentation, the written accounts may occasionally stray from proper grammar and punctuation.
and lifted up the lowly; 53 he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty. 54 He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, 55 according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever. 56 And Mary remained with her about three months and then returned to her home. * * * Mary is an uneducated, pregnant twelve-year-old, and yet she sounds like she knows: God brings down the powerful and lifts up the lowly; God turns the world upside down. She sounds like she knows God is faithful to God s promises; she sounds like she knows God. When it comes to God, I don t often talk about knowledge. It seems too solid or unyielding a word for our relationship with God. But there are times, as my friend Tom says, when a word is uttered, and you know it s true and it s always been true. Or take this from the Benedictine monk Bede Griffiths: One day during my last term at school I walked out alone in the evening and heard the birds singing in that full chorus of song, which can only be heard at that time of the year at dawn or at sunset. I remember now the shock of surprise with which the sound broke on my ears. It seemed to me that I had never heard the birds singing before and I wondered whether they sang like this all year round and I had never noticed it. As I walked I came upon some hawthorn trees in full bloom and again I thought that I had never seen such a sight or experienced such sweetness before. If I had been brought suddenly among the trees of the Garden of Paradise and heard a choir of angels singing I could not have been more surprised. I came then to where the sun was setting over the playing fields. A lark rose suddenly from the ground beside the tree where I was standing and poured out its song above my head, and then sank still singing to rest. Everything then grew still as the sunset faded and the veil of dusk began to cover the earth. I remember now the feeling of awe which came over me. I felt inclined to kneel on the ground, as though I had been standing in the presence of an angel; and I hardly dared to look on the face of the sky, because it seemed as though it was but a veil before the face of God. 1 1 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, Kindle Edition (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), Kindle locations 100-109. Westminster Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, MI Page 2 of 7 December 20, 2015
Is this ranting or real? People are thirsty. I think people are thirsty for something like that. People are thirsty for something beyond us, something that good, holy religion can provide, but they ve been told that the water is poison. It is certainly a thirst for meaning. Beyond the good ethics, beyond community, beyond comforting and world-building ritual: hymns and prayers and liturgy. There is a deep thirst for meaning. There is in the religious life a word from beyond. I think people are thirsty for precisely that word beyond us, but they ve been told, in particular by the New Atheists, that the water that could slake their thirst is poison. The language of the Virgin Birth, the language of miracles, the language of the Incarnation, the Resurrection, of a veil before the face of God all of this religious language is a kind of word from beyond. Is this water to slake our thirst or poison? The New Atheists like Dawkins and Hitchens I want to do away with them quickly. They are the modern Scrooge mean-spirited and shallow. Right off, I want to quote the literary theorist Terry Eagleton. He s a kind of anti-venom: good at neutralizing those who call the water poison. Atheist Christopher Hitchens says that because we now have the microscope and the telescope, we can reject the explanatory power (or poison) of the Bible. Eagleton retorts, that is rather like saying that thanks to the electric toaster we can forget about Chekhov. He says, Believing that religion is a botched attempt to explain the world is like seeing ballet as a botched attempt to run for a bus. That s good to remember in The Nutcracker season. I saw a performance of that ballet last night enchanting, uplifting, sweet water: but not even Rat King could have caught a bus with what he was doing. So if Eagleton is right, maybe he helps neutralize the claim of the New Atheists. Maybe the water is not poison. Maybe objective knowledge is not the only sort of healthy truth; maybe other knowledge is not merely superstition and bunk. Mary speaks as if she knows this word from beyond, that God is faithful. How can she know? Or Luke? Or Bede Griffiths? How can anyone know and speak with confidence about something not objective? Is it actual knowing or is it baloney? Michael Polanyi, the twentieth-century philosopher, based much of his work, entitled Personal Knowledge, 2 on a simple illustration. Polanyi was trying to explain the nature of knowledge that is both real and firm, and yet not objective or able to be stated in the usual ways of certainty. Think about a human face and imagine trying to describe that face with words to someone who had never seen that face before. And you would describe this face such that, when this person you told about it walked into a room full of faces, they could, solely on the basis of your verbal description, recognize that one face and distinguish it from all the others. That is well-nigh impossible! And yet, when you see a familiar face, you know it. You recognize it immediately, even if you are incapable of describing it for someone else. You know that face. My granddaughter Molly cannot 2 Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Toward a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974). Westminster Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, MI Page 3 of 7 December 20, 2015
tell you what her mother s face looks like, but from all of the seven billion people on earth, she knows her mama s face. We know more than we can tell. That s real and not purely objective. But still, Mary s a pregnant twelve year old, high on hormones. Luke talks about all kinds of crazy stuff decades after the fact. How might we trust any word from beyond? That s the kind of thing some people laugh at. It s laughable to the reasonable and scientific. It s Nutcracker season; tis also the season of Charles Dickens, who asked the same question ( How can I trust a word from beyond? ) in the person of Scrooge, who had a vision, a word from beyond. Do you remember the scene? [The ghostly, mostly transparent apparition says,] In life I was your partner, Jacob Marley. Can you can you sit down? asked Scrooge, looking doubtfully at him. I can. Do it, then. Scrooge asked the question, because he didn't know whether a ghost so transparent might find himself in a condition to take a chair; and felt that in the event of its being impossible, it might involve the necessity of an embarrassing explanation. But the ghost sat down on the opposite side of the fireplace, as if he were quite used to it. You don't believe in me, observed the Ghost. I don't, said Scrooge. What evidence would you have of my reality beyond that of your senses? I don't know, said Scrooge. Why do you doubt your senses? Because, said Scrooge, a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are! 3 How reasonable is Scrooge! How reasonable not to trust his senses, especially when they tell him a word from beyond, and something he doesn t want to hear. Mary doesn t know anything about God; she s got indigestion. Scrooge prefers to believe that the water is poison, because if, instead, it is life, he knows he should drink it. 3 Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, Kindle Edition, pp. 11-12. Westminster Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, MI Page 4 of 7 December 20, 2015
But in the gospel, we are not talking about a modern, self-conscious fiction. We re not just talking about some apparition. We are talking about Mary and Luke and Bede Griffiths and their witness to God, their witness to the ultimate meaning of our existence. This isn t just parable like A Christmas Carol. This is people claiming the meaning of our existence, a word of significance from beyond. Well, in the same way that we know more than we can tell, in the way that we can recognize and know a face that is beyond our ability to adequately describe, there is also something about meaning that comes to us also as a word from beyond. This is an analogy I ve used before. It s from Jonathan Sacks. It s one that always makes most sense during football season. Let s say that someone who has never seen football before wants to understand this strange ritual that makes us so passionate. You explain the rules of the game: first downs, passing, punting fumbling, and so on. Fine, says the visitor, I now understand the game. What I don t understand is why you get so agitated about it. So you talk about rivalries and Michigan-Michigan State, ritualized conflict, and so on to explain the agitation. There is an internal logic of the system the rules of football: how you score points but the meaning of the system (even the significance of winning or losing) lies elsewhere, and it can only be understood through some sense of the wider human context in which it is set. To understand that, you have to step outside the system and see why it was brought into being. There is no way of understanding the meaning of football by merely knowing the rules of football. And that is what science or objective knowledge can tell you about the universe: the rules by which it operates. The rules tell you how to play the game, but not why people do so and why they invest their passions as they do. The internal workings of a system do not explain the place the system holds in human lives. The meaning of the system lies outside the system. In the same way, the meaning of the universe lies outside the universe. 4 It is a word from beyond, outside the objective universe. Where Mary receives this non-objective knowledge is also whence meaning comes. The fact is she s pregnant but the meaning of her pregnancy is not derived from that fact alone. How does Mary know? Some knowledge, like recognizing a face sure, but not objective, comes to her from beyond her, and she recognizes it as a word from beyond. And it gives meaning, direction, focus to her life. It slakes her thirst for that. The word becomes very much a part of her. Be born in us today watch what you pray for! When Karen was pregnant with our son Jeremy, who we thought was Amanda, so much of our lives 4 Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning, Kindle edition (New York: Schocken Books/Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group), p. 29 adapted. Westminster Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, MI Page 5 of 7 December 20, 2015
changed: direction, focus, meaning turned into disruption, change, craziness. I wouldn t call it poison, but the old life was gone. The fact of Jeremy was critical, but the meaning is what drove us and slaked our thirst. Religious knowledge is more like knowing a face than knowing the facts. It is a word from beyond that gives meaning to the whole in a way that the simple facts cannot give. And it moves us from distance, perhaps cynical distance or objective detachment, to commitment personal, real commitment. You must know this old saw. In a bacon-and-egg breakfast, what's the difference between the Chicken and the Pig? The Chicken is involved, but the Pig is committed! This is what I mean. The process of stating, or claiming, or witnessing to the word from beyond is something like pregnancy itself. We do not generate the child by ourselves. We don t entwine together the strands of DNA. It happens without us, beyond us. But in a pregnant woman s case, it also clearly happens within us. It is both utterly beyond and utterly within: a word beyond and a word in flesh. Polanyi calls it personal knowledge. Scrooge tries so hard to keep this word beyond and questionable a bit of undigested beef. He fears that letting this word in will poison him. He tries to keep it at a distance with cynicism or reason. I suppose in some way Jacob Marley s apparition and the spirits of Christmas are poison they do away with Scrooge s former self. In the end Scrooge is changed; he moves from sitting on the sidelines to getting in the game. He becomes involved in the meaning itself. Scrooge moves from skeptic to witness and participant, much like Luke, or Mary, or anyone who might believe them. Dickens tells us that: Scrooge was better than his word. He did it all, and infinitely more. He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world. Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them; for he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset; and knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have the malady in less attractive forms. His own heart laughed: and that was quite enough for him. and it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. 5 5 Dickens, p. 73. Westminster Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, MI Page 6 of 7 December 20, 2015
How does Mary know? How does Scrooge know? Each moved from the sidelines to being part of Christmas. Each commits. It gets personal. Mary moves from her earlier question, What does this mean? to living the answer, an answer that commits her. Boy, oh, boy does it commit her When it comes to pregnancy: The man is definitely involved, but the woman is committed. Knowing this word is a matter of being committed to this word from beyond. It s what John calls the truth, as Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life: the Word that became flesh and dwelt among us. It is a word from beyond that does not leave us unchanged. Every Sunday, we pray that that word from beyond will touch us, be born in us. And sometimes the word is uttered, and you know it s true, and it s always been true. 6 And then you see yourself differently, even your world differently. The word takes on power that claims you and it becomes personal. 7 It will never be simple to say; it will be like describing our mother s face. But we know more than we can tell. Like Scrooge, or pregnant Mary, maybe people will only see the alteration in us. And that will be word enough a word is so full and fragrant and rich that it spreads through the earth far as the curse is found a word made flesh in us. Vladimir Nabokov has written a story titled simply, The Word. It is about that thirst-slaking word that changes us, that births us anew. It s about a barefoot and homesick man who finds himself surrounded in Paradise by turquoise birds, lithe orange animals, and a swarm of angels. When the angels can t restrain their bliss they unfurl their wings, and the sight is like a burst of sunlight, like the sparkling of millions of eyes. Eventually, the angels are called to a feast and recede, all but one. One angel stays, approaches the man, and embraces him with its wings for just an instant, just long enough to give the man a single word in which the man hears all the beloved and silenced voices of his homeland. The word is so fragrant and melodious that it spreads through the man like a drug, beating in his temples and spreading warmth in him such as he has never felt before. 8 May that word be born in us today and become our joy to the world. Let the people say, Amen. 6 Tom Are, the line that inspired this sermon. 7 Again, my colleague Tom Are. 8 Cornelius Plantinga Jr., Reading for Preaching, Kindle edition (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2013), p. 13. Westminster Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, MI Page 7 of 7 December 20, 2015