Scripture Luke 1:67-80 (NRSVUE)
Then his father Zechariah was filled with the Holy Spirit and prophesied:
“Blessed be the Lord God of Israel,
for he has looked favorably on his people and redeemed them.
He has raised up a mighty savior for us
in the house of his child David,
as he spoke through the mouth of his holy prophets from of old,
that we would be saved from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us.
Thus he has shown the mercy promised to our ancestors
and has remembered his holy covenant,
the oath that he swore to our ancestor Abraham,
to grant us that we, being rescued from the hands of our enemies,
might serve him without fear, in holiness and righteousness
in his presence all our days.
And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High,
for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways,
to give his people knowledge of salvation
by the forgiveness of their sins.
Because of the tender mercy of our God,
the dawn from on high will break upon us,
to shine upon those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the way of peace.”
The child grew and became strong in spirit, and he was in the wilderness until the day he appeared publicly to Israel.
Sermon
Every word in the Bible exists in at least three timelines. Let’s take the gospels. The first timeline is the one in which Jesus is walking the earth. Well, for a while, he’s being carried around, since he does come as a baby. But you understand me. The second timeline, and one just as important to the story, is the timeline in which the gospel is being written down—when the oral tradition is set down upon the page so that it can be shared more and more widely. The events of that timeline inevitably find their way into the telling of the story. And the third timeline, of course, is our timeline—more specifically the timeline of the readers and hearers of the gospel. What is happening in our world. We can’t hear the gospel without applying its insights, events, and promises to the world we are living in, right now. For instance, for clarity’s sake, please know that, in a sermon, if I am using the word “Israel,” I’m referring to covenant people descended from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and not to the modern-day political entity, the state of Israel, unless I say so, specifically.
These three timelines are so present for us in the songs we are hearing today. The first two chapters of the gospel according to Luke are filled with music. Today we are tuning in to two of the four songs that appear there, the two songs we find in Luke, chapter 1. We start with Zechariah’s song.
Zechariah, his tongue unloosed after more than nine months of silence, promptly breaks into song. He begins with a full-throated burst of praise for our Lord, the God of Israel, who has come to set God’s people free. As joyful as the birth of John is, this late in life baby who was only a dream for so many years, Zechariah is a priest, and in these words, a prophet. He sees the big picture, and the big picture is that God has “raised up a mighty savior for God’s people Israel, in the house of God’s child David.” Jesus, son of David, who will be called the Messiah, the Lord. Jesus is the big picture here.
Zechariah reminds us that this was the promise of the prophets—that God would save God’s people from their enemies, from the hands of all who hate them. He even sings wistfully of the day they will be able to worship without fear, holy and righteous in the sight of God.
This is where the timeline of the writer of the gospel breaks through. Scholars estimate that the gospel of Luke was written down sometime between the years 90 and 100 CE—between sixty and seventy years after Jesus’ ministry on earth. But that era is only twenty to thirty years after one of the most devastating events in the history of Judaism, the destruction of the second Temple and the scorched earth destruction of Jerusalem itself. These are no hypothetical enemies, to either the Jews or the Jesus-followers of that era. In the years 90 to 100 there are people living who witnessed these horrific, bloody, events and managed to escape with their lives. The longing for God’s rescue was a desperate and constant hope.
But notice the grammar Zechariah is using. He is speaking as if all these things have already been accomplished. God has come to us. God has sent a savior. God has shown the mercy promised to our ancestors. These are powerful words of hope. Zechariah has already seen enough of God’s hand in these events to know that God’s promise is good, can be trusted.
Then, in the midst of this anthem of salvation, the old priest turns to his child and sings a lullaby.
And you, child, shall be called the prophet of the Most High,
for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways,
to give his people knowledge of salvation by the forgiveness of their sins.
And he concludes with some of the most beautiful words ever set down in scripture:
By of the tender mercy of our God,
the dawn from on high will break upon us,
to shine upon those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the way of peace.
Zechariah sings of something very present to the writer of the gospel, and very present to us today, living in our timeline: those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death. The light that is coming will lead all to peace at last.
Mary’s song comes earlier than Zechariah’s in the gospel. She bursts into song after she and Elizabeth have exchanged hellos and Elizabeth herself has uttered prophecy. Then Mary take her turn… prophets all around, in these first chapters of Jesus’ life. Mary is no exception.
Where Zechariah begins on the grand scale of God’s salvation through Jesus, Mary begins with her own sense of God’s saving work. Her soul magnifies God—her heart and spirit are swelling with joy because of God her savior. Then she speaks words that may be baffling to a reader in our timeline. God, she says, has looked with favor on the lowly state of God’s servant. In the original language that last phrase could be translated “the humiliation of God’s servant.” We know that Mary has found herself pregnant, as the angel announced she would. But why humiliation?
The laws and customs in that era concerning women who became pregnant by someone other than her fiancé or husband were truly terrifying. The bible offered a sentence of being stoned to death. The customs included public shunning—humiliation—and being forced to abandon her baby. We begin to have a sense of why Mary’s first words in this song concern her gratitude to God for sparing her all these things, and for ensuring that this baby would be born.
Then Mary’s song expands from her personal experience to God’s care for God’s people. And her words are explosive. She speaks of a God who uses divine power to scatter the proud in their conceit. A God who knocks the powerful off their thrones and lifts up the lowly, the humiliated, the humble. A God who sees to it that the hungry are filled and that the rich, for once, know what it is to have empty stomachs.
These words are so subversive, there are churches that won’t use them in worship because they don’t accord with those churches’ politics. These words are so terrifying to those in power that they were banned from public worship—the Magnificat was banned—by the colonizers in British-occupied England, by the government of Guatemala, and by the military junta that ruled Argentina. Two twentieth century Christian martyrs, known for protesting the human rights violations of their governments used these words to lift up the oppressed—Oscar Romero and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Artist Ben Wildflower grew up in one of the churches I mentioned above. He had only ever heard the first few lines of the Magnificat, which can be read within a context that lifts up only the “gentle Mary, meek and mild” version of Jesus’ mother. When he started attending an Anglican church and discovered that this entire passage was prayed each day at Evening Prayer, he was overwhelmed with the beauty and power of the words. One day he found a piece of wood outside a construction site and created his image “Magnificat,” a very different image from the usual depictions of Mary—hands folded, eyes gazing heavenward. Instead, she is lifting her fist to the sky. She is stepping on a skull which is crushing a snake. Above her are the words, “Cast Down the Mighty,” and beneath her it reads, “Send the Rich Away.” Wildflower said in an interview, “She’s a young woman singing a song about toppling rulers from their thrones. She’s a radical who exists within the confines of institutionalized religion.” When some Christians took offense at the image, he wrote a blogpost explaining that it came from the Bible. [1]
Mary’s song closes with her affirming that God has come to the aid of God’s child Israel. God remembers God’s promise of mercy to Abraham and Sarah and their descendants, forever.
I must state the obvious. The Bible is political. Zechariah is political. Mary is political. Jesus, the son of Mary, who apparently learned a lot from his mother, is political. This is one of those passages whose connections to the three timelines are crystal clear. A King appointed by the Romans would determine that Mary and Joseph would travel 90 miles in the ninth month of her pregnancy for the purpose of making sure they were properly categorized on the tax rolls. The people of Luke’s time were still at the mercy of the empire as they sought to live out their faith in safety. And we spent the entire fall listening to Jesus’ warnings about wealth, all while the actions of billionaires dominated political discourse in our own country, in our own timeline. These are timeless songs of liberation, and of God’s promises being lifted up, as well as what some theologians have called God’s preferential option for the poor and oppressed. These are songs of hope.
As we prepare to celebrate the birth of a brown-skinned child born in a West Bank town who, for a time, was an undocumented refugee in Egypt, these are the songs, not only of these ancestors in our faith, but of the earliest gatherings of what came to be called the church. These are prophetic words of hope for those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death, then, and now. These are the words that both heralded the birth of Jesus, and prophesied the Good News he would preach, and live, and die for. Then, as now, these words by these prophets call us all to do our part, here and now, in creating a world of righteousness, justice, and peace.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
[1] D. L. Mayfield, “Mary’s ‘Magnificat’ in the Bible is Revolutionary. Some evangelicals silence her,” The Washington Post, December 20, 2018.