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Scripture of the Day
Sermon
Luke 1: 46-55 NRSV
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.”
How many of you have either a Facebook account or an Instagram account or some sort of presence on social media? How many of you sent out Christmas cards or have sent out Christmas cards in the past with your family members on them? Right? You go and you take pictures of your family, right, and you send them out. How real, for those of you, whoever have ever taken children to get their photos professionally taken, those three or four or maybe one that you grab for your Christmas card, how much energy and effort and bribery did it take to get that one photo? A lot, right? And how many of the pictures did you wind up taking in which one's going, and the other one's going, and then one's going? And yet, the Christmas card that you send out is the perfect one or it's the best of all of the bad ones.
And on social media, we often put the best versions of ourselves out there. Those of you who are selfie takers, you'll understand you have to get the right angle and you have to get the right look. And sometimes it takes 15, 20, 60 pictures to get that one that you're going to put up on Facebook. Or how many of you know people who if you were to just pay attention to their lives on social media or in their Christmas cards, really seem like they have it all together? Really seem like this is a person to whom no bad things ever happen, and if bad things happen to them... You know they post that one picture of no makeup on, but it's like perfectly lit and filtered and edited. So even though they have no makeup on, it's not quite what you look like when you wake up in the morning and you go, "Oh God."
How many of us think about the people that we know virtually and the people that we know in person, but they always seem like they have their lives together? And that even when they have a bad moment, they still somehow handle it with great grace, with a positive attitude? And how many times do you and I look at these things and feel bad about ourselves, because our lives definitely do not look like that? How many of us also play into this idea of curating the experiences we have on our social media where we say, "Yeah, life is hard, but I'm still looking at the positives of it."?
How many of us are concerned about how the rest of the world sees our stuff? Don't get me wrong, I play into this as well. Just the other day, I was talking to a group of my friends and my clergy colleagues who are rushing around trying to get all of their stuff done, and I said, "My Christmas Eve bulletins have been printed for like a week now. My services are all done. I'm all ready to go," and then I realized that none of my sermons are in. I still have to go out and buy 300 candy canes. I have to cut out all of these little candy cane gift things that, thank God I have recruited people to help me with that one. My life is not quite what I want the rest of the world to see.
If you happen in the office on a Tuesday morning or a Thursday morning, you will see a very different Gabrielle than the person that stands up here, because chances are I've very limited makeup on. I have my slippers on, because it's winter, and I wear my Uggs everywhere. You know, not like the nice boot Uggs. I mean the full blown slipper Uggs that I've had for seven or eight years now that are falling apart, because they keep my feet nice and toasty. There's a different persona that we put on. Our lives are not quite what we put out there for everybody else to see, because it is hard to put yourself out there.
One of the very first questions that people ask me when they are coming to visit church is, "What am I supposed to wear?". What am I supposed to wear? Which the question they're really asking is, "What do I have to do in order to fit in in this place?". Will my full self be accepted or will people be more concerned about the outfit I have on than they are about who I am and what I need and what I'm seeking? Church is supposed to be a place in which the raw and vulnerability of who we are, the wrongness of the reality of our lives is celebrated.
We look at the Virgin Mary. We've talked about her a lot during this time of year. And we've talked about her a lot, particularly this sermon series, because I want you to really think about Mary who... How many of you grew up Catholic slash still are Catholic, right? It's okay. This is a safe place here. I understand. Chris, we get it. In the Catholic church, the Virgin Mary is venerated, so deeply venerated, and when you look at images of Mary throughout history, she always has this broad smile on her face. She's always serene. She always seems to have her life figured out as she's cradling this beautiful baby with the nice, little halo.
Pregnancy and childbirth are wildly difficult, even now in 2019. It's a risk, even with all of our advanced medical procedures and our sterile birthing centers and our midwives and everyone else that we bring alongside of us on our journey to bear children. What would it have looked like to have given birth in the first century with no doctors, with no medical staff and for Mary who gave birth in a stable with no one there to help her but her husband? When Mary says yes to the angel and declares my soul magnifies the Lord, she does so with great risk, putting everything that she is on the line. If you go back and you read Luke 1, you'll notice that the angel never promises her that she will survive.
All the angel says to Mary is your name will be remembered. It doesn't say because you will bear God, you're going to be just fine. It doesn't say because you will bear the light of the world, everything in your life is going to be peachy. There are no promises made to Mary except you will be the one that bears God into this world. Are you ready? And she says, "My soul magnifies the Lord." God will do incredible and great things no matter what my part is.
And then for all of you who have given birth or have been around people who have given birth and have been part of raising children, think about how difficult it is. Think about all the things that you experienced during your postpartum months and years that nobody tells you about when you're getting ready to start a family and that nobody really talks about. The difficulty of bonding with your baby. The difficulty of dealing with the changes that happen to your body. The difficulty of adjusting to this little life who for many months really doesn't do anything except eat and sleep and then you have to change its diaper. And let's be clear, there were no diapers in the first century.
There are no promises made to Mary that it would be easy or fun. But what was promised and what Mary understood was that the whole world would be different because this child was born, because the love that God had for humanity far outweighed the unknown.
How many of you have either been to... This is another hand raising activity, okay? How many of you have either had a wedding or been to a wedding in which I Corinthians 13 is read? Love is patient. Love is kind. Slow to ang... Right? All of us. All of us. I have done multitudes of weddings where that is read. Right? And we hear these words that love is patient and love is kind and it is slow to anger and it does not judge. And we hear these words and they're read at our wedding, and so we think that that's what marriage is about. Those of you who are married, tell me, is that really what marriage is about? Not always. But that's what God is all about. God is kind and patient and slow to anger and does not judge and is not quick to hold grudges against us.
When you think about the whole enormity of the story of God's great love for the world and for humanity, we start at the very beginning when God creates from nothing, lights and dark, sea and sky, land, fish, animals, people. And as God creates humankind, as God digs in the dirt of the earth and forms us in God's image and breathes into us the breath of life, we are filled with love. And even when our human love failed and we again and again and again turn away, look at the Israelites who are brought out of Egypt and still demand to go back, because at least in Egypt, even though they were slaves, they had meat.
Think about all the times in our lives that we have run away from God, and yet, and yet, all God wants from us is for us to open our hearts back to him. It's not that he's seeking to judge us. It's not that he is seeking to tell us all of the ways that we are wrong. It's not that God is scrolling through Facebook going, "Oh yeah, Rena. She really has her life together. So check plus. I like her. She can come with me."
God instead is looking at the ways that we bear the totality of who we are, the good, the bad and the ugly. The spaces and the places in our lives in which we are ashamed. The places and the spaces in our lives in which we carry great guilt. God doesn't care whether or not your Christmas card comes out perfectly. All God cares about is that your hearts are changed. That the deep, steadfast, undying love that Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit and God the Father have for us, matter. So that church and this gathering that we do becomes a place in which people can bear the totality of their souls.
When was the last time that you sat with someone from this church and opened the darkness inside of you and let someone else see it without being concerned whether or not the person you are talking to would judge you? Most of us probably haven't done it. Most of us probably are still so concerned about the dark places in our lives that it becomes impossible to be able to share it and we hold onto these things as though we are the only ones experiencing it.
We hold this darkness inside of ourselves. It pulls us further and further and further away from being able to experience the totality of God's love. Because if I can't love myself for the darkness that resides inside of me, how will my neighbor at church love me for that? And if my neighbor in church cannot love me for that, then how in the world is God who wants me to be perfect, ever going to love me for the darkness that is deep inside of me?
Christmas is about God coming down and saying that for the darkness that resides in you, for the shame and the guilt and the places that you have no idea how it's going to turn out, God loves you fully and completely. There is no need to be picture-perfect or to curate a life for God that says, "I do all the things that God wants me to do. Look at my selfie as I'm at Bible study. Look at my selfie as I'm serving a homeless person in the city. Here's my selfie while I'm writing a check for People to People."
God, I went to church 10 times this year. It's better than last year. It's about being willing to step out into the dark places of the world, dark places of ourselves and say, "God's love is patient and it is kind and it is slow to anger. And therefore without knowing the end of the story, I can say too, my soul magnifies the Lord."
There's darkness and vulnerability within each and every one of us. There are the things that we do not want to talk about. Each of us has a place in our lives in which we know and in which we think that we know that if we were to expose it to the world, no one would ever look at us the same. And yet, God with us means that we expose that darkness to the world and we say, "Here I am, and God loves me in my totality in my darkness and in my pain and in my struggle. And it does not mean that God takes that away from me, but God gives me the strength to journey."
God gives me the strength, not that I will be okay, not that my pregnancy will be easy as a 14-year-old virgin girl, not that I am going to give birth in the best medical place in the whole wide world, but that even in a stable with no one else there, my soul magnifies the Lord. Even when it is difficult, even when it is painful, even when it scares the pants off of me, I know that God loves me for the wholeness and the fullness of who I am. Dark, scary and weird. And my soul magnifies the Lord today and every day. Amen.
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