The Fourth Sunday of Advent
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. – Luke 1:46-48
During the Christmas season, people who have strong objections to religious statues suddenly have a change of heart. I’m thinking of the Christmas creche: the sculptural depiction of the birth of Jesus. People who deplore devotional statuary in churches like ours, calling it idolatrous, fight for the right to erect religious statues on government property.
Could it be that people relish a creche while they detest other religious statuary because nativity scenes depict a God that challenge us so little. Jesus: incapable of speech. Mary: unmarried and pregnant. Neither one of them is in a position to ask a thing of us.
On this last Sunday of Advent, Luke tells us that it is not like that at all no matter how our nativity scenes make it seem. He crafts a hymn, and he has Mary sing it, about a world where people who think they are in charge are “cast down,” where God puts lowly people in positions above the so-called leaders, and where well-nourished people suddenly find themselves on the food line.
Mary, who sings her song to us this last Sunday before Christmas, reveals to us what God can do and, above all, what God wants to do. God does not want the rich to become richer, the powerful to gain more power, the satiated to become fuller. It is the opposite of what God wants. The baby is not as meek and mild as he looks, and his teenaged mother is wise and fearless, telling it exactly as it is.
Jesus was born in Bethlehem. We’ve all seen the tableaus. Bethlehem, though, was only the beginning. Jesus is forever coming into our world: God-with-Us. The joy of God’s liberating presence is beyond imagining, but so are its demands. In us, God-in-Christ is still working to liberate captives and to give voice to the silenced. That is what God asks of us in these nativity time, and unlike those creches people fight to have erected on courthouse lawns, the coming of the Christ is at least as much a challenge as it is a comfort.
Purify our conscience, Almighty God, by your daily visitation, that your Son Jesus Christ, at his coming, may find in us a mansion prepared for himself; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
– Collect for the Fourth Sunday of Advent