Pageant time!

Sometimes a well-thought-out (I hope) sermon translates decently enough into the printed word. A sermon is really a lived experience, quite different in the hearing than in the reading. This fourth Sunday of Advent illustrates that pretty well in that the sermon is not translatable into text. Or, rather, the story comes into its fuller telling by the annual Christmas pageant. The Gospel of John describes Jesus as the "Word become flesh," where the Torah, the covenant God has with God's people and with the world at large, takes on skin and bone and DNA and spittle and dirty diapers and coughing fits and sweat and... you get the picture.

This is the Sunday where we read sing together the song of Hannah, whose husband's other wife was bearing him many children, even though Hannah was his favorite wife, and she prayed so fervently to conceive a child that Eli the priest thought she was drunk and told her to sober up and be ashamed of herself for her unseemly public behavior. Little did Eli know he himself would end up raising Hannah's son when she gave him to the temple in gratitude for God's answer of 'yes' to her prayer.

This song, this story, was passed down generation to generation. Hope of God's promises come to fruition, of God's faithfulness to God's people throughout the ages. Hannah's son, Samuel, was called by God in a very spiritually dry time, when the word of God was not common among the people. It was so rare to hear from God, in fact, that at first Samuel, sleeping in the sanctuary, thought the voice calling him was that of his old teacher, Eli.

The Women of the ELCA mark one particular Sunday every year as "Bold Women's Day," and this fourth Sunday of Advent is another celebration of bold women of faith who have shaped the faith of generations of people. Hannah's song became the song shared between Mary and Elizabeth, generations later, when again it seemed the voice of God had gone silent. Rome had colonized the Jewish people and held it over them that they had more 'power' than Israel's God (they were wrong, of course, Empires have nothing on God's power), but Elizabeth had just become pregnant well past menopause, and Mary, who in her position may have been impregnated by a forceful Roman soldier, was sought out by God to carry God's own Self in her womb. Or would it make the story sound more solid to say God planted a seed in Mary's uterus? She bore God in the flesh in her own very flesh, knit God's baby body together with her own blood and fluids, broke open nine months later to push a wriggling, slimy, screaming little body into a great big screaming world.

And when Mary was just beginning to show, she went to visit her cousin Elizabeth, who was entering her third trimester, and together the two women, very young and very old, sang the song of Hannah who had made such a scene praying for God's work to bear fruit in her body. It has been sung in so many languages, tempos, rhythms, styles, for further generations down through history, from chant to popular liturgy to any excuse for a concert. When one considers the lyrics, which I recall below from a liturgy I grew up singing for evening prayer, it's amazing we've been allowed to sing this music as long as we have been:

"My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord! My spirit rejoices in God my savior, for He has looked with favor on His lowly servant. From this day, all generations shall call me blessed. The Almighty has done great things for me, and holy is God's name. He has mercy on those who fear him from generation to generation. He has shown the strength of His arm, He has scattered the proud in their conceit, He has cast down the mighty from their thrones and has lifted up the lowly. God has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich are sent away empty. He has come to the help of His servant, Israel, for He has remembered His promise of mercy - the promise He made to our fathers, to Abraham and his children forever." (emphasis mine, of course)

We are celebrating that God in the flesh has come to dwell with us and turn everything topsy-turvy! Nobody will be allowed to remain idle, nobody will remain unaffected, nobody will remain comfortable - or suffering - as they have gotten used to. The world is about to turn, yet again. God's mercies are new every morning. God's spirit is among us, active in the world. God comes to us as a demanding infant, an unruly child, an honest-to-goodness adolescent, a moderate Rabbi who re-frames the Torah and does something unexpected to the covenant by making a new covenant for the rest of us, by his own blood. So on through the generations we tell the story of a woman who sang a song begun long before she had been conceived, and on into the generations to come, God's promises are sure.

God becomes flesh. Happy fourth Sunday of Advent!