Micah 5:2-5a; Luke 1:46b-55; Hebrews 10:5-10; Luke 1:39-45 (46-55)
Preached by Jane Barter Moulaison, December 24th, 2006.
I am not a technophobe—I enjoy reading blogs, check my e-mail at least three times a day.
My students will attest that I enjoy my toys like PPT and web-based educational software perhaps a bit too much in my class.
Hey, I might even find a technological gadget or two under the tree tomorrow.
But, I must say, that there is one device that I find deeply offensive: that is the phenomenon of the cell phone.
My husband, Glenn and I were on our first lunch date in about seven years last week. (This is first year our kids have been in school all day). And all around us, diners were interrupted by the ringing of their phones. People abandoning their lunch coopanion, they proceed to speak on the phone, oblivious to the fact that everyone can hear them.
Or what about buses? I have spent too many hours on buses cell- learning far more than I would like to know about which girlfriend my teen-aged fellow traveler is ticked off at; whom she is currently dating or hoping to date, and how much alcohol she consumed over the weekend.
Usually the conversations are so banal that they are mere fillers, lest their be a quiet moment in anyone’s travel. “I’m on Archibald and Marion right now, where are you? What are you doing now?”
We have trained teenagers to be, like us, afraid of silences, because we associate silence with being alone. Yet, as we all know, empty noise, filler, conversations that fail to communicate anything of substance can be far lonelier, far more indicative of our essential and painful solitude than a silent being together, or even a silent being apart.
I firmly believe that how we communicate is as important as what we communicate. And what I mean by this is that what we communicate is caught up in the how we are communicating. As Marshall McLuhan famously put it: the “Medium is the message.” I probably could learn a great deal more about my teenage neighbour on the bus through listening, not to her words, but to her silences—the nervous energy with which she digs out the cell-phone… The re-dialing of several numbers until she finds a friend on the other end of the line.
The readings we have heard this morning tell us something about communication. Because at its heart, the good news that we celebrate today and tomorrow, and throughout this very season is about God’s communication, God’s address, God’s Word to us. The prologue of the gospel of John is: “In beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was the same as God.” And God’s Word is not a message or a lesson; it is not a sermon or a prophecy. God’s Word to us, God’s communication to the world both 2000 years ago and today, is Jesus Christ himself. And he shall be called Emmanuel, which means God with us. So let us pause for a moment to think about the readings that we have heard to consider how this Word, this child, is also known through how he is revealed to us.
Unlike our modern preoccupation with novelty, new gadgets, new ways of doing things, new ideas, finding a new language, etc., etc., both the reading from Micah and from Luke tell us that God’s self-communication is, importantly, not a new and revolutionary thing.
Jesus comes from an ancient line, all the way back to David, and Jesus is understood as the fulfillment of, not the rupture from, Israel. He is the hope-- first of all to a people—a people who had been waiting for him. He is the fulfillment of a patient, and persistent and abiding covenant that God first strikes with Abraham. Mary’s speech, the Magnificat, similarly interprets her own story, her own life, not as a new revelation, but as a continuation of her people’s story:
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.
Each phrase, virtually every word, of Mary’s speech is an allusion to Old Testament. She speaks thus because her story is not empty noise, but a story of God acting throughout history, in the law and the prophets to save her people Israel, and to save her, in whom God had “looked with favour.”
Last week, Preston spoke about the virtue of patience in our own communications with one another. Mary teaches us something about our own response to God’s Word—we too should be willing to display a persistent and patient love for God. We too should be able to respond to God’s coming to us not in frenzied activity, but in the confidence of praise.
The second thing we can learn about God’s self-communicaton from this passage is that it is expressed not in grand, otherworldly displays but in the stuff of ordinary life. To Mary, a young peasant girl, and to Elizabeth, an elderly pregnant woman. Think of the incredible strangeness that the coming of God is heralded not by triumphal marches, not by military processions, but by the entry of a young peasant Jewish woman into an elderly peasant Jewish woman’s house. It is here, in the exchange, between two nobodies, according to the standards of their time (and perhaps also our own) that John’s prophetic witnessing to Christ first takes place as he leaps in his mother’s womb upon Mary’s arrival. And so too for us, God has entered into our midst, even in the static all around us, the sound waves, and the sound bytes, and harried noise of our ordinary lives, might we still, like John, leap for joy when we encounter His truth?
Thirdly and finally, we learn something about God’s communication through how he reveals himself in the midst of a broken world. It is not through the prior establishment of some perfect, otherworldly state, nor by carrying us off in a rapture of altered consciousness, but God comes to us amidst the principalities and powers of this world and amidst the brokenness of our lives. God is heralded by Micah in a time when the Assyrians were threatening to invade. God dwells in Mary, a Jew under Roman occupation, a subject of a weak and nervous king, who will soon desperately try to destroy the child she bears.
This is profoundly good news I believe at this time. God does not wait for the perfect moment to come. God comes in the midst of crowded inns, anxious kings, and to poor and oppressed parents. We too can joyfully expect that God is not limited by the conditions that we busily try to create this season: not by peace, either global or in our homes; not by comfort or security; not by riches or overstocked houses. God comes, especially in those areas of brokenness: in the isolation and loneliness of the season, God speaks to us. In the pain of death and dying does not cease at Christmastime, God comes to us. In the suffering we face, and in the suffering we inflict upon our families: God speaks to us still. In the patient, the ordinary and the vulnerable the form of a babe, cherished by a young mom, witnessed to by an unborn Jewish prophet, in the margins of the world’s power. As the great theologian Karl Barth puts it:
God’s history is indeed a truth within history… God was not ashamed to exist [within] this historical state. To the factors which determined our human history and our human nature, belong in virtue of the name of Pontius Pilate, the life and Passion of Jesus as well. We are not left alone in this frightful world. Into this alien land, God has come to us. (Dogmatics in Outline, p. 109).Into this alien land, God comes. God communicates. God is truly with us.
Mary knew the land she lived in to be alien. She was, after all, marginal Jewish woman in an Empire where power was measured by military battalions. For Mary to speak of God’s “strong arm” delivering Israel—such language would be laughable coming from her in a world. Yet in this alien land, God had come to her.
And into this alien land, God had come to us. For it still is an alien land. After all, we are not truly at home in the shopping malls, with frenzied consumerism, and the mad rush of empty activity. We all know the non-religious language that we hear most of our lives to be watered down and impoverished. We know that there is a message to be shared that is more robust than the “happy holidays” or “seasons greetings.” We know that the heap of possessions we collect are judgments upon us. We know our families to be less than perfect, and we know that we have fallen short of what God would have us be. Yet still God comes to us.
Even through the tacky, the noisy, the busy, and the unruly of this time, we encounter his truth because there was no place where we could be exiled from him. Like Mary in the forgotten and lowly place of Bethlehem of Ephratha, under siege and in flight because of alien and oppressive laws, still God sends his Word. Thanks be to Him.
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