"The Evening Light"

Text: Luke 1:47-55
Theme: “The Evening Light!”
The 3rd Sunday of Advent
December 12, 2010
First Presbyterian Church
Denton, Texas
The Rev. Paul R. Dunklau

+In the Name of Jesus+

46 And Mary* said,
‘My soul magnifies the Lord,
47 and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour,
48 for he has looked with favour on the lowliness of his servant.
Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
49 for the Mighty One has done great things for me,
and holy is his name.
50 His mercy is for those who fear him
from generation to generation.
51 He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
52 He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;
53 he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.
54 He has helped his servant Israel,
in remembrance of his mercy,
55 according to the promise he made to our ancestors,
to Abraham and to his descendants for ever.’

Through the electronic communication known as email, a friend sent along some responses from 2nd grade children to specific questions about motherhood. Again, bear in mind that the answers are from 2nd graders. Here are just a few:

Question: Why did God make mothers? Reply: “She’s the only one who knows where the scotch tape is.” Another question: How did God make mothers? The 2nd grade reply: “He used dirt, just like for the rest of us.” Another question: What ingredients are mothers made of? Reply: “God makes mothers out of clouds and angel hair and everything nice in the world and one dab of mean.” Another 2nd grader wrote, “They had to get their start from men’s bones. Then they mostly use string, I think.” Question: Why did God give you your mother and not some other mom? Reply: “God knew she likes me a lot more than other people’s moms like me.” Question: What kind of a little girl was your mom? Reply: “They said she used to be nice.” Question: Why did your mom marry your dad? Reply: “My grandma says that mom didn’t have her thinking cap on.” Question: Who’s the boss at your house? Reply: “Mom doesn’t want to be the boss, but she has to because dad’s such a goofball.” Question: What’s the difference between moms and dads? Reply: “Moms work at work and work at home and dads just go to work at work.” A final question: If you could change one thing about your mom, what would it be? The 2nd grade reply: “She has this weird thing about me keeping my room clean. I’d get rid of that.”

On the secular or civil calendar here in the United States, Mother’s Day is observed on the second Sunday in the month of May. But it could very well be that today, the Second Sunday of Advent, is Mother’s Day on the church calendar. After all, one of the appointed readings from God’s Word set aside for our consideration and delight is the song of Mary, the mother of Jesus. It is otherwise known as the Magnificat. Magnificat runs with magnify – as Mary sang it to her relative Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist: “My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.”

Mary and Elizabeth were relatives. They were in a family together. Sometimes, when we mainline Protestant Christians think about our sessions and synods and presbyteries and polity and rules and regulations and teachings and doctrines and motions and amendments ad infinitum and ad nauseum, we quite forget that it’s about family. What is the Biblical witness if not a story about family? Cut through the cobwebs and ask the question that springs from the deepest part of the soul: what is it, really, that God really wants? It’s a one word answer: family!

Whether one was an aunt and the other a niece, we don’t know. They may have been cousins; we’re not one hundred percent sure on that either. But this much we are told. They both were pregnant; they were expectant mothers. Elizabeth was getting toward the end of her second trimester. At about that time, the angel Gabriel – as the story is told in Luke’s Gospel -- announced to Mary that she would conceive and give birth to a son. The name would be Jesus. Gabriel said, “He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High.” Mary wondered how it could be. Gabriel said: “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God. Even Elizabeth your relative is going to have a child in her old age, and she who was said to be barren is in her sixth month. For nothing is impossible with God.”

Mary spent little time processing all this. She could not sit still. She “got ready and hurried,” we are told, to a town up in the hills of Judea. Perhaps it took her all day to get there. She enters the lowly little world of Elizabeth’s home. One can imagine the sun beginning to set in the Judean hill country as the evening candles were lit. She greets her relative. Luke says that “When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the baby leaped in her womb.” We fathers can feel our unborn child leap on the outside, but only a mother can on the inside.

Filled with the Holy Spirit and all the joy that comes with it, Elizabeth cries out: “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the child you will bear! But why am I so favored, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? As soon as the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy.”

And there and then, Mary’s response is sheer poetry of soul. She cries out: “My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.” She praised God and God’s family in which she was a member. What a happy and joyful family time it must have been! Mary and Elizabeth, the relatives and expectant mothers, were there with and for one another.

But life isn’t all an endless round of warm fuzzies where, as one life insurance advertisement puts it, we “experience wellness everywhere.” Contrast this and happy family time in the hill country of Judea to the cold and dismal counting house of Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’, A Christmas Carol. There sits the manipulative, controlling, cranky, crotchety old miser Scrooge on Christmas Eve. His only living family member is his niece, and he is estranged from her.

The husband of the aforementioned niece, the nephew as Dickens tells it, drops by in the early evening to visit Scrooge and invite him to Christmas dinner the next day. The candles in the counting house were already lit – for light and for what warmth they could afford.

“’A merry Christmas, uncle! God save you!’ cried a cheerful voice.”

“’Bah!’ said Scrooge, ‘Humbug!’”

“’Christmas a humbug, uncle!’ said Scrooge’s nephew. ‘You don’t mean that, I am sure.’”

“’I do,’ said Scrooge. ‘Merry Christmas! What right have you to be merry? What reason have you to be merry? You’re poor enough?’

“‘Come, then,’ returned the nephew. ‘What right you you to be dismal? What reason have you to be morose? You’re rich enough.’”

“Humbug,” said Scrooge.

“’Don’t be cross, uncle,’ said the nephew.”

“’What else can I be,’ returned the uncle, ‘when I live in such a world of fools as this? Merry Christmas! Out upon merry Christmas! What’s Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, and not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in ‘em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you? If I could work my will,’ said Scrooge, indignantly, ‘every idiot who goes about with Merry Christmas, on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!’”

“’Uncle!’ pleaded the nephew.

“‘Nephew!’ returned the uncle, sternly. ‘Keep Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in mine.”

“‘Keep it!’ repeated Scrooge’s nephew. ‘But you don’t keep it.’”

Imagine a spectrum with Scrooge and his nephew on one end and Mary and Elizabeth on the other. Where, along that spectrum, would you place yourself and your own family? Down through the years, we Christians have said a few things about “family values.” But to what degree do we actually value families? There are different kinds of them – families of origin, extended families, adoptive families, single-parent families, broken families, blended families, to name a few.

Families are as wonderful as they are messy and as sweet as they are sticky. At this time of year, we sing: “Oh, there’s no place like home for the holidays, for no matter how far away you roam. When you pine for the sunshine of a friendly gaze, for the holidays you can’t beat home sweet home.” Yet, we also sing that song, made famous by Bing Crosby, that was first penned in the midst of the World War II: “I’ll be home for Christmas. You can plan on me. Please have snow and mistletoe and presents on the tree. Christmas Eve will find me where the love-light gleams. I’ll be home for Christmas – if only in my dreams.”

Hearts can be broken in the lives of families. The breaks can be caused by many things: dysfunction, divorce, abuse, sickness, addiction, war, death and on and on. And it is at the time of Christmas that the hurt of that brokenness can be especially acute. Sometimes, when a heart is broken, a mental or psychological hedge or wall can be built around that broken heart. It is built – and there are those of us who have built it – because we are afraid of being vulnerable. When you’re vulnerable, you expose your heart to all the possibilities – including that of being broken. If it’s already broken, why add insult to injury? You keep Christmas, if you can call it that, to yourself.

But go back with me now to the Mary and Elizabeth end of the spectrum. Come into the evening light of that home in the Judean hill country. Elizabeth had a broken heart. For years she had suffered the shame of not being able to bear a child. And what of Mary? She grew up in a land overrun by a foreign government. She had heard the amazing stories her ancestors told about God’s mighty workings through the years, but now that was over. They were paying the price for turning away from God, and God, it seemed, had turned away from them.

But the announcements they had received from those angelic visitors were proof positive that God is real, that God’s love won’t stop, that God keeps covenant. The most powerful reminder for them was that they were in a family way. The walls and hedges and fences they had built around their hearts were no more, and both of them were far more than vulnerable. They were joyful. It wasn’t choreographed piety or finery. It was deep, genuine happiness.

I pray that the kind of love and joy that sprang from that home in the Judean hills be yours this Christmas. May it please our Lord to shed the warmth of an evening light on the cold, dark night of soul that we all experience. God give us the grace and dignity to say to all the forces that drive us to despair in this world what Scrooge said to the doorknocker that once bore the image of Marley’s ghost at the end of the show: “I must leave you now. I must get ready. I’m going to have Christmas dinner with my family.”

The lyricist John Rutter has captured everything I’ve tried to express today in his “Candlelight Carol”. It goes like this:

How do you capture the wind on the water?
How do you count all the stars in the sky?
How can you measure the love of a mother,
Or how can you write down a baby’s first cry?

Shepherds and wisemen will kneel and adore Him,
Seraphim round Him their vigil will keep;
Nations proclaim Him their Lord and their Savior,
But Mary will hold Him and sing Him to sleep.

Find Him at Bethlehem laid in a manger:
Christ our Redeemer asleep in the hay.
Godhead incarnate and hope of salvation:
A child with His mother that first Christmas day.

Amen.