A Meditation on Luke 1 (Advent 3)
Sunday, December 11, 2022
1.
In my prayers this morning are those among us, wherever they may be, who have taken branches or baseball bats to the rainbow flag we fly, faithfully, out here on Main Street. Those who have broken that flagpole, and torn down the flag itself, at least three times this fall. We’ll probably never know who they are, and I’ll probably never meet them face to face. Although I’d like to, I’d really like to. And I do pray for them this morning because they too are my neighbors, my sons, my daughters, our brothers, our sisters; and I have to imagine something inside them has been broken somehow, or hardened by despair, or maybe even traumatized by cruelty.
It may be, it may well be that they’re out drinking themselves silly in the wee hours of a Sunday morning. And silliness becomes destruction. Or it may be that they’re out looking for rainbow flags specifically, and targeting symbols of love and affirmation. As if they can demoralize the rest of us.
I don’t believe that you’re born to frighten or bully other people. I don’t believe that anyone is born to hate. So whatever their motivation, and wherever they are now, I pray for them, and I hope you will too—for their world is our world, and their wounds are in some way our wounds, and, as Martin Luther King, Jr. famously said, “we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” The quality of mercy, I think Shakespeare said, is not strained.
And when Jesus said, “Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you,” I believe that he meant it. I believe it was something like the heart and soul of everything else he said and did. We don’t get to pick and choose. That kind of love loves everybody. When we break bread at his table, we’re making a commitment to that.
So we pray for those who tear down the rainbow flag in the very same way we pray for the young men who give in to self-contempt and hatred—and open fire in Jewish synagogues, and black churches, and gay nightclubs. Something inside these young men is traumatized and badly broken. And their trauma is our trauma. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. God made the world that way.
2.
Look around as we fly our own flag again this morning. I have to believe you’ll see Maryam. You’ll see Elizabeth. And you’ll see a lively, lovely community of Maryams and Elizabeths—embracing that new world together. Where the last are first, and the hungry feast, and the broken are healed again. It’s not just an old story. It’s our story this morning.
You know, it’s undoubtedly a story that was conceived and celebrated and first told among women in the early days of the Jesus movement. The initiative is Maryam’s. The community between these two is forged in friendship. Pointedly, Joseph and Zechariah are nowhere to be found in this story. It’s as if three months go by, three very important and transformational months, and it’s just Maryam and Elizabeth. Singing hymns to God. Feeding one another and growing the little lives within. Imagining a revolution of love. It’s a stunning twist in a religion that’s come to be so tragically patriarchal. The patriarchs are without a voice in one of Christianity’s seminal texts. Nowhere to be found.
Instead, it’s a story about two women, two friends resisting the kind of suspicion and shaming that their pregnancies would almost always arouse. And instead of yielding to that meanness, instead of yielding to that shame, Maryam and Elizabeth seek one another out, and they sing to one another, and they celebrate the grace of a God who knows no shame, a God who trusts them for protection and peace. A God growing in their own bodies, at home in their own flesh, and, yes, in their friendship.
3.
This morning, our story imagines not a singular, isolated God, but a God at home in relationship, a God birthed between us, a God whose dream is human friendship itself. Not a distant God marking the naughty and nice, but a divine presence nurturing truth and trust and grace and gratitude in community. In you and me, and you with me. In our bellies and bones.
You see, before it was Jesus’ gospel, before it was a Christian gospel, it was Maryam’s gospel, and Elizabeth’s gospel; and it reminds us that God’s passion for human community is undiminished by fear, undiminished by cruelty, and advanced by two women who refuse to be intimidated by the way things are or always have been. Embodying between them, even in their very bodies, the promise of peace.
4.
So here’s what I’ll be thinking as I stand with you at Jesus’ table this morning, and as we come to commune together in the Love of God, in the Good News of Jesus Christ. Maryam and Elizabeth should remind us, they do remind us that communion, our communion, is a huge and holy YES to God’s passion for healing and hope in the midst of all manner of trauma and despair. Let me say that again. Our communion, is a huge and holy YES to God’s passion for healing and hope in the midst of all manner of trauma and despair.
When I break a piece of bread off the loaf, and then when I place that broken piece in your palm, you are invited once again to cradle God’s broken body in your hand and in your heart. You are Maryam. You are the mother of God. You are kind enough, strong enough, brilliant enough to cradle God’s broken body in yours. And to touch the world’s brokenness with mercy. And to meet the world’s violence with love.
Every one of you is gifted in this way, I know that you are. Every one of us is as blessed and as precious as Maryam. And as wise and soulful and as generous as Elizabeth. But I do want to add that you don’t have to do any of this alone. This touching the world’s brokenness with mercy, this meeting violence with love. Because we are always the church together. Because we are always mothers of God in community. So when I place that broken bread, that broken body, in your palm—we are all there together, we are side by side with you, cradling God’s vulnerable humanness, touching the world’s brokenness and soothing our brother’s trauma, our sister’s pain. This is a sacrament we share. This is a calling we bear together.
It's just right for us, friends, to be celebrating communion this morning, and then raising that rainbow flag together for all the world to see. We’re not doing anything that makes us smarter or sweeter or more enlightened than anyone else. We ought not congratulate ourselves for being so loving and brave. That’s not what communion is, and that’s not what Jesus does in the communing community. Instead, we are offering ourselves to God’s dream of healing peace and reconciling love. We are offering our love and our kindness and our steadfast devotion to those who worry and those suffer and those who ache for peace—because that’s what God’s friends, that’s what Jesus’ disciples do.
In my prayers this morning, I’ll be praying for peace and transformation in the hearts of those who have three different times torn apart our rainbow flag this fall. And I’ll be praying God’s blessing and courage upon so many others for whom such violence is a scary and vicious reality. When I take the bread, the body in my hand, I’ll be asking God to make me Maryam. To make me a mother like Maryam. So that a new world might be born. In me, and in us.
Amen and Ashe.
