“The World Is About to Turn”
Psalm 146:3-10
Luke 1:39-55
I hope you’ve been appreciating our Advent focus on the good news of Christmas and our faith: that God is with us, always and forever, and that we need not live in fear.
And still, as much as we long for good news, we may have a hard time believing our good news theme for today: that the world is about to turn.
Daily—and many times throughout the day—we are bombarded with bad news. Daily it seems that things are getting only worse. Daily it’s hard to keep hope alive. Daily it takes everything we’ve got to resist all the circumstances and false messages that tell us to be afraid.
Hanging onto those truths is hard enough, but believing that things are going to change for the better? That justice and peace will come? That those in power will be overturned and that those left out and left behind will be brought to the center and moved to the front of the line? That God is at work even now setting things right?
I realize this is difficult to trust or believe, maybe even harder to believe than a virgin birth. But this good news is also right there at the heart of the Christmas story—not only in Mary’s powerful song, but between every line and in almost every word of the story.
We celebrate the story of the coming of God’s divinity into our humanity through Jesus the Christ because we need that promise. We need to be able to imagine a different and better world so that we can live fully and faithfully in the world we have now. We need to be able to imagine and to live as though the world will not stay as it is, but will, by the grace of God’s “transformative solidarity” with us, begin to resemble the world God imagined and loved into being.
As biblical scholar Walter Brueggeman put it, paraphrasing the apostle Paul: “Here is the good news I am privileged to announce to you. There is a new world available that is here very soon. . . . It is a world that invites us to move out from here to there in joy, in obedience, in discipline, to begin again. . . . We know what is coming but we do not know when.”
And no matter when it is, it cannot be soon enough.
Advent is, among other things, about preparing the way the way for that new world to come into being. It is about opening our minds and hearts to imagine a better way. It’s about planting seeds of hope that will reap a harvest of justice. It’s about continuing to shine the light of love even as the darkness deepens. It’s about trusting that the way of love is more powerful than all the forces of hatred and brutality that seek to crush humanity.
Advent is also about waking up to the promise that God does not break into the world just to make us feel a little better for a little while. This is a radical re-ordering of things, and along the way some things will get broken, some scripts will be flipped.
Remember how the religious authorities did their best to limit Jesus’s influence, because they were afraid his radical teachings would upset the delicate temple-empire alliance and bring the full wrath of Rome down on Israel? Remember how Jesus flipped the tables of the moneychangers?
God’s good news to the people of God had always been about justice, equality, and welcoming the stranger. The prophets had always said God cared more about making sure everyone had a home and food and community than in being worshipped by people who didn’t take care of their neighbors.
God’s coming to earth in Jesus, God’s Word in the flesh lived out that message with love and nonviolence. The fullness of God coming to us in a poor and vulnerable baby living under occupation was meant to help us understand once and for all that God’s power isn’t military, economic, or even religious.
God’s power is the power of love and, from that love flows healing, compassion, transformation, reconciliation, and community. It is God’s steadfast love for us and God’s “transformative solidarity” with us that makes the world turn. That a new justice comes.
The world turns by the bravery of disregarded people like Mary and Elizabeth. The mighty are cast down by the stubborn and hopeful faith of those who sing with joy into the uncaring void. The hungry are filled with good things when the lowly shine a light in the deepest darkness.
Two pregnant women—one old and long thought barren, the other young and unmarried—rejoice in their unexpected situations, connecting not only emotionally but also through the babies in their wombs, singing a praise song that honors God’s mercy while celebrating God’s holy revolution.
It’s almost as if the real plot of God’s realm on earth was slipped in between the lines of the story of God’s love made flesh, as if what was really happening was buried under adorable details involving angels and babies, sheep, shepherds, and a star.
The story has the rebels hiding in plain sight. Have women call for God’s overthrow of the world order and no one will listen. Paint a pretty picture of pregnant women touching each other’s bellies, feeling their surprise children kick, and then plotting the overthrow of empire while knitting baby booties.
It turns out that while no one was paying the women any mind, the women were attending to the words of the prophets and keeping watch for any sign of all the table-turning justice God had been promising for hundreds of years.
And so it was that a young girl and her elderly relative, both of them responding to the surprising call of God to give birth to love and truth, sang together about the turning of the world even as Rome tightened its brutal, iron grip on the people of Israel. The Magnificat is both a praise song and a protest song; it praises God for what God has already done and what God is yet to do, it protests the way things are, and it joyfully celebrates God’s promise that the violent and cruel world will not stay the way it is.
The Roman Empire wouldn’t fall for another 470 years, long after it had executed Mary’s first-born son, persecuted his followers, and oppressed or killed millions of people. But Mary sang with the joy of someone who had already experienced God’s love and justice in her own life. She sang as someone who’d heard the stories of the wonders God had already performed, and as someone who trusted that God was already at work to bring down the powerful and lift up the lowly, to fill the hungry with good things and send the rich away.
Beloveds, we, too, can find joy in the good news that, by God’s doing, the world is about to turn.
In a few minutes we’re going to sing “Canticle of the Turning,” which is the spirit of the Magnificat set to a rousing Irish tune.
We’re going to sing it even though masked federal agents continue to terrorize our immigrant neighbors. We’re going to sing it even though the president continues to call individuals and entire populations “garbage.” We’re going to sing it even though innocent people continue to be killed and families devastated in mass shootings. We’re going to sing it even though the rich keep getting richer while millions of working people can no longer afford health insurance.
We’re going to sing that “the world is about to turn” not to deny or diminish the horror of all the injustice, racism, violence, and suffering in our world, but because we believe the world will not stay like this as long as God’s Spirit of love is transforming, empowering, and acting in and through ordinary people.
We’re going to sing Mary’s song with joy because God’s promise bids us dance even in the darkness. We’re going to sing and wait and watch and prepare the way in community and with joy because in a world that treats people like things, there is nothing more subversive than human joy.
And after we sing Mary’s song with joy, after we leave this place and go out into the beautiful but broken world God so loves, let us keep singing. Let’s keep subverting the powers with joy and love.
To paraphrase the singer-songwriter Iris Dement, let’s keep working on a world we may never see. Let’s join forces with the saints of love who came before us and will follow you and me. Let’s get up in the morning knowing we’re privileged just to be, working with God to heal and turn a world we may never see.
