🔊 Good News to Share

Welcome to AnchorCast, a weekly podcast of homilies and sermons from Christ our Anchor Anglican Mission in Nashville, Tennessee.

Let us pray.

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer, Amen.

My soul doth magnify the Lord.

This is Mary’s response to Elizabeth’s praise of her faith.

Not I, Elizabeth, but the Lord.

Don’t look at me, look to the God who fills my womb, his faithfulness, his mercy.

This is the miracle.

That is who we should praise.

Look to Jesus.

It’s hard to believe that we are so incredibly close to Christmas, because it seems like only yesterday that I was starting to think that ordinary time would absolutely never end, that the weather would never actually get cold, and that we would be stuck forever in a Tennessee autumn that’s never really sure if it’s summer or fall or winter and seems to change every other day.

But here we are.

We are finally in the last Sunday of Advent, and in just two days, we’ll gather here again to welcome Christmas.

I’m sure that I am not the only one that’s in a hurry and in restlessness and needs always to be moving and always to be changing.

It seems to be the way of our world.

We go and we go, and yet we never stop to look at where we’re at.

We mindlessly pray, give us this day our daily bread, but we’re thinking about dinner before we’ve even finished buttering our toast.

When I first became a Christian, I absolutely loved Advent.

I still do, but back then I loved Advent, but I loved it for many, many wrong reasons.

I loved it because I liked being different.

I liked pushing back against the consumerism of secular Christmas.

I liked keeping rules and feeling like I had accomplished something by not listening to a single Christmas song until after the Christmas vigil.

Yes, I did listen to the sermons, and I knew about the expectation of Isaiah and the call of John in the wilderness.

I knew what Advent meant, but I have to admit it hadn’t really been applied to my life until my first regular preaching assignment.

So when I was in seminary, I was assigned to serve at a ministry that met inside a Davidson County jail.

Specifically, I was to preach weekly at a little worship service inside the ORC, which stands for the Offender Reentry Center.

Now the ORC is a really, really interesting place because it’s a place of transition.

People were only in the ORC in the early days of their incarceration, so until some sort of clear sentencing was given by a judge somewhere, or at the very end of their time as they prepared to reenter society.

So each week while I was there, I was meeting and preaching to people who were either at an extremely low point in their life, often times just a day or two into being incarcerated, or at a super high anxiety time as they wondered what they’d find in the outside world after being gone for so long.

When would they be released?

So the ORC was just a lot of waiting, a lot of not knowing.

In the ORC, you could come back from lunch and be told that you were suddenly going to be released, or you could suddenly be put into a van and taken elsewhere, maybe to a trial you didn’t know about, or a whole other facility.

Inside the ORC, there were musicians that were coming to terms with the fact that their BMW wouldn’t save them from the ramifications of their drug addiction, and there were people who knew that when they walked out of the ORC, they would have nothing but the clothes they had when they were arrested, and just a long walk to who knows where to look forward to.

Truly and truly, nobody wanted to be there.

No one wanted to be in the ORC.

Everyone wanted time to move on.

They wanted to at least know what their sentence was.

They wanted to know if they were going to get rehab.

They wanted to know if they were going to get work release.

They wanted to know when exactly they were getting out so they could plan.

And it was here in the ORC that I came to understand what Advent was like for God’s people.

What it was like to wait for news of the Messiah.

What it was like to sit under Roman rule, wondering what would be next.

For Israel, the time before Christ wasn’t just holding off singing their favorite psalms.

It wasn’t just holding back from their feasting.

It was sitting in the true reality of a conquered people wanting so desperately for time to move quickly.

Like a Tennessee autumn, Roman rule was just a little bit of everything.

It was some peace and commerce, but it was also a tax burden and a threat of violence.

It was an empty throne where David’s heir should be.

It was summer.

It was winter.

No one was really quite sure.

All the people knew is that this wasn’t going to be the way things were forever, and they were tired of waiting.

Now I’ve just said a lot of things about jail, about Israel under Roman rule, and a good few things about Advent, and you might be wondering, what does any of this have to do with Mary?

Well, it turns out that what Mary said in today’s gospel reading has actually a lot to do about these things, plus a good bit more.

So Anglicans have been praying these words of Mary daily for centuries.

It’s prayed each and every day as part of evening prayer.

Mary’s words, especially in the beautiful, poetic translation of the prayer book, are powerful and supremely beautiful, but in praying them daily, it’s easy to get caught up in it all and to lose sight of the context they were spoken in.

You see, we find these words of Mary in Luke chapter 1, and in Luke chapter 1, Jesus is still in Mary’s womb.

Caesar still sits on the throne in Rome, and his armies are patrolling the streets of holy Jerusalem, and the disgusting Herod family still brings shame to the Jewish people.

It’s been many, many generations since a prophet has spoken in Israel.

Mary’s words are said purely from faith and a position of extreme weakness, or at least that would kind of be the easy way out of this passage, right?

Mary simply had hope in what Jesus would bring.

She had faith that somehow the baby in her womb would grow up to be the long-awaited Messiah.

You know, the point of this story is to marvel at the great faith of Mary.

But I don’t know about that, because that seems to me what Elizabeth did, right?

She praised Mary’s faith.

Elizabeth says, and blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the Lord.

But what did Mary answer to that?

Not thanks, not I sure hope so, not may God make it so, no.

Mary said, he hath showed strength with his arm.

He hath put down the mighty.

He hath filled the hungry with good things.

He hath holpen his servant Israel.

If you’ll notice, these are all in the past tense.

These are not he shalls.

These are he has already done.

I don’t know what all goes on, what one sees and experiences when the God of the universe contains himself within your womb, but whatever that is, Mary is proclaiming the present reign of the Messiah still in her womb, not a hoped future.

Somehow, someway, despite the outward appearances of her situation, Mary sees that the work of salvation is in motion and that Satan has already lost.

Back in the ORC, I learned really quick that the platitudes and sermons I was being taught to preach at school weren’t going to cut it in jail.

These people had real problems and real fears.

Love, joy, hope, and kindness are all really nice ideas, but they don’t cut it in the depths of hell and despair.

When you’re in a really bad place, you don’t really want a nice hallmark card to lighten the mood.

You want out of that place.

And it turns out that even outside the jail, life is like that.

Homelessness, married, working, rich, single, poor, everyone has real problems.

The world is chocked full of them.

You can be as optimistic, kind, and joyful as possible, but when someone is unemployed and facing eviction, that’s not entirely helpful.

But as she so often does, Mary shows us the way.

If I look around this room and this church, I see faithful Christians.

I see people filled with God’s Spirit, nourished at His table, living under the reign of His present rule.

People in this very room and who come and see us frequently have seen miracles, seen angels, experienced the overwhelming and undeniable power of God.

We know our Lord and we hope not despite what we’ve seen, but because of what we’ve seen.

Mary could have very easily kept quiet.

She could have hidden away and not brought any more attention to herself.

She could have been polite and tried to tone down her boldness about Jesus so she didn’t disturb anyone or ruffle any feathers, but she didn’t.

She knew what she had experienced.

She knew what He had done for her.

She knew He had won and that everything was different.

She could not know the good news and not loudly proclaim it.

She knew the people didn’t need a happy story.

They needed a Savior.

They didn’t need an uplifting song or poem.

They needed to know that real things were happening.

That there was a real and tangible force of God at work in the world.

The world around us is waiting in a type of advent.

If we look around us, we can see the news reports of wars and suffering and darkness and unknowns and worries.

The signs in the shop windows say joy and hope and peace.

Our secular Christmas songs are about warm fires, families, and a world without strife.

Around this time of year, people like to binge hours and hours of movies with unrealistic relationships and happy endings where everything can be solved by a cup of cocoa and some magical snow out the window.

People around us know that things aren’t right.

People know that something needs to be fixed.

People sense the deep rift in the universe.

The songs, the shops, the feasts, the movies.

They all divert our attention away from the hurt, but they don’t actually stop it.

Now of course the easy path in all of this is to tell everyone that we also hope.

That we seek peace, that we love family and warmth, and of course all of these things are true, but I posit that we should be more like Mary.

We should be more bold.

We should tell them of a Savior.

Tell them of the miracles we’ve seen, and we should show His power at work in our lives and around us.

Because if it’s not good news in times like these, then it’s not good news at all.

If Jesus is just some sort of Middle Eastern Santa Claus who told some heartwarming stories, then honestly I would kind of rather be at brunch right now.

So in closing, I’m going to read again the words of Mary.

Listen carefully and remember the girl who said them.

Remember her situation.

Remember the world she lived in.

Remember that she said this song so often and so boldly that it could be recorded easily and shared with us.

Mary said these words not only to us, but for us.

We pray them daily as Anglicans as a reminder of whose we are and what He’s done for us.

We pray them daily because they are our mother’s words, and she wants us to share what her Lord and our Lord has done.

We are washed in the blood of Jesus and saved.

We are forgiven of our sins.

We are washed anew in the waters of baptism.

We are His forever.

We’ve seen, we’ve experienced, and we have stories to share.

So we should stand firm with Mother Mary and we should be able to boldly proclaim her words.

She says, My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Savior.

For he hath regarded the lowliness of his handmaiden.

For behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed.

For he that is mighty hath magnified me, and holy is his name.

And his mercy is on them that fear them throughout all generations.

He hath showed strength with his arm.

He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.

He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble and meek.

He hath filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he hath put empty away.

He remembering his mercy hath opened his servant Israel, as he promised to our forefathers Abraham and his seed forever.

In the name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

Amen.

Christ Our Anchor is an Anglican mission in East Nashville that meets on Wednesday evenings for prayer and fellowship.

And join us on Wednesday evenings at 5.30 as we live into what Jesus has called his church to be.

Everyone is welcome.