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Advent Part 2
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Welcome to the commons cast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information.
Speaker 2:My name is Bobbie, and I am one of the pastors on the team here at Commons. It is my pleasure to add my welcome to you on this second Sunday of Advent. Now I actually must confess something to you. As much as I love Advent and work really hard to honor the themes of Advent in my life, I'm actually pretty terrible at Christmas time preparation. I don't know if I have always been this bad, but this year feels like a new low for me.
Speaker 2:I don't have a tree up at our house. I don't even have a plan in the works to get a tree. I will definitely only get Christmas gifts in the mail so late that there is no way that they are arriving for Christmas. There is just no way. And the only real Christmas decorations up at our place so far is a single string of twinkle lights.
Speaker 2:See the picture? And guess what? Those bad boys are up all year round. It's my homage to the late, great filmmaker Nora Ephron, who believed that twinkle lights are one of life's true delights. So I just keep those guys up all year round.
Speaker 2:But look, I actually don't feel that bad about my poor Christmas time decoration plans because it is Advent. And I'll get to Christmas when I get to Christmas, but Advent means that we wait. One of my favorite Advent books invites you into the season of Advent with these words. Advent marks something momentous. God's coming into our midst.
Speaker 2:That coming is not just something that happened in the past. It's a reoccurring possibility here and now. So Advent makes space for all of the ways that we still wait and long for God to come into our midst. We wait. We wait for rescue.
Speaker 2:We wait for comfort. We wait for love. We wait for friendship. We wait for a helping hand. We wait for a soft place to land.
Speaker 2:And the cool thing about all this waiting is that waiting for the divine exists with this invitation to participate in Jesus' coming here and now. It's an active kind of waiting. And here's what I mean. There are a few traditions we engage at Commons to mark Advent. First, we wear a stole during our teaching time all Advent long.
Speaker 2:A stole is like this highlighter that marks this time as a bit different, as special, as something to return to and to pay close attention to. If Advent hasn't really been your thing in the past, maybe this is your year. That's the hope behind the stole. Second, we invite you to participate in our annual advent giving campaign, which we're super excited about and we continue to tell you about, and it is lovely. And third, we lean into these themes of hope and love and joy and peace with our liturgy and our candle lighting.
Speaker 2:And we return to these themes every single year because we can actually never exhaust them. We always crave more hope and more love and joy and peace. Don't we? I know I do. Now, speaking of serious Advent traditions, I actually have a fairly complicated relationship with Christmas music.
Speaker 2:I think it's because I really love Advent so much. The themes of waiting and longing, they really speak to me year after year. Advent is this honest check on my spiritual life. And Christmas music, it feels like it is rushing me to get through these advent themes. I mean, how can I hold space for my longing when John Legend is crooning Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas in my ear?
Speaker 2:And how can I honor the ways that we are all waiting for lasting peace when Christina Aguilera circa early two thousands is caroling angels we have heard on high? I mean, maybe I don't hear angels yet, Christina. Don't rush me. So back in 2014, I decided to make my own advent playlist and share it with a few close friends. It's a playlist that we still listen to.
Speaker 2:So I started with a song by Rose Cousins called All the Stars, and it includes this verse. It's a bit poetic, so you're really gonna have to listen. Fly the birds by and by, the reasons why do you listen for the pull of the wind as they swoop and soar. Do you want more? Do you want more?
Speaker 2:Yes. Rose Cousins. I do want more. I do want more. Then I went to this James Vincent McMorrow cover of Steve Wynwood's classic, Higher Love.
Speaker 2:I'm sure you'll know it. I'm not gonna sing it, but it's Think About It. There Must Be Higher Love down in the heart and in the stars above. I see there's a bit of a stars theme going on and that's of course seasonally appropriate. Then on that playlist, I wove some more traditional Advent songs right in the middle like, Oh Come, Oh Come Emmanuel, classic Advent.
Speaker 2:Right? And Sufi and Stephen's Lumberjack Christmas slash No One Can Save You From Christmas Past, a real holiday standard. Right? Come on, you guys. That was definitely a joke.
Speaker 2:No one can save you from Christmases Past is not an actual holiday standard, but still a good tune. Like any good soundtrack to a season, I played that playlist over and over and over again. It allowed me to be with my longing. The music, it honored life's waiting. So today, we are going to open our ears to songs of longing.
Speaker 2:We'll begin with the song of Hannah found in first Samuel chapter two and finish with Mary's Magnificat found in Luke chapter one. So I'm calling this sermon liberation songs on repeat. So let's pray and dive in together. Loving God of our holy longing to whom all hearts are open and all desires known. We sit here with you and with this community aware of Advent longing.
Speaker 2:That the beginning of the world, your holy longing brought creation into being. Your holy longing moves across millennia to see us breathe in that first sacred breath. Air in our lungs, the ground under our feet, and longing in our hearts for more. Today, may we brave the terrain of our own hearts. May we stay open to songs from the past and listen for how they join with our songs in the present.
Speaker 2:God will help us to find our voices to actually sing along. We pray. Amen. So there is one other song that I put on that twenty fourteen playlist that I wanna tell you about. My big finish was a sleepy tune by Bonnie Prince Billy called There Will Be Spring, which starts, there will be spring to the very end.
Speaker 2:I'll sleep to the sound of burning winter. Place for me built and for my friends by which we'll pass each on his venture. And I ended the playlist with this song because a good friend of mine sent it to me while he was on a faith questioning venture. And I kept that song, There Will Be Spring on Repeat because I wanted to honor my friend's search for more. And that search is like Hannah's story in first Samuel.
Speaker 2:She kinda rocks to the beat of her own longing. You see, Hannah was one of two wives to a man named El Cana. The other was Panana. And Panana had children while Hannah did not. And this detail of Hannah's barrenness drops us into a certain kind of story.
Speaker 2:Hannah shows up in the opening words of the text in Samuel because she is a type. And I don't mean that she's a five on the Enneagram or an INTP in Myers Briggs. I mean type literarily. Barren women in the bible signal to the reader that God will be found in this story, turning a barren woman into a mother of a hero child. Remember, barren Sarah gave birth to hero Isaac.
Speaker 2:Baron Rebecca gave birth to hero Jacob. Baron Rachel gave birth to hero Joseph. And now, Baron Hannah will give birth to hero Samuel. But none of these heroes are ever quite enough. So the story, it just cycles on and on.
Speaker 2:I actually love this so much. You don't have to be a woman for these stories to connect to your own barrenness, your own longing for more. Remember my friend in a bit of a faith crisis, an old way of believing in God left him feeling empty. The only thing for him to do was to really honestly search for more. And I think many of you here can relate to this kind of barrenness in faith.
Speaker 2:Maybe the ways that you used to pray now make you feel kinda worse about yourself or about God. Maybe what you thought about the bible in the past, it just is not cutting it in your real life anymore. Maybe you're just so tired of thinking of God as this deity out to get you, to demand something of you that you just honestly cannot offer up anymore. Barren faith. These barren women signal that God still works when we walk away from, past its prime uterus to the reconstruction of your faith.
Speaker 2:God still works. So here's how the baroness plays out for Hannah. Year after year, Elkanah takes his family to the tabernacle. And Hannah, she is worn down from the bullying of Elkanah's other wife, and she cries out to the Lord. And Eli, the priest at the tabernacle basically says, yeah.
Speaker 2:Okay. Best of luck to you with all that. And somehow, Hannah has this new hope that her baron years will soon be behind her. And in fact, they are. Soon after they get home from this worship outing, Hannah gets pregnant and gives birth to a son whom she names Samuel.
Speaker 2:Now, you might think Hannah would hold this son super super close, kinda helicopter parent the heck out of this little guy, but she doesn't. Hannah takes the boy back to the tabernacle and she gives him away. She tells Eli the priest, I'm giving him to the Lord and he will belong to the Lord his whole life. And then Hannah breaks into song. Now I'm putting Hannah's song in the persona of Beyonce in my mind.
Speaker 2:You can do what you want with these lyrics. Just imagine someone who embodies fortitude and fearlessness and maybe a pretty good beat. So Hannah starts. My heart rejoices in the Lord. In the Lord, my horn is lifted high.
Speaker 2:Now unlike my little niece dressed up for Halloween, see adorable picture, Hannah does not think she's a unicorn. Horn for Hannah is the symbol of strength and restored dignity. She says, I am like a majestic animal. I raise my head high. And then Hannah sings this line.
Speaker 2:There is no one holy like the Lord. There is no one besides you. There is no rock like our God. And a more strict translation inserts the word other as in there's no other one holy, no other one besides, no other rock or mountain like our God. And this phrasing is common for designations of other divine beings.
Speaker 2:What's really going on here is a critique against Israel's syncretic worship. At the time of Hannah's song, Israel had this worship style that was a mash up between worship of Yahweh and the worship of a fertility goddess, Asherah. And the fertility goddess, Asherah, she even had these curvy birthing hips. So you think, why let go of Asherah, Hannah, when what you want is a baby? A baby to secure your future, a baby to get your sister wife off your back, a baby to make a family of your own.
Speaker 2:Well, Hannah doesn't just want a child for herself. Hannah wants safety and peace and justice to be commonplace for everyone's children. So she places her trust in Yahweh alone because she says Yahweh is a mindful God. A God who balances actions. Next, Hannah strings together a list of reversals.
Speaker 2:She paints a picture of how God will right all wrong. She says, the bows of warriors are broken. Those who stumble will be armed with strength. She says, those who are fattened with all the food will go without, but the hungry will be hungry no more. She says, the barren woman has seven children, but the woman with many sons is left to grieve.
Speaker 2:Think about it. This is a song from three thousand plus years ago before Martin Luther King Junior's speeches, before Jesus's parables, before David's Psalms. This is a song about how God reverses earthly relationships to power and privilege. The reversals in the scriptures, they are there to comfort the disturbed but to disturb the comfortable. And I know that that can sound a bit cliche but if you need hope in the face of hopelessness, if you need light in a very dark place, if you need to be seen in a world that looks past you or around you and most certainly will not look you in the eye, then reversals are for you.
Speaker 2:Because Yahweh is a mindful God. A God who balances actions. Now in the Hebrew scriptures, Samuel is part of the Nevi'im and Samuel follows Judges and Judges is a super super chaotic scene. Archaeologists wrote about the time of Judges as a terribly barbaric age with savage retaliations and fierce struggles of disorganized tribes. And theologian, Francisca Murray, makes the connection between this stateless chaos of these people and Hannah's longing for more.
Speaker 2:Hannah's song ends looking forward to a time when Israel will have a great king who will resurrect the circumstances of her people. So long before Samuel will grow up to anoint Israel's first king, Hannah sings, the most high will thunder from heaven. The Lord will judge the ends of the earth. The Lord will give strength to the Lord's king and exalt the horn of the anointed. Hannah wants so much more than just a kid for herself.
Speaker 2:Hannah wants a savior because Hannah knows that her world is a wreck, her people are a wreck, her home is a wreck, and now her song is set on repeat. Hannah hands her son over to the priest at the tabernacle and then she just turns and she walks away. And as she goes, she hums this tune of longing that she knows in her gut. Hannah is part of a bigger movement, a longer song that cannot be silenced by human error or frustrated by junk values. And I recently stumbled upon this term junk values in my audiobook listening habit.
Speaker 2:To be honest, I may or may not have a small problem with how many audiobooks and podcasts I listen to. Sometimes I think I know the great Ira Glass, king of all podcasts personally, and Phoebe Judge, the host of this really cool podcast criminal, I feel like she's my BFF. But she's not. I don't know these people. I just feel like I do.
Speaker 2:It's fine. Right? It's totally fine to have these kind of imaginary friends. Anyway, I've been audio hauling through Johann Hari's book, Lost Connections. The subtitle is uncovering the real causes of depression and the unexpected solutions.
Speaker 2:And Johann Hari urges us to reconnect with meaningful values to establish healing connections. The problem is that we are so embedded in an economic system that makes us feel inadequate, basically, all the time. We are told that the solution to this feeling is to constantly spend. So Johann Hari traces a study by social scientist Tim Kasser. And in the study, Kasser asked youth and parents open ended questions like, for me, money is, fill in the blank, why do I spend?
Speaker 2:And list what you really value. People say that they value looking after their family and telling the truth, and one 14 year old boy even writes simply that he values love. Bless his little romantic heart. Doesn't take long for the participants in the study to realize the conflict between how they spend and what they value. Our longings get co opted by advertising, and we purchase stuff we do not need to put off the connection that we do need.
Speaker 2:This isn't news to you. We all do this. We feel a little sad or lonely. We start obsessing about a new pair of shoes from Gravity Pope or a fancier iPhone, and we get said fancy shoes or iPhone, and then we just feel hollow all over again. I know these feelings.
Speaker 2:You know these feelings. It's not news to us. So Johann Hari invites us to break that cycle by coming together, by thinking more deeply, and reconnecting with what really matters. And the ramp up to Christmas is as good a time as Amy to reconsider our relationship with materialism and to really pay attention to our deeper human longing, to consciously move from junk values towards what really matters. Because longing is not bad.
Speaker 2:It's a part of what makes us human. We long for connection. We want belonging. We need love. We long for forgiveness.
Speaker 2:We want pleasure. We need meaningful work. We long for affection. We want some stillness. We need liberation.
Speaker 2:And liberation arrives while we sing the world that we want into being. Liberation arrives when you tap into your truest human longing and find that the best of what you want for yourself is also the best of what God wants for the world. The song of Hannah and now the song of Mary are songs that express this craving for liberation. So let's trace liberation in Mary's song, the Magnificat, the prelude to Jesus's arrival. So about a thousand years after the song of Hannah, we find the story of Mary.
Speaker 2:The gospel of Luke picks up the theme of the barren woman. Barren Elizabeth, the cousin of Mary is going to give birth to John the Baptist. So again, we have a type scene signaling to the hero, okay. I get it. We're in one of those stories again.
Speaker 2:This is about God stepping in and bringing about a hero child. But then, the story takes a thrilling turn. We don't just have a barren woman giving birth to a special child, we have a virgin woman giving birth to a god child. This is the biblical story par excellence. American Cuban historian, Husto Gonzales, describes it like this.
Speaker 2:The child born of her will be in the same line of Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Samson, and Samuel, but he is more than they. His mother has no reason to conceive. She is a virgin. In the child born of her, the long history of agents of God born of barren women comes to its culmination. Its meaning has been fulfilled.
Speaker 2:So after this mysterious and holy insemination, Mary, now with child, trucks off to visit her cousin Elizabeth. And upon her arrival, the unborn John the Baptist jumps with joy inside of Elizabeth and Mary breaks into song. And we call her song the Magnifica because that is the first word in the late fourth century Latin translation of the bible known as the Vulgate. One time story, you can just tuck that away. Now you know that.
Speaker 2:Magnificat, it simply means magnifies which is how the song begins. And Mary said, my soul glorifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my savior for God has been mindful of the humble state of God's servant. Mary says that her soul, her psuche in Greek, her nephesh in Hebrew declares the greatness of the Lord. Now when we hear that word soul, think of something invisible inside of us. But in Hebrew, nephesh is so much more.
Speaker 2:The most basic translation and understanding of nephesh is throat. As in when Joseph was hauled off to slavery in Egypt, his nephesh was put in iron shackles. But nephesh doesn't only mean throat. Since life is dependent on the food that we swallow and the air that we breathe, Nefesh can mean the whole person. Mary says that her whole being praises God.
Speaker 2:So Mary, she is not detached from her body And this is important because Mary and her people know that liberation isn't waiting for you in the afterlife. Any kind of perfect afterlife is really not on the table in Hebrew understanding. It's here where Hannah and Mary actually live and breathe and give birth. It's here that they hope for God's healing and wholeness to come. It's this place, this earth, this community where God fulfills promises, not the afterlife, this life.
Speaker 2:Last week, Jonathan and I were talking about liberation. And I asked him, does the word liberation mean anything to you? And he said, yeah. I think so. And I asked him what?
Speaker 2:And he said, get this. I'd like a liberation app that would liberate me from the first ten seconds of a DJ Khaled song to just get to the good stuff already. We were actually listening to a DJ Khaled song. I'm not going to tell you which one. We the best music.
Speaker 2:Got it? And I was totally on board with Jonathan's app idea. Right? Just, like, get to the good stuff already. But then, Jonathan listed places that he could sense this kind of craving for liberation, both personal and societal.
Speaker 2:Financial liberation. Liberation from anxiety and addiction. Racial liberation. And I added liberation from my urge to always have noise around me instead of quietly sitting on my yoga mat every morning because I know it is the best thing for me. So I have to ask you, what would you add?
Speaker 2:What does liberation mean to you? Is there something that you want radically reversed? Something global like climate change, like the war in Yemen, like wealth inequality. Maybe it's more relational, like some old family wounds, distrust in your marriage, grief around a recent loss. Maybe you long for liberation in a more personal place, like the sadness that you just cannot escape at this time of year, or your boredom, or your distraction.
Speaker 2:It's okay to want all this liberation. It's more than okay. So back to Mary Song. She also launches into a string of reversals just like Hannah's. She sings, the mighty one has been made so small to scatter the proud in their innermost thoughts.
Speaker 2:The mighty one does not side with rulers on thrones but lifts up the humble. The mighty one has paid close attention to the hungry, filling them with good things but has sent the rich away empty. We are so used to conjuring up images of Mary that are serene and contemplative, but the Mary of this song is fired up. The Mary of this song is a prophet. She prophesies that God is on the side of the vulnerable.
Speaker 2:She prophesies that God will overturn systemic injustice. She prophesies that God will liberate the people all too often left behind, trampled over, and locked out. Now Mary and Joseph were believed to have been a part of the Anavim community and this is Hebrew for the poor ones. So do not, do not, do not forget who God chooses to birth all goodness through. A poor woman in a poor community, in a nearly forgotten part of the empire.
Speaker 2:Mary ends her song singing, God has helped God's servant Israel, remembering to be merciful to Abraham and Abraham's descendants forever just as God promised our ancestors. And this word helped in Greek is antilembanomai. And in the context, antilembanomai means to take a person or thing as it is, to be held, to embrace. It's tender like a mother. This is God who doesn't turn away when you're hurt and longing for more.
Speaker 2:It's God who moves in to heal and to liberate. To show you that you are held this Advent season. You are embraced just as you are. The divine unfolds you with perfect tenderness. This good news is always personal to you, but it also opens up to include way more than you.
Speaker 2:Throughout Mary's Magnificat, she uses the phrases all generations and generation to generation and to Abraham and Abraham's descendants forever. And these phrases are so interesting because where Hannah ends her song with a king, Mary ends her song with the echo of God's persistent liberation across the generations. Some communicators and commentators say that Luke's picture of Jesus proclaims God's commonwealth as an alternative to these imperial systems. In other words, God did not come to build a nation. Jesus did not come to dominate an empire or to win a war.
Speaker 2:Jesus came to invite us to participate in the world God has in mind, to witness our common humanity made holy with the presence of the divine breath moving through us all. We still need liberation songs. We need to be liberated from our distraction, our addiction, our fear. We need to be liberated from our selfishness, the noise that we surround ourselves with, the abuse we inflict on creation. We need to be liberated from our consumption, our pollution, our disconnection from one another.
Speaker 2:We need liberation songs on repeat generation after generation after generation. So how do we sing liberation? Well, let's go back to music for a moment. Advent and Christmas music, however you want to define it. I stumbled upon something in my spiritual practice this week and I want to offer it to you.
Speaker 2:I took the ancient practice of Lectio Divina, which is the sacred reading of scripture, and I mashed it with my search for outside the box Christmas music, Advent themed songs of waiting and longing in particular. So I chose one song, and I listened to that thing on repeat, and then I waited until a word or a phrase caught my attention. And then I asked myself two questions. The first, what do I really long for? Just asked myself that.
Speaker 2:The second, how is Jesus liberating me? So the song was Mary. It's a Patty Griffin cover, but it's covered by my friend Justin McRoberts from his Christmas songs volume three album. You can find it on iTunes. And I listened to the song once, and I thought, yeah.
Speaker 2:That's beautiful. I love it. And then I listened to it twice, and I was like, oh, yes. There's this cello intro. It's so gorgeous.
Speaker 2:And I listened to it a third time, and there they were. Words that really stood out to me. Two lines, actually. They are, angels are singing his praises in a blaze of glory. Mary stays behind and starts cleaning up the place.
Speaker 2:And as I asked myself those two questions, what do I really long for and how is Jesus liberating me, I actually got a bit emotional. I felt moved because I sensed in that moment a God who is a blaze of glory and also somehow woven into the details of daily life. Right there with Mary cleaning up this place, liberating our hearts and our minds and our bodies generation after generation to join in the renewal and the liberation of all things, of all things. Let us pray together. Loving God of holy liberation, only you know the longing that is really present in this room.
Speaker 2:Longing for love and healing and wholeness, longing for connections, answers, direction. Somehow we trust that you are attentive to it all. In this season of waiting, will you show us your liberation? Your liberation, God, is slow and patient. Your liberation is tender and truthful.
Speaker 2:Your liberation always holds us close and carefully frees us from our own destruction. So help us this advent to take steps towards a world more liberated, more liberated to share, more liberated to listen, more liberated to follow the humble way of Jesus. With and through the Holy Spirit, we pray. Amen.