Magnificat - Advent 2021

Preacher: Virginia White - At the same time as the physical world around us descends into longer nights, colder days, and the stillness of winter, the advent season invites us into a spirit of warm and eager anticipation of the birth of Jesus Christ and the coming of the Messiah into the world. But what does it mean for us to anticipate an event that has already happened in the past? How can we hold onto certain hope that something good is promised to us and will be given to us when the world around us seems so broken, so (literally) cold, so cruel? 

Advent asks us to hold the pains and disappointments of reality as we know it in tension with unshakeable expectation that no matter how difficult things may seem now, there is an ever present promise of a new and world-altering good yet to come. And even that this world re-making good thing that lies ahead of us in the future, has already been done before and so can be done again. 

Advent, then, is like this topsy-turvy time warp land where by remembering the amazement of Jesus’ birth all those years ago, again, we become more able to expect that God will once again do great and wondrous things to care for this world in the future. 

This week we will look to the woman who knew this time-warping experience well. Not long after Jesus’ mother-to-be gets word that she is going to give birth to the Messiah, while still pregnant with him, she breaks out into a prophetic song that explicitly describes the redistribution of wealth, the downfall of the mighty, and the uplifting of the hungry, poor, and outcast. Yet she speaks not in the future tense, but in the past. As if she has already seen God’s promise come to full completion. 

Might advent be calling us to become like Mary? Can we, too, become visionaries of a just and redeemed world, of which we are so certain and so moved, that we are ready to speak of it, and live into it, as if it were already here? Perhaps that is how Christ will come into the world again now.