Scripture
Zephaniah 3:14–20 & Luke 1:46–55
Manuscript
The LORD is in your midst; you shall fear disaster no more.
…
The curtain rises on a woman and her cousin—one too old for children, one too young. And yet, they are both expecting.
The town is whispering. A holy woman, a miracle, a child for the grandmother with no children.
And a wayward woman—a child, really—now pregnant before she is married.
They wonder amongst themselves:
Is it true, what this one says? Is her child really a miracle, too?
…
The LORD is in your midst; you shall fear disaster no more.
…
Imagine: a world where the empire shows strength through oppression. Through conquest. Through assimilating every other god, every other people, every other nation as their own.
This Roman Empire who hates the Judeans for not making that easy. For determinedly refusing to let their God be scooped up into the pantheon. What makes them so special? Everyone else lets their pet gods be adopted by the rest.
…
Imagine, further in the past: a world where the king shows strength through subjugation. Through order, violently made. Where every artwork shows him charging into chaos on his chariot, to trample down everything that is not properly Egyptian.
Or, north of that, a world where you ensure strength by devastating your enemies. Tearing them apart. Exiling their best and taxing their poor. Forcing their kings to bow, and then carving it onto stone for all eternity to remember.
…
Or imagine today: a world where too many people cling to strength by hoarding wealth. Or amassing fame. Clinging to power and doing little with it. Where it feels like the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, and the people in office seem only to be paid for the promise of working against one another.
…
The LORD is in your midst; you shall fear disaster no more.
…
There are few ways that Mary could have had less status in her world.
She is Jewish, in an empire that distrusts her people and her faith.
She is almost a child, in a world where children are ignored.
She is a peasant, with little prospect for social change.
And she is unmarried, in a world where marriage and motherhood are women’s only source of power more often than not—where a pregnancy outside of marriage could leave her divorced, unmarried for the rest of her life, if she wasn’t flat-out executed for her ‘indiscretion’.
In other words, nothing about her was favoured by her world. She was marginalised in every way. And yet the Creator of the universe offers her, of all people, a miracle.
…
The LORD is in your midst; you shall fear disaster no more.
…
Imagine: a God with endless strength and power, called mighty and warrior and king and almighty by the prophets and the poets. One who is everything all those human kings and emperors and anxious people strive to be, yet behaves nothing like them.
A God who is not afraid of shedding power and stepping aside. Of lifting up the fallen, the weak, the hurting and forgotten.
One who willingly sheds divinity to be born as a mortal. A helpless baby, not born of kings and priests, but of peasants. A Jew in a hostile empire. A refugee from a hostile king of his own people. A carpenter, with little social capital.
It’s a miracle.
It’s not just that a God would be born in the flesh, to a human woman unmarried—
but that anyone with that kind of power could be different.
Could be willing to let it go. To raise up instead of push down. To share wealth, and not hoard it. To find strength in weakness, in cooperation, in turning the tables of the world.
It’s a miracle.
Justice that is actually just, and not just a tool of the powerful.
Hope that is actually concrete, not just a vague future promise.
Peace that is actually peaceful, for the people who’ve needed it most.
It’s a miracle.
And Mary sees it. This woman considered suspicious by the people around her—she sees it.
She trusts the promise that her child is a miracle. Because she sees what it means that someone like her could be chosen, could be favoured, could be blessed. She sees the promise of God fulfilled, already, in this moment.
She sees the good news.
And she sings for joy, and for justice, and for hope. She sings for herself, and for her people, and for her God. And she sings for the poor, and the outcast, and the oppressed, who are already being lifted up by the God who has promised and will continue to always stand in the breach to defend the powerless.
Because even if lifting up the lowly can sometimes feel like a loss to the powerful, it’s good news for us all.
God’s Kingdom. This vision that Mary sees when the angel comes to her and she sings for joy. This is a Kingdom where all are fed, all are favoured, all have fullness of life.
The LORD is in your midst; you shall fear disaster no more.
May it be so.
Amen.