SERMON FOR THE FOURTH SUNDAY OF ADVENT, 12/19/21          TEXT: LUKE 1:39-55

          Luther dismisses the idea of a woman in the pulpit out of hand. He notoriously lumps them together with mental defectives as unfit for preaching. He does concede that God may nonetheless use a woman to proclaim the Gospel; be prepared for the unexpected, God spoke through Balaam’s ass after all. And Luther acknowledges what the Scriptures make plain: it is women who are the first to recognize the work of God in Jesus and make it known. The women at the empty tomb, running back to tell the disciples, “We have seen the Lord.” And then the pregnant Mary, praising the mighty acts of God despite the precarious situation in which she finds herself.

          Last Sunday John the Baptist was God’s spokesman. He preached a message of repentance and offered concrete advice to those who asked, “What should we do?” (Luke 3:10, 14). As the New Testament scholar David Lose pointed out, the Baptist’s response “feels more like the stuff of Klndergarten than Apocalypse. Reduced to everyday language, these are the rules of the playground: share, be fair, don’t bully.” Yet John is fully aware of the higher stakes to come. When asked by the crowd if he himself might be the Messiah, his response is both promise and warning, “I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire” (Luke 3:16-17).

          Today, the fourth and final Sunday of Advent, it is the women who take center stage: a wife “getting on in years” (Luke 1:18) visited by an unmarried teenager whom she welcomes with love and wonder. Cousins, both unexpectedly pregnant, and both filled with the Holy Spirit and erupting into speech. Elizabeth exclaims, “And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.” Mary’s response is in verse — she bursts into a song of praise. This is how she responds to God’s act of salvation. This is how she welcomes the child she nourishes in her womb. Not with a lullaby or a Christmas carol but with a paean of victory.    David Lose writes, “Notice that the verbs in Mary’s song are in the past tense. Mary recognizes that she has been drawn into relationship with the God of Israel, the one who has been siding with the oppressed and downtrodden since the days of Egypt, the one who has been making and keeping promises since the time of Abraham. The past tense in this case, we should be clear, does not signify that all Mary sings of has been accomplished, but rather describes God’s characteristic activity and acknowledges that Mary is now included in God’s history of redemption.”

          Listen to her exultation: . . . my spirit rejoices in God my Savior/for he has regarded the low estate of his handmaiden/For behold, henceforth all generations will call me blessed/for he who is mighty has done great things for me/and holy is his name” (RSV). Mary is truly a daughter of Abraham of whom St. Paul writes, “No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, being fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised” (Romans 4:20-21). Mary, like Abraham, follows where God leads. She trusts God’s call; she believes that God’s promise is for her. This insignificant young woman, so young and vulnerable, yet chosen and blessed and certain of it. To all those who feel irrelevant she is a sign of what God can do with the commonplace likes of you and me. She is a constant reminder that God sees you, even when the world turns a blind eye. Mary speaks to the poor, the humbled, and the powerless, and she speaks for them, because she is one of them.

          In last Sunday’s Gospel John tells the crowd to share even what little they have. He charges the tax collectors to take only what is fair and stop skimming off the top. He admonishes the soldiers to stop their violence and extortion and be satisfied with their legitimate wages. Here repentance begins with acts of simple common decency. John speaks to what is within our reach. But Mary speaks to our sense of helplessness. We long to free the world from the greed and arrogance, the shameless indifference to suffering and the endless violence that threaten to destroy us, and their dark power continually defies us. Yet Mary sings as if the transformation had already happened, because she knows it has been set in motion. As the angel Gabriel tells her, “For nothing will be impossible with God” (Luke 1:37). The Lord has begun a good work among us, and he will bring it to completion.

          So let us join Mary in her hymn, and let her confidence and hope resound within us. “A few voices drawn together in song in late December may seem a small thing in the face of the wars and worries of the age,” writes David Lose, “but . . . Mary’s God, we should remember, delights in taking what is small and insignificant in the eyes of the world to do extraordinary and unexpected things. So it has been, is, and ever shall be ‘according to the promise God made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to us his descendants forever.’” Amen.