Two Women -- 4th Sunday of Advent

I love the Magnificat, or "Mary's Song," as I prefer to call it. My first exposure to it came a whle back, during the few years that I spent as a member of the Legion of Mary, as a part of the prayer we shared during the meetings. I don't know why it is never included in the Church's regular Sunday Lectionary. Only on the daily Mass for December 22nd does it show up as part of the gospel -- in spite of the fact that it is far longer than all the rest of the Marian quotations added together. It also reveals Mary to be far more aware of social justice concerns, both from her own vantage point as a woman in an oppressed, patriarchal culture and from her understanding of our God as a liberator of the poor and powerless.

Hence, whenever we reach the gospel for the 4th Sunday of Advent in the C cycle, and encounter the Visitation of Mary to Elizabeth, rather than stopping after Elizabeth's words to Mary, I continue reading the gospel through the Magnificat, through to the logical end of the passage, when Mary returns home.

So, here is this past weekend's homily, based on that passage.


The other day, a parishioner forwarded a link to a website that had a lot of good suggestions for "ethical Christmas gifts." So I followed up the link, and found a lot of good gift suggestions for those in need all over the world. For instance, for about $50 you could buy a goat for a family in East Africa suffering from the drought over there. I thought that was a pretty good idea. And then, while I was on that page, I saw this other link to "Homilies." And so I clicked on this little button for the 4th Sunday of Advent. And right away, this little message flashed on the screen that said, "Please wait. Don't be impatient." So I waited a minute...and then two minutes... and thought to myself, 'Well, I can do something else while I'm waiting.' And I kept coming back every couple of minutes, but there wasn't anything happening, there was still that same message. Finally, after about 20 minutes of checking this message, it suddenly hit me...THAT was the homily: "Wait. Don't be impatient."

Well, that wasn't too bad for an all-around Advent message, but when we get here to the 4th Sunday of Advent, I think there is a little bit more to it than that. In fact, I really love this gospel passage today, because all the waiting and anticipation of Advent begins to burst out into expectant joy. In fact, many of the great midieval paintings of this scene show two women in kind of a mid-embrace dance. Just listen to the words: When Elizabeth hears Mary's greeting, the baby inside of her leaps for joy! Elizabeth herself is filled with the Holy Spirit. And Elizabeth cries out a joyful greeting in those words that we repeat in one of our most familiar prayers, Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! And then Mary herself, filled with the Holy Spirit, bursts forth into that song of joy, which is the longest Marian quotation in all of the Bible.

Why does she sing? Because the two of them realize that they are living a story of God's love, faithfulness, and surprising victory -- and the two of them are filled with outrageous joy and delight in the face of the impossible. Just has the Holy Spirit had once brought forth all of creation out of nothingness long before, so had this very same Spirit brought Life to the emptiness inside of Elizabeth the sterile and Mary the virgin. And while they had no way of knowing all the great events to come, they did know themselves to be simple women without voices who lived in poverty, whose people endured occupation and sometimes even hard brutality under the Romans. But these two lowly women were nonetheless so filled with joy because they could sense the unimaginable beginning to happen in the coming births of their children, they could experience the workings of the Holy Spirit within them, within their world.

And so Mary sang, "The lowly will be lifted up. The mighty will be overthrown. The hungry will be fed." Right then and there, in the midst of their poverty and powerlessness, it was a time of salvation, a time of hope. "God is at work, even in our troubled times," is their message, "and we know because God is at work within us!"

That is why Mary sang.

And I tell you truly, that is why we too must sing, because even in our own chaotic times, the Holy Spirit is at work, within us.

Don't all of us remember the anticipation that we experienced as children, at Christmas time? Even if things were hectic and sometimes frantic, people seemed happier then than they did at other times of the year. Music filled the air, packages were under the tree, secrets were being whispered from person to person. Sometimes the excitement would build until you thought you were going to explode. It was such a magical time.

Most likely as adults we smile at that kind of anticipation when we see it in our children or grandchildren. "How wonderful to be a child." But I think that there is a very adult anticipation within this season which is very simple and childlike -- and it is the kind of anticipation we find in the joyful song we hear in the story of our two women in today's gospel. It is the joy-filled anticipation that God is about to break into the chaos of our world.

And whatever that chaos is in our life, whatever our troubles are, we should sing with that joyful anticipation, just as Mary sang. We can do this, can't we? I know that we can sing, as a parish, in the face of poverty and disease in Malawi, in the face of homelessness here in Seattle and illness right down the block at Children's Hospital. We can do this because we do know that the Holy Spirit has been working within us and within our friends in Namitembo, within the families we help at the Sacred Heart Shelter and those we visit at Children's. We are witnesses to the presence and working of the Holy Spirit in the times of those troubles -- let us never forget that. And that certain knowledge will even give us the courage and the power to sing with a joyful anticipation in the face of the chaos that is Iraq, and the genocide of Darfur, and the killings in Sri Lanka and the Congo and Lebanon and Palestine, singing in the face of the fears of terrorism anywhere -- singing in anticipation of a world of peace and justice.

Not only can we sing, but we must sing, songs of promise and hope, of the workings of the Spirit in the midst of troubled times. We sing to remind ourselves, but most of all we need to sing these songs for our children and for our children's children, because they are all too often afraid of the world that we leave them. They are so relentlessly exposed to the naked violence and senselessness of the world around us, and a culture that conjures for them the illusion that they must be stronger or faster or bigger or have more money. To our children we must sing songs of real hope, songs that reveal to them a Spirit who brings holiness out of chaos.

Mary could sing: My soul magnifies the Lord, my Spirit rejoices in God my savior, because God has looked upon me, the lowliest of the low, and oppressed woman from a tiny village in an oppressed land. God has looked upon ne, a lowly servant, with favor!!!

And if God could break with favor into the life of an unsophisticated, small-town peasant girl like Mary, God can and will do it in the lives of anyone who feels lonely, lowly, broken, or insignificant. God's mercy is for all those who will bow humbly before the Spirit. God has filled the hungry with Good Things, just as God will do once again today, as we who hunger for God prepare together to receive the Eucharist.

We may live in difficult times, but times no more difficult than Mary and Elizabeth's times -- these two simple, faithful women, who danced with joy together.