Salvation: The Musical!

Micah 5:2-5a

Luke 1:39-55

The story of Jesus' birth in Luke's gospel keeps getting interrupted by people breaking into song.  It feels kind of like you're watching a musical!  You know, A MUSICAL!!  WHERE THE ACTORS STOP MIDSTREAM AND BELT IT OUT, WITH FEELING!!! 

Elizabeth sings and Mary sings.  Zechariah, father of John the Baptist, sings.  The angels who appear to the shepherds sing.  We might conclude that for Luke, singing is the most appropriate way to respond to the story of God’s long awaited arrival in Jesus.

 

Like many of you I attended the High School musical “Bye Bye Birdie” a few weeks back.  On one level, it’s a play about Birdie and what happens to him.  But it’s a musical and you really need the music.  The singing allows the characters in the play to register what they’re feeling.  And this singing – whether it’s silly, sad, or over-the top joyful – gives us as the audience permission to feel what the play wants us to feel.

So too Luke’s story of Jesus’ birth.  If you don’t hear the songs, feel the songs, sing the songs – you will miss the drama of why God’s arrival is good news for the whole world.

Our reading this week invites us to listen in as two pregnant women greet one another and share their stories.  Neither expected to be pregnant.  One is too young.  One is too old.  But what has come to birth in them isn't just for them.  It's the kind of newness and fresh beginning that all of us desire.  And so they sing. 

If you don’t like to sing, I suppose you can hum, or whistle, or tap your feet, or use spotify.  The point is that when God arrives in our lives it breaks open a pathway forward that we hadn’t before seen.  A new way to solve problems we couldn’t have imagined.  A way around an obstacle that had – up to now - defeated us and left us in despair.  And when these breakthroughs come, we rejoice together.  We sing, or hum, or whistle, or whatever.  There’s music. 

Now this is all good, but I have to admit that I’ve been avoiding a pretty big problem to this point.  Some of us don’t feel like this story connects us to what God is doing in our lives.  Some of us aren’t convinced.  You’re not singing.  Perhaps you haven’t yet found your way inside this story.  It’s not obvious, anyway, that this story has anything to do with us.  It’s a story about two pregnant women.  We’re looking on as two pregnant women greet each other with blessing and rejoicing and singing. 

When they sing, they sing about God saving, delivering, rescuing, blessing and redeeming.  They talk as if they have some visceral and personal experience of such things.  And they seem to use these very religious sounding words very comfortably.  We’re almost embarrassed to admit that this language doesn’t feel as natural to us.  Their song about God’s strong arm and mighty deeds makes some of us feel a little like outsiders.  And we begin to wonder whether this is a song that include people like us.

Think of it like this.  Many of you keep clothes in your closet or in a dresser that don’t fit.  They haven’t fit in a long time.  They’re probably never going to fit.  But you still have them.  Most of my jeans and pants I wear are a 34 inch waist.  In my closet I have hanging several pairs of pants that are 33.  Maybe one or two that are a 32 inch waist.  I’m never going to wear those.  They don’t fit the body I now have.  But I sort of feel obligated to keep them.

So here’s the problem.  “Salvation” is a very common word in Scripture.  And it’s at the heart of Mary’s song: “My soul glorifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior” (v. 66-67).  God is the Saving One.  God is the One who Saves.  The Mighty One has done great things and is doing them now.

According to Elizabeth and Mary, God does something so magnificent that the whole world’s fortunes are reversed.  The proud are scattered and the meek are gathered.  The rulers are cast down and the humble are lifted up.  The rich are sent away hungry and the poor are filled and satisfied.  How can you not want to sing a song like this?  And yet, we wonder.  Is this really a song for people who experience life the way I do?  

To be as simple and clear as we can, all the gospel writers imagine God’s arrival in Jesus to be an act of God “saving” us.  That is, you can’t fully hear and receive why this is all good news if you can’t imagine your life as informed and colored by this little word, “salvation.”  And yet, to a lot of us, that word is a little awkward.  It feels like ill-fitting clothes.

If you’d like a little help exploring the full meaning of “salvation,” just find some religious people and ask them.  Good Lord, some church folks love nothing more than telling you exactly what it means.  Except when they give you their little schpiel, you’re impressed by their self-righteous, narrow-minded certainty but not at all sure they know any more than you do. 

Some people will fixate on talking about the mechanics of how you get “saved.”  They’ll roll out arguments about when and how it happens, who’s in and who’s not - baptism, believing, the Holy Spirit, conversion.  They’ll spin some tale about exactly what has to happen for you to be “saved.”  Usually these stories carry with them some faint suggestion that however it happened for you probably wasn’t quite right.  They’re so sure of what they “know” that they can’t take a breath long enough to admit that Scripture itself suggests there are many different, quite messy, ways that people come to a saving faith in Jesus Christ.  Nor do their individualized little accounts have much to do with Scriptures wider focus on communities of peace and justice where the poorest of the earth find dignity. 

Other people will fixate on the afterlife, what it takes to get into heaven.  For them, “salvation” talk is always talk about some other time and place.  What’s happening “now” is interesting only as a staging ground where we try to secure a ticket to heaven.  To listen to them, God is almost completely uninterested in the daily ordinariness of our lives and the difficult work of forgiving our enemies, sacrificing our resources for the good of others, and welcoming one another in God’s name.  All God seems to care about, so these folks suggest, is who can enter the pearly gates and walk the streets of gold in the great heavenly beyond.  They have very little interest in Scripture’s focus on the earthy dimensions of good news: the disgraced welcomed, the outcasts included, the poor filled with gladness, the lepers healed, the children safe and flourishing.

So I’m trying to listen in to this conversation between two pregnant ladies who keep breaking into song.  And I wonder what it has to do with me.  Salvation.  God.  Prepare the way.  And I wonder what it has to do with our kids and teenagers.  I wonder how Alexa Metcalf hears this story today, having just given birth this week.  I wonder whether these two pregnant women, talking and singing, reminds you mothers of your own pregnancies.  I wonder whether some of you men feel blocked out of this pregnant-woman musical. 

Here’s how I make sense of these “salvation” songs.  Sometimes I get stuck.  I can get stuck worrying about money.  I can get stuck when things don’t go my way.  I can get stuck in a bad mood for any number of reasons.  I can get stuck complaining about this or that.  When I get stuck, usually it is not complete self-absorption.  There’s often a little light in it.  That lightness, I think, comes from the recognition that when I’m stuck I’m experiencing something that lots of other people experience.  Being stuck reminds me that I’m traveling in a crowd.  That there are others making their way alongside me.  What I need when I get stuck is a way forward.  What I need when my life gets blocked is an open path, the imagination to see it, and the courage to walk forward.

Friday afternoon was cool and windy, but the sun was shining.  It was about 40 degrees.  After lunch I went for a walk in Gunn Park on the trails.  It was a little muddy in spots.  I like to run or walk because it helps clear my mind.  I think it releases some chemicals that are good for me.  Anyway, I started along the rocky downhill trails at the park entrance, and wound my way down to the flat section that moves through the woods.  The path was wet but it was packed down by runners and mountain bikers.  About ten minutes into my hike I just stopped, arrested by the plain, earthy beauty of the path.  Along the edges was the thistle-thatchy dead grass.  Just inside that, along both sides of the path, were strips of golden green moss.  And then in the center the dark brown mud.  And all of these colors were dappled by the patchy shards of sunlight that were angling sideways through the forest. 

I don’t feel like I have very good language for what happened.  I felt summoned.  I felt something lift.  I smiled.  All of a sudden I felt more buoyant.  So was it brain chemicals?  Or was it the striking beauty of the colors along the path?  Or was it grace, an answer to prayer?

Often the place where I’m stuck seems stale, familiar in a deadening way.  And I need something new.  Now I know that this is a very personal, individualized, sort of mystical example I’ve given you.  But just as Mary begins singing about herself and then moves to singing of what God has done for others, my experience opens me to the many ways God is opening new paths for people who desperately need it. 

Many of us feel stuck in fear.  Fear or terrorism.  Fear of people from the middle east with violent visions of a Caliphate.  Fear of angry white kids with automatic weapons and dreams of finally being noticed.  Many African Americans in our country feel stuck in a racist culture that keeps denying their full dignity.  Many Hispanic people and immigrants feel stuck as unwanted outsiders in a culture polling extremely high for candidates who voice utterly hateful venom towards them.  Many are stuck in bad jobs, or in abusive families, or in cycles of depression and despair.  Some are trapped in the harmful cycles of overeating or overdrinking or overmedicating on something else.  The word – “salvation” – might not roll easily off our lips.  But all of us know what it’s like to dream of a new and better way forward.  For ourselves.  For our community.  And for the whole world. 

Our family spent a week in New York this past summer.  I took lots of pictures.  One of the pictures I took wouldn’t mean much to anyone else.  But it’s very meaningful to me.  It’s a picture of the entrance to the long overpass that crosses the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.  It’s the only way to get from Caroll Gardens Brooklyn into the sealed off neighborhood of Red Hook. 

In a past sermon I told you about this visit, but I didn’t tell you about the picture I took.  I was headed to visit an art space called Pioneer Works.  The boys were tired of walking.  And they were excited to catch up with some of our friends.  And so Steph told me to just go by myself.  So I google-mapped the route.  And I knew there had to be this passageway, this overpass, but I couldn’t find it.  I walked around the block twice.  I was completely confused.  I could see the big hulking thing spanning the BQE, but I couldn’t find the entrance.

So I asked a mail carrier for help.  I was standing about twenty feet from it when the guy pointed behind me and said, “It’s right there.”  And so I made my way across it.  But that’s not when I took the picture.  I made my way into Red Hook and found the Pioneer Works Arts Center, way down by the water where the Cruise Ships dock.  And the next two hours walking around in that space were sheer delight.  The massive, industrial building that had been renovated.  The working artists.  The paintings and sculputres throughout.  It was moving for me.  It triggered discoveries and realizations.  It prompted me to wonder at why great architecture and well-designed spaces can fill us with hope.  Some of the art was hilariously raunchy and funny, and helped me recover my playful side.  All the artists at work on their projects helped me see that I’ve been practical to a fault.  I need to be making more things. 

Anyway, all these dots were getting connected in my head and heart.  And they all had something to do with living a life that’s more satisfying, more joyful.  It was overwhelming really.  And so even though I enjoyed getting to go by myself.  I was excited to reconnect with Steph and the boys so I could describe the experience.  And so I made my way back to the overpass and across it.  Only I turned at the other end to look back.  And the industrial looking entrance to the overpass looked beautiful in a rivets-and-chain-link sort of way.  And so I took a picture of what had been for me a newly found path to more joy . . . “Salvation.” 

I admit that the term “salvation” has a richness that I don’t know what to do with.  And so I come back to these two women.  Elizabeth, old and six months pregnant.  Mary, very young, too young, scandalously young and barely pregnant.  They’re both women in a culture where women didn’t matter.  They’re both from small places that didn’t matter. 

I don’t want to tell you how to read this story.  You will find in it something I didn’t, for sure.  But don’t miss the smallness of it.  It’s two pregnant women greeting one another and then giving voice to a shared hope for their children, and their own lives.  And so while I am slightly embarrassed even to mention my noticing the sun-dappled, moss-encroached path; and the picture of the overpass that took me across into a new experience . . . these things are not too small.  How will we ever imagine our way into this language of “salvation” if we don’t think small?  How will we ever imagine what God is up to if we don’t survey the recent terrain of our own lives, looking for places where something fresh and green pushes its way through the brown undergrowth?

These two pregnant women remind us that we are already living in a world marked by the new.  A world that isn’t sealed shut.  A world cracked open to new possibilities.   Salvation has already appeared.  It is here, open for us, available to us.  It is God’s new and surprising kingdom.  God’s realm of mercy, justice and love, taking shape right in the ruins of the old and tired.  May God give us eyes to see it, hearts that welcome it, and the courage to walk forward.  Amen.