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Green Blades Preaching Roundtable

3rd and 4th Sundays of Advent

Year B
December 17, 2023
Pastor Kristin Foster

Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11
Psalm 126 or Luke 1:46b-55
I Thessalonians 5:16-24
John 1:6-8, 19-28

2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16
Luke 1:46b-55 or Psalm 89:1-4, 19-26
Romans 16:19=27
Luke 1:26-38

 

As I read the texts for the third and fourth Sundays of Advent, I feel an anticipatory sense of loss. The annual Christmas Pageant will displace the texts for Advent 3 in many of our congregations.  Advent 4 will likely be lost as it shares a Sunday with Christmas Eve.  How many worshipers will hear their sonorities?  How many preachers will have the opportunity to prepare to preach them? 

 

According to these very texts, however, counting is not what counts. And sometimes, what begins as a voice that no one hears but the wilderness itself, or as a pregnancy as wildly beyond control as the wilderness – turns out to be conceived by the holy wholly wild Spirit, to grow and be born in some way that stirs us beyond our own imaginations into a new becoming.

 

And so, whether you prepare to preach on these Sundays or not, whether you are a preacher or not, I offer you some notes, on the Virgin, the voice, and the wilderness.

 

Note first that the Song of Mary, the Magnificat, is the alternate psalmody for the 3rd Sunday of Advent as well as the psalmody for the 4th Sunday of Advent brings Mary into both Sundays. Apparently, John’s voice crying out in the wilderness and Mary’s voice singing out to Elizabeth have something in common. And Mary, the virgin of Luke 1 and of the Apostles’ Creed, may have more in common with the wilderness itself than we have noticed.

 

The dominant cultural, historical meanings around virginity tend to cluster around ideas of innocence, of purity, of a girl or woman “saving herself” for marriage. The girl, under her father’s protection and possession, becomes a woman who will be under her husband’s protection and possession. Virginity is a dangerous and fecund period of potential for pregnancy before marriage which must be strictly guarded for the girl to be marriageable. After all, a future husband will not want to take responsibility for another man’s child. The Church has tended to transfer these dominant understandings to the mother of Jesus as virgin.  Perpetually pure, perpetually innocent, she becomes the moral symbol for sex as something impure, or at best, something that is good only when owned and guarded by a (male) system.  Along with this perpetual purity, the Church extols her submissiveness to the will of God. The Virgin Mary submits, surrenders, to the angel’s message the way ordinary women are expected to submit to men.

 

Alongside these connotations, though, we typically read the story of Mary’s pregnancy as miraculous in the sense of being supernatural, a divine intervention which contravened nature’s process of procreation.  Believing in the virgin birth becomes a warrant for a theology which finds God not in what is natural but in what is supernatural. God acts not through nature itself, but in specific acts of undoing nature, of transcending or contravening it.  When we do this, locating God in the supernatural, when we define miracles as supernatural events which disrupt the processes of nature, we drain nature of God. God is not in nature, God is in the supernatural. We consign God to an ever-diminishing arena of what we do not understand, of the unnatural.

 

In so doing, we miss the miracle, the miracle of nature, and the miracle of the incarnation, the miracle of the gospel.

 

So this Advent, I am pondering a very different read.  What if the first miracle in the gospel is that a male writer in the first century of the Common Era would feature in the first chapter an angel coming to a woman, and would voice the experience of a woman? What if Mary is a virgin in the opening chapter of Luke’s gospel in the same way that we describe wilderness as virgin?  Virgin wilderness is wilderness that has not come under human domination. (As we are learning, indigenous peoples interact with wilderness, tend wilderness such that the wilderness remains wilderness while providing for them. They do not own or dominate it.)  Wilderness exists beyond human ownership. It is not a natural resource.  Once we call old growth forests virgin timber, we are already measuring the trees as commodities. They are virgin like a young woman in patriarchal society is virgin, defined for their eventual use.  (Read the long history of human civilization, and you will meet the long history of deforestation, of owning wilderness in order to own it.)

 

John the Baptizer, as forerunner to Jesus, went to the wilderness precisely because the wilderness exists beyond human ownership and exploitation.  John, giving new voice to Isaiah, cried out in the wilderness. His voice is a voice only in the wilderness because what he speaks is not exploitable. God meets God’s people outside human norms and control. In the wilderness.

 

Likewise, God comes to a virgin, Mary, enters into the imagination and being of a virgin, as a young woman who is not under male possession. There is a wild freedom at the heart of her encounter with the angel. Like the virgin wilderness, her capacity to conceive, her full being, is outside the bounds of human civilization and practices. Her pregnancy is not a product of patriarchy.  

 

And please also take note. The only choice in the account of Mary’s conception is her choice.  Joseph does not give permission.  Her parents do not give permission.  Mary, herself and alone, says Yes.  In a world where women had no choice of who they would marry or how many children they would have or when and whether and with whom they would have sex, Mary had choice. She could say “Let it be to me according to your word.”   Her Yes to the angel was a yes to her own participation in the saving work of God, her own capacity to conceive God. Conceive. God. Give birth. To God. Give birth to God’s own Anointed One. To God’s own way for the world.

 

Isn’t this the miracle at the heart of the virgin who conceives and bears a Child. Not that God would supersede God’s own natural processes, but that God would supersede, would disrupt, the human (male) hierarchy which claims to own a woman’s body and a woman’s choices --- in the same way that this same social pattern wants to own the forests and the oceans and everything else? 

 

And more.  Through the long and looping narrative of the Hebrew scriptures, God meets God’s beloved people and calls them, into the wilderness, out of bounds, beyond human ownership and control. There, the people learn to live, not under societal expectations, but in expectation.  Like we used to say of a pregnant woman, she is, they were, expecting.

 

John, who was also expecting, called people back into the wilderness to meet a God who will not be confined or defined by any empire, any hierarchy, or any temple, a God who offered a re-start, a re-set, a new beginning. A God who frees us from the tyranny of expectations to live in expectation.  Perhaps it would not be too far-fetched to say that Mary was not the only one expecting the Messiah.  Perhaps everyone who came to the wilderness to hear and be baptized was expecting too. Becoming pregnant. With God and God’s own borning.

 

Such pregnancy, such expectation, is not safe. We fear what we cannot control. (Note the current global rising of populist authoritarianism. Even in the Netherlands, people are afraid. People are wanting someone to be in control.)  In contrast, this announcement of conception from the margins by the Holy Spirit undermines all claims of territory, all territorial disputes. All empires. All wars.

 

John’s voice in the wilderness and Mary’s great Yes were and are an existential threat to all human hierarchy.  John would be beheaded.  A sword would pierce Mary’s heart. The Child whom she freely conceived would be executed. 

 

As you know, we are now encountering another existential threat, the existential threat of climate chaos and ecological devastation.  Even the financial and fossil fuel industries and their political backers will use those words. They say we must address the existential threat of climate change, even as they turn the Amazon rain forest into pasture and the boreal forest into toilet paper.

 

As Larry Rasmussen writes in The Planet You Inherit: Letters to My Grandchildren When Uncertainty’s a Sure Thing, the flood is upon us. And we are the flood. We are also the ark.

 

But hear this promise. The Advent gospel, spoken from the wilderness, conceived by a woman apart from male ownership, is an existential threat to that existential threat.

 

We meet this gospel in the Indigenous people of the Amazon, defending their wilderness home and our very climate.

 

We meet this gospel in the Water Protectors, the Indigenous people of Minnesota and the Dakotas and northern Wisconsin, who are challenging pipelines through fragile ecosystems, who, by the way, are often women leaders.

 

We meet this gospel in Wangari Maathai, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 for her efforts to lead women in a nonviolent struggle to bring peace and democracy to Africa through its reforestation. (Her organization planted over 30 million trees in thirty years.)

 

We meet this gospel in people on the Iron Range who are promoting research now that demonstrates that precious metal recycling can replace precious metals mining. 

 

We meet this gospel in congregations across our region who are joining a movement to create a regional network of pollinator sanctuaries.

 

And we just might meet this gospel in our own season of Advent. Even if these scriptures don’t get heard.

 

Let’s say your congregation is holding its Christmas pageant on the third Sunday of Advent.  The scriptures appointed for the Sunday are being displaced. Neither Mary’s Magnificat or John’s voice may be heard.  Let’s say that the children are dressing up as angels and shepherds, as Mary and Joseph and magi. Whether you know it or not, you are inviting them into the wilderness. By clothing them in the story, you are filling them with freedom, with expectancy.  You are dressing them in a pregnant promise. As they dress up in this story, they may be coming to expect something different than what they can buy, or earn, or prove, or achieve. Even without you knowing it, an angel may be whispering to them of a birth in which they are participants, of an existential threat to our civilization’s existential threat. Without you knowing it, they may even be whispering Yes.

 

Without you knowing it, you may be whispering Yes as well.

 

Pastor Kristin Foster
Pastor Kristin Foster
Cook, MN

Kristin Foster, long term pastor on the Mesabi Iron Range of northern Minnesota, now retired from parish ministry, is the co-chair of the Northeastern Minnesota Synod’s EcoFaith Network and editor of the Green Blades Preaching Roundtable. Over four decades of ministry, including fifteen years as internship supervisor, she has written, preached, and worked for the rights of organized labor, the full inclusion of people of all sexual orientations and gender identities, and the empowerment of small communities. As pastor of Messiah Lutheran Church in Mountain Iron, she was also the founding chairperson of the Iron Range Partnership for Sustainability. She lives outside Cook, Minnesota with her husband, Frank Davis, on an old Swede-Finn farmstead. They take every available opportunity to spend time with their two daughters, their partners, and their three grandchildren.

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