Take a moment to locate ourselves:  it is December 21, the longest night of the year.  We are in the northern hemisphere, and the cold polar wind is coming to remind us of that.  We are at the fourth Sunday of Advent, and for those who count other ways – there are four more shopping days until Christmas.

We are waiting.  We are waiting as Northern Hemisphere people for the days to begin lengthening – ever so imperceptibly until March, when suddenly the sun takes a turn toward warmer.  We are waiting for the light of early morning to awaken us; for the light of lingering evenings to cheer us.  It is memory that helps us wait for that which is not yet.  That is part of the mystery of this God-with-us event for which we wait:  It is remembered when it is not yet.

Garrison Keiller, in a piece about Christmas letters, includes this phrase at the end of his own Christmas letter, skillfully grasping the promise of Advent:  “The crabapple tree over the driveway is bare, but we have a memory of pink blossoms and expect them to return.  God bless you all.”

The bare branches of the crabapple tree are an apt metaphor for these times in which we wait…I need not rehearse again the dire circumstances in which we find ourselves.

But today, we are at the fourth Sunday of Advent.

On the fourth Sunday of Advent, we begin waiting with Mary and Joseph.  And something shifts in our waiting on this fourth Sunday.  No longer do we wait in the dead of winter, in the darkest of days, for the prophets’ long awaited dreams to be fulfilled.  We wait now with a turn toward spring, with the beginning of the fullness of the promise.  We wait with Mary who has been visited by the Spirit of God and is now the keeper of the long awaited promise.

If the prophets bore the promise in words; Mary now bears in her very body the promise of the fulfillment of the Word.  The promise of God spoken in Mary’s voice takes on a new dimension; a heretofore unheard of dimension.

It is not just words.  It is the Word made flesh.

God has appeared to be absent from the earth for some time.  But we have the memory of God, at least figuratively walking in the garden with Adam and Eve; burning in a bush with Moses; consulting on the mountain top with the same Moses; leading the Israelites across the wilderness.  We have the words of the prophets, who have for ages and ages and ages been reminding us that once the branch of Jesse’s tree was fruitful and fragrant; and though there words began to seem like an empty promise, Mary’s words come…and we find that even we are expecting God to return to us.  God bless us all.

It is the fourth Sunday of Advent, and today is Children’s Christmas pageant day.  This story is lovely when it is told by children.  The youngest among us tell the greatest of stories.

I never played Mary in the Christmas pageant, at least not that I remember.  Only one little girl gets chosen to be Mary, and the masses of the rest of us are relegated to the angelic choir, or, if there is a shortage of boys, girls have long been permitted to stand in as shepherds.  There is a role for everyone in the pageant…but there’s only one Mary.

Though Mary is the plum role in the pageant for little girls, in most children’s pageants, she has no speaking role.  Kind of surprising, really, when in Luke’s gospel and in the liturgy for the fourth Sunday of Advent, Mary has quite a lot to say.

You never find the Magnificat in the children’s pageant.  That’s probably because it is very grown-up material.  But it is here, in the words that remain unspoken by children that we find a profound, and very inclusive invitation to grown up spiritually maturing Christian people.

God wants to cast us all in the role of Mary.

That is to say, God wants to make us all bearers of God’s life and presence in the world.

Anyone of us can sing Mary’s song.  “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.”

Just singing the song tells good news to a lost, lonely, fearful world.

And what is that good news:  listen to the paired verbs of Mary’s song – verbs which describe God’s action:

There is a showing of strength and a scattering.
There is a bringing down and a lifting up.
There is a filling up and an emptying.

God does this in the world:  the proud are scattered; the powerful are brought down from their thrones; the rich sent away empty.

Before Mary sings this song, she is visited by the Spirit of God, and invited to participate in God’s work of redeeming and saving the world.  And Mary’s participation is not just idle agreement.  The fact that she is cast by Luke as a virgin mother strongly suggests that she will give blood, sweat and tears to the work of bearing God into the world as a real physical presence.  This is about incarnation.

And so, Mary is willing to invest quite a lot of herself, all of herself, when she speaks in response to this visitation.

“Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”

This is the beginning for Mary – and for us, of bearing God’s purposes in the world.  Mary is an humble peasant girl; with no aspirations or hopes of a rich, royal, powerful life.  Mary is not a role for divas.  Mary is a servant of the Lord.

If God is going to cast us as Mary, we best be prepared to have our own pride scattered; our own power brought down; our own riches taken away.

Then, and only then, are we properly prepared for the role of Mary.

Isn’t it interesting what we communicate at Christmas, with our photos and our letters to friends?  What Garrison Keillor describes as letters “in which the writer bursts the bonds of modesty and comes forth with one gilt-edged paragraph after another…”

Have we not heard that God has looked with favor on the lowly?
Have we not noticed the God brings down the powerful?
Have we not realized that the rich are sent away empty?

Mary comes to us on the fourth Sunday of Advent to teach us how to keep Christmas.

Henry VanDyke put it this way:

“It is a good thing to observe Christmas day.  The mere marking of times and seasons when [people] agree to stop work and make merry together is a wise and wholesome custom.  It helps one to feel the supremacy of the common life over the individual life.  It reminds [one] to set his own little watch, now and then, by the great clock of humanity.

“But there is a better thing than the observance of Christmas day, and that is the keeping of Christmas.

“Are you willing to forget what you have done for other people and to remember what other people have done for you; to ignore what the world owes you and to think what you owe the world; to put your rights in the background and your duties in the middle distance and your chances to do a little more than you duty in the foreground; to see that your fellow [humans] are just as real as you are, and try to look behind their faces to their hearts, hungry for joy; to own that probably the only good reason for your existence is not what you are going to get out of life, but what you are going to give to life; to close your book of complaints against the management of the universe and look around you for a place where you can sow a few seeds of happiness – are you willing to do these things for even a day?  Then you can keep Christmas… “Are you willing to believe that love is the strongest thing in the world – stronger than hate, stronger than evil, stronger than death – and that the blessed life which began in Bethlehem nineteen hundred years ago is the image and brightness of the Eternal Love?  Then you can keep Christmas.

“And if you keep it for a day, why not always?”

    Henry Van Dyke
Keeping Christmas


Begin in Advent.

Make Mary’s prayer your prayer:  “Here am I, a servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”

When one’s life seems bare as the branches of the crabapple tree, this prayer can help us old the promise of God with us Emmanuel – we expect a return of this presence.  God bless us all.