12/11/22

Today's gospel reading on the third Sunday of Advent is Luke 1:47-55, the Magnificat. This is the version used by Ernesto Cardenal in The Gospel in Solentiname from the American Bible Society:

"My soul praises the Lord;
my heart rejoices in God my savior.
because he has noticed his slave.
And from now on all generations will call be happy,
for mighty God has done great things for me.
His name is holy,
and his love reaches his faithful ones from generation to generation.
He has shown the strength of his arm;
he conquers those with proud hearts.
He pulls down the might from their thrones
and raises up the humble.
He fills the hungry with good things
and he leaves the rich with nothing.
He helps the nation of Israel his servants,
in remembrance of his love;
as he had promised to our fathers,
to Abraham, and to his descendants forever."

Like so many prophets and revolutionaries such as Isaiah before his birth, and others like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ernesto Cardenal after, Jesus embodies the spirit of this song of hope, and his life was devoted to bringing it about.

The translation they used today at Spirit of Grace was a modern, more inclusive rendition that was nice but had a less forceful impact. Nevertheless, the underlying message is the same. Mary, pregnant and waiting to give birth to her first child, Jesus, sings a praise to God and prophesizes the birth of a new world of justice for the poor and oppressed.

And that got me thinking about how that will come about. There are a lot of hymns that talk of waiting for this world to come, for God to bring it about. But I think that waiting is more like the waiting of an expectant parent, a waiting in which the parent takes an active part. The birth of a child takes time. And as this new life grows and takes shape, it's fed and nurtured by its parents-to-be until the conditions are right for it to enter the world and be born. So, too, the new world we hope to be born takes time to gestate, being fed and nurtured by our words and actions and the intentions underlying them.

But even after the child is born, care is still needed to protect it, nurture it, and help it to thrive and live long into the future, just as any social transformation still needs our continued care to protect it, nurture it, and help it to thrive and live long into the future. And just as we don't ever know the exact minute a child will be born and must wait patiently while preparing for its arrival, the same holds true of the new world, the kin-dom of God, we long for. We must wait patiently while preparing in whatever ways we can for its arrival.

And if we truly take the commandment to love our neighbour as ourselves seriously, then we must work to free our neighbour from social systems of domination and exploitation, from hunger and poverty, from injustice and discrimination, from oppression and violence, from political and economic servitude.