Sermon for the Third Sunday of Advent

 

By Courtney Godwin
Interim Minister in the Memorial Church of Harvard University

(The following is a transcript of the service audio, Dec. 17, 2023)

I chose to preach on this day, way back in June, because of the lectionary offering. We read the Magnificat, the song of Mary praising God when she finds out she's pregnant. Both the Magnificat and today's passage from Isaiah are a promise of what is to come. They promise that God wants justice, righteousness, and mercy for us and is going to help us achieve those goals by sending us Jesus. I chose these passages because I love the Magnificat, and I thought therefore it would be easy to write and preach about. That was a really good reminder of how wrong I am. When I started writing this sermon, I was thinking I wanted to write, Christmas is about God's promise of justice through the incarnation of Jesus. But I quickly realized that that wasn't the sermon I needed to hear right now, and it wasn't a sermon that I'm currently capable of writing. When I picked this week, I didn't think about this Sunday being the last Sunday that many of the students would be here or that I would be in the middle of moving and completely emotionally overwhelmed. So here we go.

In today's gospel reading, Mary finds out she's pregnant because an angel comes to her. Just the angel's presence already scares her out of her wits. Otherwise, his first words wouldn't be, "You don't have to be afraid of me." But the news he brings scares her too. She's a pregnant, unmarried woman. Matthew's rendition of this story tells us that when Joseph finds out about her pregnancy, he plans to divorce her. Some commentaries say that this was the kinder option, that he would divorce her quietly instead of publicly and have her stoned.

We don't hear about Mary's family, her parents, but it's likely that they would've disowned her, and this may be why she fled to her cousin Elizabeth. She is young, alone, poor, and pregnant. And what does she do? She praises God. She sings that her soul magnifies the Lord.

Mary is an embodiment of the faith that we are all supposed to have. She believes that God has set her on the right path and will protect her even and especially in these scary circumstances. Many Christians praise Mary that she doesn't doubt. She has faith, and she rejoices. We, too, are supposed to rejoice at Christmastime. It's the most wonderful time of the year. We're excited about the promise of what is to come, whether that's the presents under the tree or the Christmas dinner with our families, or a baby laid in a manger for telling a new world to come. We want Christmas to be a time of joy, but sometimes it's not. We want to have faith like Mary, but sometimes we can't.

Multiple times this week, I sat with this passage until I was in tears. But I've done a lot of crying this week for other reasons too. As many of you know, my time at Memorial Church is coming to a close. I am moving away from my beloved communities in Cambridge and back to my beloved communities in Atlanta. And it is such a time of joy. I cannot wait to hug my grandmother, to go on walks with my dog, and this is such a time of immense grief saying goodbyes that I don't want to say.

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I imagine Mary felt this tension too. She has chosen for this great task, but what does that mean for the rest of her life? She's saying goodbye to one life and bravely stepping into a new one. Sometimes, I wish an angel would come and tell me what to do. I wish that I could focus on the joy and have Mary's faith that God has set me on the right path. But I'm not sure. Mary's faith is not comforting to me as I think it's meant to be. It makes me feel like I'm not a good Christian for not having the same faith, for not being able to only rejoice when life is complicated. Not that I even think being a, quote, unquote, "good Christian" is a possible or even real thing.

Advent is a time of waiting. We are waiting for all that God's incarnation will do for this world. But we will not wake up on Christmas morning to find our justice system fixed. We will not wake up on Christmas morning to find our system's devoid of racism, classism, sexism. We will not wake up on Christmas morning to find all the wars in the world have ended with solutions universally praised. We will not wake up Christmas morning with the magical knowledge of everything we should do to be good people to make the world a better place.

So, what are we really waiting for? We are waiting for a sign like the Magi, searching for the brightest star that we are on the right path. We are awaiting a transformation of our faith that we, like Mary, might say to God, "Here I am the servant of the Lord. Let it be with me according to your word." We await the knowledge that whatever our next step is, we are going in the right direction. I will wake up Christmas morning in my empty Somerville apartment and head to the airport, praying that this is the next right step for me.

We know the rest of Mary's story that she watches from the sides as her son performs miracle after miracle and then as he's tortured and executed brutally. We know that she's among the first to discover his body missing from the tomb. We know the joy and the pain that is to come, but we also know more than Mary did. We know that 2000 years later, we still gather every year to tell her story, to sing her song, to aspire to her faith. We know that 2000 years later, we still gather every week to worship her son and his dream for us. And we would still do this even if her first reaction had been to rage at God or had been to burst into tears at the implications of this major life change. Mary would still have a place in this story even if she doubted God and the path God sets before her. There is room for doubt in this story. There is room for anger, and grief, and questioning, and fear. And there is room for what Advent reminds us of hope, and peace, and joy, and love.

And these are not mutually exclusive. We can hold them all at the same time because they are connected. The depth of our grief is a reflection of the depth of our love. There is room for all of this and for all of us in the Christmas season and in the Christmas story. I don't know what the next right thing is right now, but I hope that each decision I make or step I take will be led by the things I've learned and the love that I feel for my communities, including this one at Memorial Church.

Thank you all for being my home and for this beautiful experience.