December 23, 2012 – Luke 1:39-55
Luke 1:39-55
Small Everyday Deeds
Fourth Sunday of Advent – December 23, 2012
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country.
This is how the Gospel story begins today.
This is how the world begins to turn.
Last Christmas Eve I noted how this part of the Bible begins in such a small domestic way,
not unlike how much of the earlier biblical story begins.
Two people in a garden, Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Esau, Joseph and his brothers.
You see God trying to turn the world through the stories of ordinary people in
their everyday lives.
You see the domestic shot through with the divine.
Soon enough you see focus shift to the grand, the worldly,
to the kings and their courts and their costly armies.
The prophets, you sense, try to bring things back to earth, but without much success.
Until, that is, the beginning of the story of the one long promised begins today:
In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country.
Into a world Luke tells us is seemingly run by Emperor Augustus and Governor Qurinius a
pregnant young woman – perhaps as young as 14 – goes to visit her elderly relative,
also pregnant.
And so it begins, the turning of the world around.
With two insignificant women, in an unimportant unnamed town in a backwater of
the mighty Roman Empire: here is where the world begins to turn.
God returns us once more to the domestic and everyday.
It is from here that God will turn the world.
The prophet Micah assures us this morning that ultimately the one who will turn
the world around will be born in Bethlehem, the one who will finally bring peace.
When we sing “O little town of Bethlehem” we can be sure the carol got it right:
Bethlehem was about as little and unimportant as you can get.
Not Jerusalem, certainly not Rome, but Bethlehem.
Bethlehem is simply a small, insignificant place from which great things will come.
(Laura Sauder, in the Kairos, 2012 Advent Worship Resources, for Advent 4)
A place from which the world will be turned.
I have been thinking about the importance of our seemingly small,
seemingly insignificant daily actions this week,
as last Friday I went to see film The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.
Hobbits are small creatures, seemingly unimportant in the world in which they live.
They are retiring, gentle folk who live in an out of the way part of the world,
who cultivate their gardens and who are
seemingly addicted to the comforts of home.
When the great wizard Gandalf comes knocking on the hobbit Bilbo Bagginses door one day,
and invites him to take part in an adventure, Bilbo reacts with horror.
Adventure? Adventures are nasty, disturbing, uncomfortable things!
In the end, he decides to go and help a company of 13 dwarves help reclaim their gold from
a dragon who’d taken it from their ancestors decades before.
This is the backstory of a much larger story told in The Lord of the Rings.
Bilbo, the hobbit, and later his nephew Frodo, will ultimately be
the heroes in the story, the ones who will save the world,
the ones who will destroy the ring of power and its evil influence.
Not the great wizard Gandalf, not the great human kings, not the elf lords and ladies,
but the domestic, every-day run-of-the-mill hobbits from the tiny town of hobbiton.
When Gandalf is questioned by the great elf queen Galadriel as to why he has chosen a hobbit,
Gandalf responds with the film’s most memorable quotation:
Saruman [the chief wizard] believes it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. I have found it is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay: small acts of kindness and love.
Gandalf is not a wise wizard for nothing.
It is the hobbits, with their everyday mercy and compassion, who will turn the world.
Keeping the darkness at bay has been much on our minds this week as the aftershocks of
the heartbreak in Newton Connecticut continued.
Speculation continued, funerals were held, grief and shock deepened.
The darkness is real enough, and we Christians acknowledge it in this season of Advent,
with its shortening days.
But on the first Sunday of Advent, Jesus bade us keep awake and watch for the goodness that
has been unleashed into the world, for that, as the wise know,
is the true miracle in this world: that there is goodness, that there is sacrifice,
that there are those who put other’s needs above their own.
While we marvel at the illness and disease and disaster and tragedy that seem so much a part of
everyday life, we must marvel still more at the goodness.
Vicky Soto, a 27 year old teacher in Newton shielded her students with her body and
saved their lives.
Robbie Parker, father of one of the deceased children, was able to see through his own grief and
say this as he spoke publicly at his daughter’s funeral:
I can’t imagine how hard this experience must be for you [the family of Adam Lanza], and
I want you to know that our family and our love and our support goes out to you as well.
(quoted at http://omidsafi.religionnews.com/2012/12/19/gandalf-and-goodness-today/)
Now that is heroic, that is truly heroic. It’s miraculous.
If you want evidence of God at work in the world, look no further.
Truly it is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay.
Small acts of kindness and love.
These are things that turn the world.
The thing is: what you do matters.
You can make a difference.
Like Mary, you can bear the gift of Christ you are given at the table this morning.
You can take that light into a dark world.
And you can be part of the turning of the world.
For in Jesus, in his life, death, and resurrection, the turning of the world has begun.
In the life, death and resurrection of this Jewish peasant from Nazareth God has given
this world the thing it most needs.
The grace of mercy.
The promise of resurrection.
The hope of a world made new.
A good end to the story of this world, and a dignified meaningful place for
each one of us in it.
The turning of the world will come through ordinary folk like Mary, like Vicki Soto,
like Robbie Parker, like you.
I mean it’s amazing, isn’t it, that 14 year old Mary from Nowheres-ville sings such a
world-changing song this morning?
Right in the middle of this very domestic scene, Mary sings a wondrous song of what God
will work through her, and so sure is she that God will bring about these things that
she talks about them in the past tense, as if they’ve already happened:
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly;
He has filled the hungry with good things. . . .
This song, the martyred El Salvadoran archbishop Oscar Romero once said,
reminds us of the importance of taking a long view. (Sauder, ibid.)
Mary’s song reminds us to trust that as we do our smaller parts,
God is taking care of the big picture.
The little town of Bethlehem today is a town divided by a wall.
It is walled off from Jerusalem is home to three Palestinian refugee camps.
Palestinians who lived for generations in ancestral homes were forcibly evicted
after the war in 1948 and have lived for generations in these camps.
My friend Khaled, whom I met in Vancouver, came from one of these families.
Indeed, his family probably is still living in one of those refugee camps.
Khaled is a Muslim.
Back in the 90s when prejudice against Muslims was on the rise,
I invited Khaled along to speak with me to a group of Lutherans about
Islam and Christian-Muslim relations.
He didn’t want to go at first because of the treatment he’d received at his
Lutheran wife’s church, but he came with me anyway.
And on a sunny day in Vancouver, with a small group of 20 or 30 people,
there was understanding and, for Khaled, there was healing.
Some myths were put to rest,
and I like to think that some of the darkness was kept at bay that day.
As a token of thanks, Khaled gave me this small olive wood pitcher made in,
you guessed it, little old Bethlehem.
I keep it in my office and I often say that if I look inside it I can see the future,
and that future is a good one.
This is the future into which Adea was baptized this morning.
This small person, now incorporated into God’s story of turning the world through
Jesus of Nazareth, is now a part of God’s promised redemption of this whole
World and every person in it.
Adea is now in the company of those ordinary people who have been chosen and
called to bear this Jesus of Nazareth into the world.
She now is part of this strange story of how God has chosen to work in this world through
The ordinary and everyday and turn it.
She has been given a great gift, the gift of the Spirit of Jesus himself and
adoption into the family of the triune God.
And then, too, she has been given a great promise: the promise that she, now, will be a great gift.
So along with Adea, along with Mary, along with Vicki Soto and Robbie Parker and
countless others, let us put our trust in this God who returns us again and again to
the everyday, to the hurting, to the poor and the vulnerable, to one another.
Let us put our trust in this God who has promised to bear life into
the midst of our everyday darkness.
Let us with Oscar Romero remember the importance of taking the long view,
that the future is in God’s hands and that the future is not in doubt: it is a good one.
And let us trust that as we do our smaller parts, God is taking care of the big picture.
The world has begun to turn.
So together let us say, “Amen.”
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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