By: Rev. Michael Neuroth, Director of the Office of Public Policy and Advocacy
While the book of Luke begins with the author’s desire to offer an “orderly” (1:3) account of events leading to Jesus’ birth, the scene shifts dramatically with Mary’s “Magnificat,” when a whole new world order breaks in. Full of rich, prophetic imagery, Mary’s song is fueled by an awareness of what the message that she would conceive and bear the Son of God could mean for her and for the world. Her words echo the stories of Elizabeth, Hannah, and generations of women past and future who also know the pangs of childbirth, patriarchy, and occupation.
Drawing on this lineage of freedom-fighters, Mary’s song gives voice to a re-ordering of life. It casts a vision of abundance and a future of wholeness in which the hungry are filled, where God brings down the powerful and lifts up the lowly. In this future, the proud are scattered into “the imagination of their hearts,” an imagination fueled by privilege and power, supremacy thinking and the myth of superiority, and imperialist fantasies of entitlement. The same kind of imagination that makes Mary precarious as she says yes to a vocation as one who gives birth to a radical new way of living and loving in this world.
When we read Mary’s song, let us remember her words flow out of her experience and the lineage of justice-making dreams she continues to embody. Let us honor these words by centering the voices of those most impacted by systems and structures of oppression and empowering those who speak from different life experiences from us. Let us listen for and proclaim God’s abundance, acceptance and healing. When we put aside pride and lean into a new imagination with an open heart, we build collective resilience that points towards the hope that is coming. A love just waiting to be born anew.
God of the freedom-fighters and new-world-bringers,
on this Advent journey of hope and longing, we pray for guidance.
Teach us to sing the songs of our ancestors’ dreams,
so that we might carry a new imagination in our bones.
Draw us to listen to those of us whose experiences reveal
just what this future will require of us.
With this song in our hearts, may we live as we pray. Amen.
Music: “The Journey Isn’t Over” by Mark A. Miller
Offered by: Ann Jefferson
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Take some time reflect on the ancestors and lineages you draw on in your work for racial justice and abolition. Consider also what lineages you might be being called to heal and transform, to move toward a new imagination, in this season. For inspiration, listen to poet Aja Monet read from her collection My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter.
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