December 23

By: Rev. Michael Neuroth, Director of the Office of Public Policy and Advocacy

God has shown strength with God’s arm and has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. God has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; the Holy One has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty. Luke 1:46-55

 

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.

Prayer

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.

Freedom Song

Music: “The Journey Isn’t Over” by Mark A. Miller
Offered by: Ann Jefferson

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“Then that little man in black there, he says women can't have as much rights as men, 'cause Christ wasn't a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him.” – Sojourner Truth

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Prepare the way by continuing freedom-fighting lineages

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.

Listen to the poetry

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