Reading for 12/17/23 — click to enlarge
This happened at a day-long training for a non-profit that I worked for sporadically – it was about a dozen years ago, when my boys were still in carseats and my parents were alive.
We were a small group – 5 or 6, including myself. While the morning session was winding to a close, a man appeared and began setting the table for our lunch. He was a small man – clearly Asian, and he moved with the precision of one practiced in the business of providing food for groups of people. Soon the delightful smell of Asian food began to overpower us, and it became virtually impossible to concentrate on the matter at hand. Thankfully we were essentially done with the morning’s agenda, so we closed our workbooks, shut down the Powerpoint, and broke for lunch.
We were all so taken with the smell of the food, that we couldn’t get settled quickly enough. It turned out that the man was actually the husband of one of the organizers of the training. He was not Thai, as I had supposed, but Cambodian. He bowed, graciously accepting our compliments, and departed.
Our lunch conversation lingered on our enjoyment of the food. The woman who was married to our benefactor, told us that he had made it over to the United States as a child, but that he was the lone survivor in his family. His parents and siblings and most of his extended family had perished in killing fields – the genocide that Khmer Rouge inflicted on their own people in the late 1970’s.
This put a damper on things. After a few moments of absorbing this information, another of the women told us that her grandparents narrowly escaped the Holocaust, and that, like our friend who had brought the food, the other branches of her family all perished in the camps.
It was my turn. I told everyone that my father narrowly escaped dying in the firebombing of Tokyo that happened on March 10th, 1945. Had he not been a fourteen year old who was quick on his feet, I would not be sitting there having lunch with them.
Another woman – the person who had founded the non-profit we were gathered to support – then told us that her father had been among the many thousands of American infantry to land at Normandy. Her presence among us was likely due to the fact that he had not been one of the unlucky ones who had been deployed on the first day of the invasion. Not many of them survived.
We were a random group of half a dozen people, most of us middle-aged, a couple approaching retirement. Four out of the six of us were one degree away – either the children of, or married to – people who had been present at the most harrowing and traumatic moments of the twentieth century.
**
I know it’s strange, but I was reminded of the story I have just related, by the passage that Carol just read for us.
This is among the most well known passages in the Bible. Like other such famous passages such as the “Baptism” the “Transfiguration” and the “Beatitudes” this passage can be identified not only by its chapter and verse: Luke 1:46-55, but also by its name. This passage is known as the Magnificat.
In this, the quintessential Advent reading, Mary the mother of Jesus, expresses, for the first time, her response to the puzzling news that the Angel Gabriel gave her, that she – humble Mary – is to be the mother of the Messiah.
At first she is pretty freaked out by the whole thing. The visitation of an archangel is dramatic enough by itself! On top of this, comes the astonishing news! When she gathers her wits about her, her first question is practical – how will it work? Does the Angel know that she is still a virgin? When Gabriel explains that is all as it should be, she simply acquiesces, saying:
“I am the Lord’s servant. May your word to me be fulfilled.”
It isn’t until a few days have passed, and she is confiding in her kins-woman Elizabeth, that Mary actually says how she feels about this extraordinary turn of events.
(In this way, incidentally, Mary puts me in mind of my wife. When Cary is presented with a weighty decision, she will not be rushed. After a few days have elapsed she will have the answer, and there will be no gainsaying the soundness of it.)
So, when, at last, Mary speaks she says some interesting things. The first thing she says is:
“My soul magnifies the Lord”
This is interesting! This statement – from which the name “The Magnificat” comes – feels very different from the initial response that Mary gave to the Angel Gabriel.
A few days before, Mary had made herself small, by saying “I am the Lord’s Servant.”
Now she says: “My soul magnifies the Lord.”
I might expect Mary to say: “The Lord has decided to magnify my soul.” After all, it is the Lord, who set this whole process into motion, not her. Shouldn’t the Lord be the one doing the magnifying?
If you think about it, it’s rather odd to claim to magnify the Lord – isn’t the Lord sufficiently magnified already?
It seems to me that part of being the Lord is the quality of being in a state of complete magnification.
And yet this humble young lady from Judea claims (after ruminating over it for a few days) that it is not the Lord that magnifies her – it is she who magnifies the Lord.
To be sure, in the next few lines, Mary remembers herself and once again refers to herself as a “servant.” But no sooner does she do this, than she thrills in her astonishing good fortune:
Surely from now on all generations will call me blessed,
for the Mighty One has done great things for me
This is the first reference to “generations” in the Magnificat – but it is not the last. In this short passage of nine verses, Mary makes reference to the turning of the generations two more times. In the next breath she says:
The Lord’s mercy is for those who fear him
from generation to generation
and at the conclusion of the passage, she refers to her child as the fulfillment of Jewish prophecy when she says:
The Lord has come to the aid of his child Israel,
in remembrance of his mercy,
according to the promise he made to our ancestors,
to Abraham and to his descendants forever.”
When I read these parts of the Magnificat, it sensitized me to the theme of generations.
A mother, of course, is the person who forms the link in the chain of the generations – and it is at this moment – the moment in which she gradually comes to terms with herself-as-mother, that Mary’s speech is filled with this awareness of the generations.
When Mary acknowledges her role in this story, she acknowledges a generational depth – in both directions. She recognizes (correctly) that she will be remembered for generations to come. She knows also that her womb carries the great gift that the Lord promised when the covenant was made with the great patriarchal ancestor, Abraham.
This talk of the generations, caused me to remember that day – many years ago, when a group of six people gathered at random in a room in Western Massachusetts, was, by all accounts, a cross section of human despair.
The trauma that we all recognized, was generational trauma – the kind of pain that is so great that it is passed from parent to child.
But the story that we have before us, today, on this, the third Sunday of Advent, is a story of Generational Joy.
With the help of Mike and his grandchildren – three generations together on this altar – we lit the candle of Joy this morning.
Mary, in the fullness of her deep knowledge, speaks to us, not of generational trauma – but of generational joy.
And we are offered this possibility – we anticipate this reality – that, with the birth of Jesus, the light of joy is brought into the turning of the generations.
**
My father stood at the window overlooking the backyard.
He was wearing the threadbare blue nightgown that I’d come to associate with his cancer. Downstairs, my mother was playing an Arabesque by Debussy on the piano.
He had grown thin.
In his heyday my father had been a renowned Christian theologian. He’d risen to the top of his field—quite an achievement given his humble origins. Born in Tokyo in 1929, my father was a child in Japan during the Second World War. He was 14 years old when, on the night of March 9-10th 1945, American B-29’s swept the city with incendiary bombs. Japanese architecture was made mostly of paper and wood. The result was an immense vortex of fire.
Somehow my father survived this.
In 1951 – a mere six years after the end of the war, Dad came to the United States to study theology, of all things. He worked his way through Drew University cleaning toilets at Greystone Psychiatric Hospital, and went on to get his PhD at Princeton Theological Seminary where he met my mother.
Together they embarked on a missionary call to Northern Thailand, (where I was born) but he soon discovered he was more suited to scholarship, and by the 1970’s Dad became a leading voice in Asian and South East Asian Christian theology. We, his family, followed him as his career took him from Thailand, to Singapore, to New Zealand, and finally to New York City, where he walked into an endowed chair at Union Theological Seminary..
And yet, for all this achievement, at the end of his life he was plagued by regret.
“Sometimes I wonder what it was all for,” he said. “We speak of the Kingdom of God, but look at our world! Does religion have any real practical value in our violent world?”
“Doesn’t religion teach us compassion?” I said.
“Yes,” he said, but he sounded tired.
And then, after a moment he said:
“Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the gift religion gave to humanity was the end of war?”
Amen.