How to sing a hard, strong love song

 

Luke 1: 39-55
New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE
December 22, 2024

Photo of a 12" x 15" patch sewn onto the back of my denim jacket with orange, yellow, and turquoise embroidery floss. Patch is black twill with white printing.  Woodcut print of the Magnificat with Mary in the center, fist raised, standing with her right foot on a skull over a serpent. "Cast down the mighty. Fill the hungry. Lift the lowly. Send the rich away." Art by Ben Wildflower

First, let me put your mind at ease. Well, sort of. Learning how to sing a hard, strong love song does not require you to sing well or on key. But it does require you to find your voice. More importantly, it requires you to love and to love deeply, which sometimes means telling your fear to take a backseat, even though your voice and your legs might shake.



Actor Angelina Jolie spent seven months training and learning how to sing opera for her role as renowned opera singer Maria Callas. She remarked how terribly nervous and shaky she was. She also said how therapeutic it was, saying “I wish everybody could know what you feel when you sing at the top of your voice and what can come out of your body.” After her mother died of cancer in 2007, Jolie felt like she had lost her voice. She said in an interview, “We all don’t realize different things that happen to us in our lives, we hold them in our bodies. Everything is locked somewhere just to help us keep going. And so, to really sing and to sing very fully, you have to unlock all of that.”



In this story of two pregnant cousins, for Elizabeth to be so full of the Holy Spirit and for Mary to sing what she sang, both of them had to find not only their voice but the voice of their people. Elizabeth’s husband, Zechariah, as yet cannot speak because he dared to ask the angel Gabriel for a sign and Joseph does not speak at all in the gospel of Luke. It is the women who give prophetic voice to the hopes of their people. And hope is one of those things we lock up inside us, we hold in our bodies just to help us keep going.



Almost twelve years ago, when I was searching for this church but had not yet found you, I was asked to sing a solo in a church choir anthem entitled “City Called Heaven” composed by Josephine Poelinitz. It’s an African American sorrow song, and we know how sorrow and love go hand in hand. Singing this song is like a gut punch. These are the lyrics:



I am a pilgrim, a poor pilgrim of sorrow
Left in this wild world, left in this wild world alone
Ain’t got no hope for tomorrow
I’m just trying to make it,
Make this city of heaven my home
Sometimes I’m tossed and I’m driven, Lord
Sometimes I just don’t know which way to turn
I heard of a city, a city called heaven
I’m trying to make it, make heaven my home



There were days during that search that were spiritually and emotionally demanding. I was on my church’s prayer list for two years. I kept a lot of my grief and sadness to myself, wanting to appear hopeful. To sing this song I had to take all the masks off. I practiced alone at home until I could sing the song without bursting into tears.



A hard, strong love song not only tells the truth but requires us to do the same. It was Dietrich Bonhoeffer who called the Magnificat, Mary’s love song, "a hard, strong song". This is from his Advent sermon in 1933, the same year Hitler came to power: “The song of Mary is the oldest Advent hymn. It is at once the most passionate, most vehement, one might even say the most revolutionary Advent hymn ever sung. This is not the gentle, tender, dreamy Mary whom we sometimes see in paintings; this is the passionate, powerful, proud, enthusiastic Mary who speaks out here. This song has none of the sweet, nostalgic, or even playful tones of some of our Christmas carols. It is instead a hard, strong, uncompromising song about bringing down rulers from their thrones and humbling the lords of this world, about the power of God and the powerlessness of humankind.”



If a love song should be anything, it should be uncompromising. With love, we’re either all in or we’re not.



A hard, strong love song reminds us of who we are and whose we are, that we belong to our beloved and they to us—in Mary’s song, we belong to God and to each other. The Torah—the first five books of Moses—was written as a foundation for Israelite life, to remind them of their identity, especially when God’s people were in exile. So too the gospels were written during a time of upheaval to answer the question, “Where did this Jesus raised from the dead come from?” Mark begins the story with John the Baptist and Jesus’ baptism. Matthew begins with the genealogy of Jesus and focuses more on Joseph’s role in the birth of Jesus. John goes all the way back before the creation, that the idea, the story of the Word made flesh was there at the very beginning.



Luke locates the story in the midst of empire and an oppressive occupying force, naming names as though he is putting people on notice. Mary and Elizabeth are the primary storytellers, with Mary singing a song that would have reminded Luke’s readers of Hannah, the mother of Samuel. Mary sings of her hopes in the past tense, as though she is remembering what God has already done. The presence of this child within her is the sign that God will accomplish what has been long promised: the mighty will be cast down, the lowly will be lifted up, the hungry filled with good things, and the rich sent away empty.



Like the long line of prophets before her, Mary’s song is a direct confrontation of those who wield power unjustly. Her words are so subversive that they have been banned in the last two centuries by at least three oppressive regimes. 19th century Baptist theologian Walter Rauschenbusch reminds us “…there has never been a conservative prophet. Prophets have never been called to conserve social orders that have stratified inequities of power and privilege and wealth; prophets have always been called to change them so all can have access to the fullest fruits of life."



To sing a hard, strong love song means unlocking what we’ve been holding onto, whether it’s grief or sadness, hope or fear, desire or need, and letting that fill our voices and our hearts and set us loose upon the world. Earlier this fall, when I first heard Mark Miller’s song “Ready for the Miracles”, I realized that I had been holding onto grief, like the last eight years of grief, and when I sang those words for the first time, it was like scales falling away from my eyes and from my heart. That’s why we’re singing this song in Advent and on Christmas Eve. Building affordable housing on our site might turn out to be the hardest, strongest love song this church will ever sing. And we will need our fullest voice, our hearts unlocked, and our love not only for one another but for another world that God is creating through us.



How do we sing a hard, strong love song? With everything we’ve got. Amen.

Benediction – enfleshed.com

Go forth, let your souls magnify God,
who expresses Herself through gentleness & friendship,
who topples empires and sets all beings free.