Joy

Luke 1:39 In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, 40 where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. 41 When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leapt in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit 42 and exclaimed with a loud cry, ‘Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. 43 And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? 44 For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leapt for joy. 45 And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfilment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.’

46 And Mary said,

‘My soul magnifies the Lord,

47 and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour,

48 for he has looked with favour on the lowliness of his servant.    Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;

49 for the Mighty One has done great things for me,    and holy is his name.

50 His mercy is for those who fear him    from generation to generation.

51 He has shown strength with his arm;    he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.

52 He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,    and lifted up the lowly;

53 he has filled the hungry with good things,    and sent the rich away empty.

54 He has helped his servant Israel,    in remembrance of his mercy,

55 according to the promise he made to our ancestors,    to Abraham and to his descendants for ever.’

I have this glitch in my memory where I always think that Mary’s song in this passage, the Magnificat, comes after the angel tells her she’s going to give birth to the Messiah, and every year the actual story reminds me that it’s not in response to the angel, but to her older cousin Elizabeth. And I think that’s actually really interesting. This would be a different story, and the song would be different, I think, if it came on the heels of the supernatural encounter. I think it matters that Mary’s defiance and hope and ultimately, her joy, are a direct response to Elizabeth seeing her and responding with her own joy at Mary’s news. Elizabeth’s joy elicits Mary’s song.

The reason I think that’s important is that it’s one thing to experience joy in a spiritual or existential moment; it’s one thing to believe something in your heart about what’s happening in your life, but it’s another thing to go out into your community, among the people around you, and explain your revelation to them. Many of us have had experiences like this, right? It’s one thing to be honest with yourself about your gender identity or sexuality; it’s something else entirely to come out to others.

Or, I remember before Jubilee existed, I had this idea for a church built around acts of liberation and solidarity, but it was something I kept to myself, my own private dream (I thought), but a dream that was always with me. Then one day, in the fall of 2018, when it was clear that Ephesus Baptist had come to the end of its life, I went and got lunch with Larry Hovis, the head of CBF North Carolina, to ask him if he knew of any church plants that might want to take over the building. In my mind, that meeting was me giving up after 3 years of trying to bring Ephesus back. While we were talking, Larry asked if I had any other ideas, and there was this split second where I was like, “Should I say it?” Larry’s really generous and kind, but he’s the head of this whole organization, he doesn’t have time for some yahoo’s daydreaming, but at that point I didn’t really have anything to lose, so I went ahead and told him about this idea to re-start, to build something new in the shell of the old, and I braced for him to tell me how hard or impractical or naive that was.

But he said, “That’s really interesting. Why don’t you do that?”

And all the sudden, him saying that made it real for me.

Maybe it wasn’t a dream, maybe it was the Spirit of God guiding me…but to realize that, I needed someone to affirm it.

I’ll never forget how excited I was when I got in the car to drive back to Durham. Something had opened up, some fire had caught, where for several months I’d only seen walls closing in around me, all of the sudden there was an opening and a path and a destination in front of me and I couldn’t wait to get going. I think that was joy. And everything that’s followed—the solidarity and safety this community has created with and for women and LGBTQ+ people; the way our space has become a hub for artists and labor organizers and tenant organizers and organizers for justice in Palestine; the way we’ve payed off tens of thousands of dollars in debts so people could get their insulin or psyche meds or make rent or keep the heat on; the way we got “stimulus” funds to undocumented families whom the government wasn’t helping during lockdown; the way we raised funds last year that cancelled $8 million of medical debt for 2000+ of our neighbors—all of that goes back to that moment of joy, to one person nervously sharing something with another,  expecting to be rebuffed, only for that second person to affirm them.

In our scripture this morning, Mary’s in this situation where she’s living in a highly patriarchal world with some pretty specific norms around pregnancy and very little social safety net to speak of for people who break those norms, and she’s all of the sudden pregnant even though she’s not married. Last week we read that her fiancé Joseph is thinking about breaking off the engagement and sending her away. It might even be the case that that’s the background for this trip to go stay with her cousin—Joseph could be back home deciding what to do. So she’s in a really precarious spot. And her cousin is much older than her; I’m imagining Elizabeth being more like the very religious aunt than a sister or someone Mary grew up with thinking of as a peer.

I wonder if Mary’s worried about what Elizabeth is going to say, if she thinks she knows how that conversation’s gonna go; if while she’s on the road she’s anticipating how she’s gonna respond to Elizabeth’s questions; if she can already hear Elizabeth saying, “How could you let this happen? How could you be so irresponsible? I’m so disappointed in you, Mary.” It’s not hard to imagine that conversation going poorly.

So much of our lives plays out according to scripts. These implicit, subliminal, automatic associations. We can’t help anticipating how things are gonna go. If I say peanut butter, you think jelly. If I say “teen pregnancy,” something in a lot of us goes, “Oh that’s not ideal.” And these scripts aren’t just personal. They’re the way the social, the structural, the political, needle their values into our psychology. This is how racism and sexism and homophobia function on an individual level, through these automatic associations. These scripts are how the powers of this world deputize us to reinforce the world as it is, so that we’re upholding the status quo without even thinking about what we’re doing because it’s a part of our thoughts, it’s a part of our reactions. What we call “the world” is closer to us than we are to ourselves.

Even in places like church which we want to believe offers some different ways of life, we find these scripts shaping how we live. Another world is possible, but the bills are still due; Jesus is risen, but we still have a budget. We offer up our hopes, but we think we know how things are actually going to go. There are these implicit realities that we feel like we have to tip our caps to, we have to give the devil his due, it’s the cost of doing business, etc. We’re constantly having to negotiate with the HR rep or the vice principal or the disappointed father in our brains.

I’m afraid that sometimes it seems like our only hope is a more friendly performance of the script. I wonder if that’s why life in our world often feels so dreary. Like maybe we can find some pleasure in rearranging the deck chairs, but we’re still on the Titanic. We can hear the good news from the angel, but we still know how the world around us is going to respond, and with all due respect to the angel, we still have to live in the world. And so many of us stop speaking our hopes, we let them stay daydreams, we assume there’s no room in the world for what we really need because it doesn’t follow the script.

That’s why it’s so interesting to me that Mary’s song comes in response not to the angel, but to Elizabeth. Because in that moment, when Elizabeth could shame Mary, could refuse to give her the benefit of the doubt, could lose sight of her behind the traditional scripts of how young girls should behave, Elizabeth goes off script. Elizabeth not only welcomes Mary, but she rejoices at the sight of her. Elizabeth recognizes her for who she is. She doesn’t say, “Yeah right, I know how the world works, I know how people get pregnant, Mary!” She says, “This is something new, how wonderful!”

That’s when Mary bursts into song, when Elizabeth refuses the script and truly sees her for who she is. That’s what allows Mary to imagine God lifting up the lowly and casting down the kings from their thrones, feeding the poor and sending the rich away empty, telling the HR reps in our heads that they can let themselves go, the disappointed parents in our heads that they can ground themselves, the scriptwriters in our heads that the Spirit is taking over and we’re gonna tell a different story now. That’s what joy looks like, not just a friendlier style that smiles while it sticks the knife in, but a different reality breaking in, interrupting the scripts of this world to show grace. Joy is the upsurge of relief and courage we come to know when we see this world cracking and grace shining through. Mary can sing of those things because Elizabeth’s improvisation already gave her a glimpse of them.

That means we can bring each other joy by showing each other grace, too. And we can prepare to show grace by paying attention to our reactions, to our instincts, to our default modes when we’re stressed or scared or worried. If this world’s scripts are subliminal then we have to ask for the help of the Holy Spirit, who’s also closer to us than we are to ourselves, to help us recognize those habits. The analogy that I always think about with this kind of stuff is driving a car, or particularly what to do when you lose control of a car and start to spin. Most people’s instinct in that situation is to slow down, so they hit the breaks. Everything in us says that’s the safest thing to do. But it turns out that is actually the most dangerous thing to do: the car is spinning because there’s not enough weight on the back tires, and hitting the brakes shifts the weight of the car forward, which only makes things worse. So when you’re losing control, the safest thing, the only thing that will save you, is to do exactly the opposite of what feels comfortable, and hit the gas to shift the car’s weight onto the back wheels.

What are your instincts when you’re stressed? When you feel like you’re losing control or things aren’t going how they should? Is it to grip harder and find something (or someone) you can control? Is it to follow the rules even more closely because the rules are supposed to keep things in place and at least you can know you’re good because you followed them? Is your instinct to protect yourself by disappearing, by shying away from contact or connection because you can’t bear the shame to be seen, even or maybe even especially by friendly eyes? I’m not saying never trust your instincts. I am saying to be aware of those instincts so you can ask if they’re really serving you. Everybody can be gracious when they feel like they have a handle on life. It’s when we feel out of control that the scripts start taking over, that we let people disappear behind those scripts, because the scripts feel certain and safe and familiar.

But we can choose to live differently, we can choose to break the scripts. We can practice improvising and recognizing each other. So many of us live our lives waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting for this world to give us another reminder that we’re on our own. But it doesn’t have to be that way. At the very least not here. We come to church to remind each other that we’re not good and loved and worthy because our lives follow the script. You’re just good and loved and worthy because you bear the image of God, because you’re here. You’re not a burden, you’re not a problem, you’re not a cog in a corporate machine, disposable as soon as you get a little squeaky. You are blessed. We meet here each other to remind one another that you’re very presence is a blessing. We’re here to greet each other like Elizabeth greets Mary. And in that greeting, in that grace, we catch a glimpse of powers falling from the thrones, we catch a glimpse of the lowly rising up, we catch a glimpse of the strength of God’s arm and know it’s more real than the scripts of this world. We catch a glimpse of blessing. And we rejoice. Amen.