In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leapt in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud cry, ‘Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leapt for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfilment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.’ Luke 1.39-45

At Lectio Divina on Wednesday we reflected on this Gospel passage. Each of us chose a word or a phrase from the passage which resonated for us. I chose ‘went with haste.’ Joao chose ‘when I heard the sound of your greeting,’ and Ester chose ‘blessed is she who believed.’

Reflecting on each of those phrases gives a wonderful resonance to this very familiar account of Mary’s visit to Elizabeth. It’s  a tremendously tender picture, isn’t it, often reflected in artists’ visions of the story.

The readings today are hugely hopeful – as we approach Christmas, we are given the image of Mary and Elizabeth’s friendship and care for one another, and the triumphant Magnificat with its shout of hope and justice:

He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; He has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.

And I am glad of that hope! But, today, I want to focus on what makes the hope necessary – even vital – on the reality of the world into which, we believe, the infinite love of God was expressed through the birth of a baby.

You may remember Simeon’s prophecy in the temple, to Mary when she and Joseph take the baby Jesus – “This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed—and a sword will pierce your own soul too.”

I want to think about WHY we need the Christmas hope, the Christmas present, this midwinter celebration of the transformational power of love.

At Advent, traditionally, we reflect on the four last things – death, judgement, heaven and hell. Here at St Andrew’s we haven’t quite done that – we have focused on the nature of time, on prayer, and on justice – but today I want to focus fair and square on the darkness into which we believe the light has come.

I want to focus on the need for us to grieve, and to lament. Remembering that Jesus came for the falling and rising of many – and that a sword pierced Mary’s own soul too.

Lament is something which, perhaps, we as Anglicans aren’t very good at. I know that I tend to take a relentlessly optimistic approach, looking on the bright side and sometimes denying the reality of pain which surrounds us. And, with Christmas already bursting out around us, it feels hard and perhaps cruel to want to plunge back into the darkness.

But there is good authority for it, from the Old Testament prophets – from Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Malachi and so many others. Jeremiah, especially. Jeremiah, who lived in a time of exile and of great grief, when Israel had been conquered and taken captive. According to the great theologian Walter Bruegemann:

Jeremiah lived in a time of turmoil. He believed it was a time of dying. He envisioned the death of a culture, a society, a tradition. What pained him even more was the failure of his contemporaries to notice, to care, to acknowledge or to admit… Jeremiah’s testimony is a tale of grief. The book of Jeremiah is a meditation on grief and on great loss.

We don’t often read Jeremiah, and when we do, my heart tends to sink. He’s so depressing.

But my heart is being forced open, at the moment, by the importance of acknowledging openly and clearly the pain and the loss and the destruction and the hardships which surround us.

We can live in denial – and much of the time we do. Denial is one option: but acknowledgement is so important, and so real.

The course I am taking currently, on spiritual direction, included a talk last week on the work of Bruegemann and the prophets. Julie Dunstan, the course leader, said:

Against denial, the prophets, and especially Jeremiah, dared to express honestly the depth of sadness, rage, anger and loss in conversation with God and to the people; to complain, to say how overwhelming was the loss, how great the anxiety, how deep the fear.

There is so much to lament, at the moment. On a local level, the debasing of politics and the seemingly endless disruption of our lives due to COVID. The losses and sicknesses we are all experiencing.  The cruelty of the society we live in – homelessness, violence, hunger.

On a global level – global injustice – the exploitation of people in the Global South by us as rich nations, still pillaging and stealing through extraction and the financial system. And the heartbreaking stories of climate change, each more urgent than the last – unprecedented storms in the USA, the Samia people in Lapland unable to feed their reindeer…

Against denial, the prophets, and especially Jeremiah, dared to express honestly the depth of sadness, rage, anger and loss in conversation with God and to the people; to complain, to say how overwhelming was the loss, how great the anxiety, how deep the fear.

There is a growing movement calling for climate lament, which until now I have tended to shy away from: but I am beginning to realise how important it is. Here is a song of lament from Resound Worship:

To lament is to turn towards the people who are suffering: to be in solidarity alongside them, as Rowan Williams magnificently explains in a lecture he gave a few weeks ago.  Genuinely to lament is to be part of the web of pain and exploitation and destruction which surrounds us. It is to open our hands to the truth of pain, and to allow us to hear the cry of the poor, the cry of exiles and migrants.  By the rivers of Babylon , there we wept, when we remembered Zion. How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?

But, thankfully,  it doesn’t stop there. As Julie goes on to say:

To know ourselves in a culture that in so many ways contradicts God’s ways, and to allow ourselves to feel about this, in prayer and in the company of others, instead of being in denial, enables us perhaps to  turn our pain into faith and our despair into new hope for God’s saving grace.

To grieve is to allow our hearts to be broken and to return to our true identity in God.   This reality also suggests that our hearts open more truly to the people in our world who experience geographical exile, dispossession and powerlessness.  It puts us in communion with all those who suffer.

And that brings us into the heart of the Christmas story. It opens us up to the mystery of the incarnation, which we celebrate on Christmas Day every year.

Because it is the lament of God, the grief of God at the pain of the world, which led God to take the step of becoming human, of becoming fully and completely part of the grief and the pain which is all around us and within us.

Love breaks in. Heaven is seen on earth. The kingdom of love is among us. Emmanuel, God with us!

So Christmas is not about Pollyannish optimism, or some bland good wishes for the future. It’s about a real, gritty acknowledgement of the Four Last Things – but also about the hope, the belief, the confidence that this too shall pass, that the light WILL shine in the darkness, that Love WILL come down at Christmas and that the herald angels WILL sing glory to the new born king!

I want to finish by paying tribute to one of the great thinkers and philosophers of the last fifty years, who sadly died earlier this week. bell hooks: a spiritual guide, an activist passionate for justice, a powerful Black female voice bringing hope and wisdom to thousands of people through her unflinching and compassionate writings and teachings, someone who knew a lot about lament and grief. We grieve her passing as we grieve so much: but, to end this sermon, I want to share with you something from the end of her great book “All About Love.”  It comes at the end of her chapter on death – which coincides with my emphasis in today’s sermon on grief and lament.

Accepting death with love means we embrace the reality of the unexpected, of experiences over which we have no control. Love empowers us to surrender. We do not need to have endless anxiety and worry about whether we will fulfil our goals or plans. Death is always there to remind us that our plans are transitory. By learning to love, [and I would add, to grieve, to lament] we learn to accept change. Without change, we cannot grow. Our will to grow in spirit and truth is how we stand before life and death, ready to choose life.