Mary’s Canticle, what we sang during our psalm today, might be familiar to those of you who have ever worshipped at evening prayer, like during Lent. It is a song of justice - Mary, a young woman living under the oppression of the Roman Empire, is given the honour of bearing the Son of God - a title reserved for the Roman Emperor. Mary is the central figure in what we might call a religious Cinderella story - a poor girl lifted out of her meagre surroundings to become high royalty - and she recognizes it. And so she sings this beautiful hymn about God’s commitment to justice. God scatters the proud, brings down the powerful and lifts up the lowly, feeds the hungry and sends the rich away because they’ve already had their fill. For God, justice is about equality - justice is about everybody having the same. The same access to power, the same amount of food, even the same access to God. The priest Zechariah, John the Baptist’s father from a few weeks ago, has access to God in the Temple, while Elizabeth, a woman and therefore never *ever* allowed to become a priest, is filled with the Holy Spirit. Did you notice that? Before Saint Paul gives us the problematic verses that women shouldn’t speak up in church, God fills Elizabeth with the Holy Spirit and makes this woman the first human to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ coming into the world. God’s justice is about equality - God’s justice is about everyone being treated as all equally God’s children - in God’s eyes, we are each equally precious.
This justice is what we’re waiting for all throughout Advent. We look forward to the day when Christ will come again, and when the Kingdom of God will reign on earth. We say, “Come, Lord Jesus,” and we long for justice. Because the injustice in our world is staggering. The ways in which people are treated as unequal to one another, the ways in which people are categorized and sorted into different levels of acceptance is overwhelming. People are treated differently based on the colour of their skin or what country they’re from, on their gender, on their sexual orientation, on their religion, on their income, on their level of education, on their age. The world is not a place of justice, and so we wait, praying that Christ will come again and that we will one day see God’s justice on earth.
But here’s an interesting thing. Did you catch the tense of Mary’s Canticle? It’s entirely past tense. God has done great things, God has scattered the proud, God has brought down the powerful and lifted up the lowly, God has filled the hungry and sent the rich away empty, God has helped Israel. We often speak of God’s justice as something that will happen in the future, something we are waiting for, but Mary here is speaking of God’s justice as something that has already happened. And indeed, we celebrate Christmas because something marvelous did happen - Jesus Christ was born, and he did die, and he was raised. And in his life, death, and resurrection, he opened to us the way of everlasting life, as we say in Communion. God has already changed the world for us, God has already established justice. Our New Testament reading from Hebrews says it quite clearly, “it is by God’s will that we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.” We are sitting around waiting for God’s justice to come, when it turns out God’s justice is already here. We are all already equal - we are all already created in the image of God, we are all already recipients of God’s mercy and forgiveness, we are all already equally worthy in God’s eyes here on earth.
But, clearly, there’s a problem. We certainly don’t act like God’s justice is already here. We wait and wait for someone to make things right, rather than living as if things are right. We see injustice in the world and we sigh and we lament and we pray for God to make things better, but we don’t step up and proclaim that people being treated differently from other people is against what God wants, we don’t act to reclaim God’s kingdom of justice. We just wait. Why?
I think that one of the biggest reasons we are still waiting for justice rather than living as if it is already here is because we see ourselves as those in need of justice rather than those stopping it from coming. We see ourselves as victims of injustice rather than perpetrators of it. When we hear Mary’s canticle, and when we hear of the different ways in which the lowly and the hungry and the poor have been oppressed, or the ways that different people have been deemed less deserving than others, we nod our heads and say, “Oh, yes, I’ve felt that too.” And that’s fine, because most of us have been treated worse than those around us from time to time. But how often do we hear Mary’s canticle and hear about the proud and the rich and those who are full, and think, “Oh yes, that’s me?” How often do we hear about people being treated unequally and say, “Oh, I’m usually treated better than others?” While it is true that we have all experienced discrimination at some point in our lives, it is also true that we have all experienced what I would call “privilege” as well. There have been times when we have been treated better than others because of our skin colour, or gender, or our religion, or level of education, or age. And at those times when we have been treated better, how often did we reach down and help those below us?
One of the reasons that there is such a gap between the justice that God has already brought, which Mary sang about, and what we see in the world is that we spend so much time waiting for God’s kingdom to arrive that we neglect to act as if it were already here. We are so busy looking at the ways in which we are discriminated against that we are blind to the ways in which we discriminate against others. Because we do - we open our doors to certain people, but not to others. We welcome some people into our homes, and our hearts, and our churches, but not others. We help some groups of people but not others. We have compassion for the misfortune of some people, but not others. We are happy to act for justice for some people, but not for others. God has already acted for justice for the entire world, and we’re here dragging our feet, making excuses for why some people are worthy of our help but not others. We’re waiting for God to bring justice, and God is waiting for us to catch up to what God has already done.
But God does catch us up. God does open our eyes to see the justice that God has introduced to the world and shows us how we might participate in it. We’ve been reading from the letter of Hebrews for our second reading lately, and these readings talk about the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ making the world holy. Most often, the body of Jesus Christ has been interpreted to mean his literal body. That his death on the cross makes the world holy. But there is another interpretation - that the body of Jesus Christ means the body and blood that we receive in Holy Communion. That it is Holy Communion that makes the world holy. Communion is the great moment of justice in our world - it is the moment when God opens our eyes most fully to see that God’s kingdom is already here, that God has already done great things, and that we do not need to continue waiting for Christ to come, because Christ is here. Communion is God’s perfect justice: all are welcome forward and no one is turned away. Everyone receives the blessing of God’s grace - old, young, rich, poor, healthy, sick, men, women, gay, straight, proud, humble, saint, sinner, oppressed, oppressors, all colours and languages and education levels and capabilities. When we come forward to Holy Communion, we are each one of us welcomed by God to this moment, and we each receive the same full blessing and forgiveness and grace as the person next to us. God does not give some people more forgiveness than others, or some less blessing than others, and so when we come forward to this rail, and receive the body and blood of Christ given “for you,” we are participating in God’s kingdom, we are receiving the justice that we are meant to embody in the world. God calls us forward to receive Christ and then sends us out into the world to treat others in exactly the same way. To welcome them and to give them our lives, whether they are old or young, rich or poor, healthy or sick, men or women, gay or straight, no matter their skin colour or their language or their income or their education. When you have received the taste of God’s kingdom at the rail, and you stand up and turn around, you face the doors at the back of the church, doors that lead us out into the world, and when we walk out those doors we carry within us the body and blood of Christ, and so we carry God’s justice out into the world with us. We no longer wait for Christ to come to make the world better, we no longer cry out for God’s justice, we allow Christ to work within us to make the world better now, we allow Christ to use our voices to demand justice and to enact justice wherever we are.
In Advent we have been praying, “Come, Lord Jesus,” and Jesus is now saying, “Come on, I’m already here!” So as we celebrate this last Sunday in Advent, with our eyes to Christmas Eve on Thursday, let us come forward with eagerness and thanksgiving to experience God’s justice in Communion, and say with Mary, “my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour!” Thanks be to God. Amen.
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