Holy Resilience

It is ever into a world torn asunder that faith is birthed.  Isaiah speaks to a desolate people, brutally slaughtered, hauled off to exile.  Sing us a song of Zion their captors taunted. “How can we sing the Lord’s song in this God-forsaken place,” they sobbed.”  No, they sat down by the waters of Babylon and wept.

We, like them live in a time of exile.  Death and destruction reign.  You know the places:  Gaza and the West Bank, Somalia, Sudan, Ukraine, the Congo, Russia, off the shores of Venezuela.  Gazing upon the ruination of our nation, its laws, its customs, its civility.  It has all been turned to an ash heap – reduced to a garish ballroom that dwarfs the People’s House – reduced to the lawless murder of hapless folks in small boats on the high seas in the Caribbean – reduced to our complicity in settler murder of Palestinians in Gaza and on the West Bank — reduced to a pastiche of our former constitutional order.  All by the most ignorant man to have ever held the office of president, a doddering old fool who can barely stay awake during his own meetings.  Attended by a corrupt, greedy and imbecilic cabal that is the laughing stock of much of the civilized world.  Yes!  Exile from all we have known and revered.  Exile from the America of youthful ideal.  Exile – strangers in our own land.

It Is into such distraught and barren times that Magnificat, the Song of Mary breaks through.  As I’ve mentioned, in Luke’s telling of the episode Mary is not some coddled, mild young thing who meekly accepts this angelic outrageous greeting.  It’s as if she takes one step back and tells that rude interloper, if this is the way it’s gonna be, hold my beer and watch this.  She then cuts loose with one of the most radical prophecies in all of scripture. 

Those on the top will soon find themselves on the bottom.  Those who have grabbed up all the goodies, will walk away with empty hands.  The powerful are confronted and confounded.  No garish, monster ballroom for them.  It will be the lame and the halt who will joyfully do-si-do to fiddle, banjo and mandolin out in the Rose Garden – the People’s Garden.

Yes, “He has showed with his arm;
        he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
He hath put down the mighty from their seat,
        and hath exalted the humble and meek.”

I just love the language of the King James version for this canticle.

And finally…
“He remembering his mercy hath holpen his servant Israel,
        as he promised to our forefathers, Abraham and his seed for ever.”

Mary, maybe a 12 or 14-year-old girl, the property of a father with the prerogative to marry her off to whomever and whatever age.  Yet, in Luke’s, telling no shrinking violet she.  No!  Brimful with prophetic righteousness.

And she will persevere through the worst that life can deal out, eventually weeping at the foot of a tree of torture as her son succumbs to a most agonizing death.  Holy Resilience, indeed.

Christmas each year is killed not by those radical liberals who want to banish it, but by saccharine sentimentality.  Its message of Good News is NOT for the timid or the lazy, the willfully ignorant.

It’s about God feeding the people with the nourishment that builds the soul, true manna.  Much more about manna than Macy’s.  Yeah, manna like the veggies of St. Francis Garden of Hope.  The sort of stuff that takes hard work.

It is into the desolate and rough places the actuality of hope breaks through.  That’s the Baptizer’s, that’s Mary’s message.  Hope, perceived through Holy Resilience.  Yes, Lord, we stand ready to be “holpened.”  NOW!

“Remarking on the occasion of Christmas, Thomas Merton once said, ‘Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for him, Christ comes uninvited.’  So it is with the true message of Advent. The very life of God takes flesh among us.  It is a scandal, an offense, a disruption to this world.”[1]

Mary is a part of that story of disruption to the very end, from the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Wedding at Cana, the Crucifixion and Resurrection appearances.  It is difficult to imagine a mother bearing more sorrow than Mary, yet she is a most resilient of women.  In the end, the disciple John is entrusted with Mary’s care, Jesus’ last wish from the cross.

Holy Resilience is a gift of the Spirit.  It is what keeps the community of Faith true to it’s calling.  It is our North Star. It’s easy for good intentions to dissipate under the pressures of modern tedium and annoyance.  Let me tell you how.

The other day at Cardenas Market, I completely lost it in the checkout line.  Some woman ahead of me was cashing in vouchers or something.  She must have 20 or 30 or so of them, and for each one the clerk had to go through a big rigmarole with the register.

It was taking forever.  We waited minutes and more minutes.  Customers behind me began moving to the adjacent line.  It seemed so inconsiderate that this woman should be wasting some 20 minutes of everybody’s time – no, change that – of MY time.  I said a few snide things, huffed and puffed.  Finally, we were checked out.  I felt rather sheepish when, afterward, my home health aide Ileen told me that all those receipts and whatever were for a homeless project.

How long, O Lord, must we wait for peace to settle into our hearts, into MY heart?   My resilience had completely evaporated in those few moments behind this woman doing a righteous deed for some destitute homeless folks.

Pastor Heidi Neumark, one of my favorites, tells of a girl’s birthday party around the time of Advent in New York City.[2]

By the time she arrived with her two children the festivities were already under way.  When they entered the house, they were confronted by Tweety Birds, scores of them everywhere.  On the napkins, on balloons, plates, the cake, and center stage, a big Tweety Bird piñata.  Heidi had taken her children because the mother, Marta, was their favorite baby-sitter.  It was the first birthday party for Marta’s baby and it was to be the baby’s baptism.

The children were crowding around the piñata, eager to take a whack at it.  Eager to bash it to pieces and grab as much candy as they could hold in their small hands.

Marta’s one brother was absent, serving time in jail and no one had seen her other brother, 16-year-old Christian.  Va y viene, he comes and goes.

In the middle of the chaos, Christian walks in, baggy red pants and a red sweatshirt.  Hanging out of a back pocket was a red bandana.  Christian had joined the Bloods and he was flashing their colors.

This family had for some time teetered on the edge.  Their mother was strung out on drugs, and the three children had been raised by an elderly grandmother who could barely keep up with them.

When Christian’s own mother died of AIDS, he was 15.  “He sat slouched with his face in his hands, crying uncontrollably through the entire funeral, Heidi recalls.”  It was after that he had joined the Bloods.

Seeing Pastor Heidi, he comes over, gives her a hug and a kiss.  In her arms he, always a slender boy, seemed so frail.  That is why, now, he is most likely armed.  “Young, dangerous and endangered,” she remembers thinking.[3]

It is soon time to leave.  On the way home, Heidi and her children pass two groups of teenagers.  They are walking towards a fight that’s about to explode between the two.  She pulls her children in tighter and quickly walks around the kids.  She doesn’t know the neighborhood and these are not kids she knows.  Heidi and her children hurry to their car.

She notes, once they are safely home and the children in their beds, that tomorrow will be the first Sunday of Advent.  After putting out the Advent decorations – calendars, the wreath of candles, the lion and lamb and a bowl of stars – each one bearing a prayer for the person named on it (Yes, Marta and her family are inscribed on one of those stars) – Heidi takes a few minutes to herself to reflect on the reading for that Sunday from Isaiah 40.

“Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places plain.”

In the stillness of the night, she wonders when this might be.  In the daily grind of violence of her large city, God seems so absent.  For people like Marta and her family, where are the signs of that promise?

Yet, in the resilience of Mary, in the resilience of all mothers like Marta, that the promise finds fulfillment.  The testimony of the Mothers of the Desaparecidos in Chile and Argentine, their resilience each week in the central squares of those nations – their silent resilience is the sacramental sign of this hidden God’s presence.  Their sorrow is the manger in which the Christ Child is born.   Holy Resilience his swaddling. Where is this Christ born?  His birth is in those places where we are weak and vulnerable.  Those places where we are not so full of ourselves — those places, where in the silence of the night, unbidden prayer breaks through:  O Come, O Come Emannuel.  Enter into our brokenness.  Come, O Advent Promise, and shine forth, burning brightly as once did that Epiphany Star, pointing the way. Enlightening our coming days, Marta’s coming days, and the coming days of a world that has sorely lost its way.  Come quickly.  Come, quickly, Lord Jesus.  This we pray.  Amen

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[1] Jim Wallis, “The Low Estate of His Handmaiden,” Sojourners, December, 1976.

[2] Heidi Neumark, God’s Absence in Advent, Christian Century December 5, 2001.

[3] Ibid.

December 14, 2025

Third Sunday in Advent

Isaiah 35:1-10 Psalm 146:4-9
The Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55); Gospel: Matthew 11:2-11