music — Andy James

Why I Sing: Brahms Requiem

January 29, 2017 By Andy James

This afternoon, I will join with over 150 voices of the North Carolina Master Chorale to sing Johannes Brahms’ Ein deutsches Requiem. This is my first time to perform this beloved masterpiece, though I have heard recordings of it many times before over the years. This piece has a storied history of performance over the century and half since its composition, but I most remember the quickly-organized performance by the New York Philharmonic on September 20, 2001, in memory of the victims of the attack on the World Trade Center in New York City just nine days earlier.

The text chosen by Brahms for Ein deutsches Requiem is not that of the traditional requiem mass but rather of biblical texts meant to offer comfort to the living. In these days of conflict and strife, words like these are all the more important to sing and share. Sometimes the words we sing and the music that makes them live are certainly enough, but today, in light of the dark clouds gathering around us, the walls being built to keep people from finding safety and hope, and the uncertainty of the coming days, I feel like I need to say a bit more about why I sing this piece today.

Today I sing for family and friends who have died, for the gift of their lives in shaping mine, and for the memories that continue to flow.

Today I sing for the victims of terrorism, on 9/11 and before and beyond, for those whose lives were cut short by violence of every sort.

Today I sing for armed forces everywhere, for police officers and firefighters and EMTs, for those who work every day to protect us and lead us and guide us.

Today I sing for government officials in my own nation and around the world who work for peace and goodwill and cooperation that sustains the fullness of life.

Today I sing for those who long for peace, even a peace that looks different from what I have come envision through my own prayer and study.

Today I sing for all who mourn death in so many ways, particularly those whose loved ones have been killed by injustice, terrorism, war, poverty, strife, and heartbreak.

Today I sing for a Church that does its best to sing for others, even though it sometimes falls short, and for my own church that is not afraid to speak up for the vulnerable and oppressed.

Today I sing for those who are afraid and allow themselves to live in fear, for those who have allowed violence to win the day by seeking vengeance, for those who seek something different but know no other way that the discord we have known and sown.

Today I sing for refugees and displaced persons everywhere, for their immediate comfort and safety, for their longing to return home, for their hope of some way out of the difficult and challenging days that they face.

Today I sing for those we are called to welcome as guests in our midst, for the stranger who knocks at our door, for the person on the side of the road who needs our help, and for those who reach out and respond in hope.

Today I sing for people who have been singled out by the world as different in one way or another, for people of color, for LGBTQ persons, for immigrants and migrants, for Muslims and Jews and Christians, for all those who need to know that God loves them and need to feel that divine love expressed in human affection.

Today I sing for my sisters and brothers who proclaim the gospel each and every day, whether they be Christian or Jewish or Muslim or other or claim no faith at all, whether they be ordained or not, whether they they use words or not.

Today I sing for all those who show that God’s love cannot and will not be limited by any limit of our human minds.

And today I sing for a new heaven and a new earth, as the little work I can do today to make a new and different way visible in the here and now, for the power of God to mold us and shape us and transform us and make us new.

Wherever you are, however you raise your voice, I hope you will sing too.

Glory to God

October 20, 2013 By Andy James

a sermon on Psalm 100
preached on October 20, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

I can’t imagine life without music. I know this isn’t the case for everyone—maybe it just comes from being born into a family where music was important, from being surrounded by music in church from a very early age, or from all the piano lessons, band practices, and choir rehearsals that filled my childhood years! Whatever the reasons, the incredible gift of sound and song is an indelible part of my days.

I keep finding that when music is fully and completely in my life, something about me is different. I can’t tell you how many people have told me how much I am different over the last year since I joined the New Amsterdam Singers, and I myself can feel it. I can even feel it right now simply because I’ve had to miss two consecutive weeks of rehearsals! There is simply something very special about making music with other people, so much so that there is even scientific evidence that something changes in our brains when we sing together!

And so it is with the church, too. Something is different when we sing together. Even though we are not the largest congregation and don’t normally have a choir to lead us in song, we have an incredible gift of music in our life together—and not just because of Julie’s talents that she so willingly shares, my own love of music, or even our wonderful guests who enrich our celebration and hymnal dedication today. Something happens each and every time we lift our voices in response to the psalmist’s command: “Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth.” As I say often, I’m very glad for this exhortation, for it doesn’t urge us to make a beautiful noise or sing a familiar song—it instructs us to make a joyful noise, whatever that may be.

This joyful noise is the beginning of our worship of God. We bring our songs of praise and thanksgiving, our recognitions of God’s wondrous creation in our lives, our hope of God’s continuing presence among us, and our confidence in God’s steadfast love and faithfulness. We “come into God’s presence with singing” and make it clear that all our praise is directed to God. All our songs—new and old, in languages familiar and unfamiliar, simple and complex, whatever the season or occasion—all our songs give thanks to God.

And so today we celebrate this gift of song, not just for those who love to sing but for all the earth, not just for those who can carry a tune beautifully but for those who think they can carry no tune at all, not just when we sing out of these new books but when we offer the songs of our hearts to God. The songs we share in this place can fill the role of nearly everything we do together: offering praise, expressing confession, sharing the word, showing concern for others, calling for justice and peace, gathering us at font and table, and sending us out to live out God’s new creation in the world. The songs we share in this place can express the depth and breadth of human emotion: the joy and excitement of new life, the challenges of difficult days, the laments of pain and suffering and death, and the hope of something more yet to come. And the songs we share in this place tell the great stories of our faith: the joy offered to the world in birth and life of Jesus, the wondrous love shown in his suffering and death, the joyous alleluias that emerge with in the light of the empty tomb, the amazing grace that shows us the depth of God’s mercy, and the love divine, all loves excelling, that sustains us each and every day.

So as we dedicate these new books of song today, as we lift up our voices to sing “glory to God,” may we not ever imagine life without music but instead make a joyful noise to the Lord and declare with heart and voice God’s goodness, steadfast love, and faithfulness as we raise our songs and hymns and spiritual songs to God in this place until we join with angels and saints and all creation to sing God’s praise forever and ever. Glory to God, now and always! Amen.

Songs for the Seasons of Life

July 21, 2013 By Andy James

In lieu of a sermon for July 21, I asked church members in advance to submit their three favorite hymns, including a few words about why each was particularly memorable. I then assembled a number of the selections into a hymnsing, with these favorite hymns tied together with a few words under the theme “Songs for the Seasons of Life.” So, since I usually post sermons here, I figured I might also share these hymns and words here as well!

Call to Worship (from Psalm 71:17-18, 20, 23)

O God, from my youth you have taught me,
and still I proclaim your wondrous deeds.
So even to old age and gray hairs, O God, do not forsake me;
until I proclaim your might to all the generations to come.
You who have made me see many troubles and calamities will revive me again;
from the depths of the earth you will bring me up again.
My lips will shout for joy
and sing praise to you!

Creation and Birth

Hymn: “God Is Here!”

God is indeed here in our midst as we worship and sing praise.
God has been with us from the beginning of time,
and from the beginning of our lives God has called us to lift our voices in thanksgiving.

Throughout all our lives, God’s presence surrounds us.
The psalmist wonders aloud:

Where can I go from your spirit?
Or where can I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there;
if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.
If I take the wings of the morning
and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me,
and your right hand shall hold me fast.
If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me,
and the light around me become night,”
even the darkness is not dark to you;
the night is as bright as the day,
for darkness is as light to you.

For it was you who formed my inward parts;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wonderful are your works;
that I know very well.

The hymns that sustain us in our faith remind us of these things:
that in life and in death we belong to God,
that all creation joins in awesome wonder
to consider the breadth and depth of God’s love,
that the stars, the rolling thunder, the woods and forest glades sing of God’s praise,
and that all creation lifts its voice to sing, “How great Thou art!”

Hymn: “How Great Thou Art” (v. 1-2)

Childhood: Growing in God’s Love

From our earliest days, we come to know the breadth and depth of God’s love.
The songs we sing as children echo throughout our lives
and remind us in every season of life that Jesus loves each and every one of us.
So many of our favorite hymns begin in childhood experiences,
in those transformative early moments of faith
where our lives are marked with words that proclaim the wonder of God’s love,

This is no wonder,
for in a day and age when children were to be neither seen nor heard,
when those who followed him tried to turn away children who sought to touch him,
Jesus spoke up and welcomed the children into his midst:

Let the little children come to me, and do not stop them;
for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs.
Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.

The hymns that mark our days remind us that God loves us,
however old or young we may be,
and give us strength to proclaim all our days,
“Yes, Jesus loves me.”

Hymn: “Jesus Loves Me” (v. 1)

Hymn: “Fairest Lord Jesus” (v. 1 & 4)

Passing the Peace

All honor, praise, and glory, belong to Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace,
who steps into our world and proclaims peace beyond understanding
and invites us to share it with one another and all the world.
May the peace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all.
And also with you.

A Lifetime of Commitment

As we grow up in the faith and mature into the followers of Christ that God invites us to be,
God calls us to make commitments to show God’s love in our lives and in our world.
The prophet Isaiah heard the voice of God calling out to him:

Whom shall I send,
and who will go for us?

He could say nothing more than these simple words:

Here am I; send me!

Over and over again, God calls us to respond in our lives
and show the fullness of God’s love to everyone we meet.
The hymns that sustain us in our faith
give us words to express our response to God’s call,
to cry out, “Here I am, Lord; send me;”
to journey beyond our hopes and our fears and our dreams
to express the wonder of God’s grace,
and to stand up and follow in the challenging path of Jesus each and every day.

Hymn: “Here I Am, Lord” (v. 1)

Hymn: “Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus” (v. 1-2)

Offering

Just as God calls us to offer our lives in God’s service,
so God invites us to bring the fullness of our gifts before God,
for all that we have and all that we are comes from God,
and we can respond in faith and hope and joy all our days
as we proclaim that joy to the world.

So let us now bring the gifts of our lives before God
as we gather our tithes and offerings.

Doxology: “Joy to the World!” (v. 1)

Prayer of Thanksgiving

God’s Presence in the Challenges of Our Days

Amidst all the joy that we see in our world,
we know that there are still challenges in our lives.
Day after day, we face difficulty and strife head on,
whether in the darkness of our lives
or in the challenges of living in changing times.
The psalmist knew these moments well and cried out,

How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
How long must I bear pain in my soul,
and have sorrow in my heart all day long?
How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?

Even so, he also knew that this was not the last word,
that God would transform his mourning into dancing
and would guide him into new life:

But I trusted in your steadfast love;
my heart shall rejoice in your salvation.
I will sing to the Lord,
because he has dealt bountifully with me.

And so we too sing to the Lord,
confident of God’s presence in times of joy and sorrow,
trusting that we will be lifted up as on eagles’ wings
and that we have nothing to dread or fear
when we lean on the everlasting arms.

Hymn: “On Eagles’ Wings”

Hymn: “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” (v. 1, 3)

Joys and Concerns of the Congregation

Prayers of the People and The Lord’s Prayer

Faithfulness Along the Journey

All along life’s journey,
the songs that sustain us in our faith
show us new horizons of God’s love in our lives.
We find God inviting us to open our eyes to new glimpses of truth,
the Holy Spirit blowing in the wilderness,
calling us to break ancient schemes and dream new dreams,
and the bold witness of Jesus calling us to be creators of justice, joy, compassion, and peace.

Wherever the journey of life leads,
God’s faithfulness sustains us and invites us too to be faithful all our days,
and the songs of the seasons of our lives give voice to our praise and our prayer.

Hymn: “Open My Eyes, That I May See”

Hymn: “Spirit, Spirit of Gentleness” (v. 1 & 4)

Hymn: “For Everyone Born”

Death, Resurrection, and New Creation

Even when our lives come to an end,
the songs of our faith continue on.
Every time we bear witness to the resurrection for a sister or brother,
we proclaim our mortality and our hope:

All of us go down to the dust;
yet even at the grave we make our song:
Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.

And so the songs that sustain us in our faith cannot ignore death
even as they proclaim the sure and certain promise
that there is something far greater ahead for us.
The saints who journey before us and beside us in the faith
give us confidence and hope of God’s wondrous love,
and the promise of the new creation is sure and certain for them and for us:

So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation:
everything old has passed away;
see, everything has become new!
All of this is from God,
who reconciled us to himself through Christ,
and has given us the ministry of reconciliation…
So we are ambassadors for Christ,
since God is making his appeal through us;
we entreat you on behalf of Christ,
be reconciled to God.

The songs of the seasons of our life proclaim this great hope
until this new creation is finished once and for all
and we cast our crowns before the Almighty,
lost in wonder, love, and praise, forever and ever and ever.

Hymn: “For All the Saints”

Hymn: “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling”

Charge and Benediction

A New Song, for Us

June 2, 2013 By Andy James

a sermon on Psalm 96
preached on June 2, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

As a musician and music lover, I have long been fascinated by the gift of the psalms. Most of these ancient poems likely began as songs, though the original tunes have been lost for centuries and the lyricism and beauty of the Hebrew poetry doesn’t always translate well into other languages. But beyond this musical history, I’m also quite a fan of what the psalms have to say about music.

There are two wonderful recurring phrases about song in the psalms. First, there’s the great phrase “make a joyful noise to the Lord.” This one shows up in some form or another in four different psalms, but I especially appreciate the character of its exhortation. As I frequently point out to people who say that they can’t sing, the psalms do not say “sing a pretty song with a beautiful voice” to God but rather “make a joyful noise!” While I certainly appreciate beautiful music as much as the next person, when it comes to praising God, the thing that matters is not the beauty of the sound but the attitude that goes into it!

The second great phrase about music in the psalms is the one that opens our psalm for today: “Sing to the Lord a new song!” This one shows up in five different psalms, and commentator Robert Alter (The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary) notes that it is often intended to be the composer’s self-affirmation of his work, for if God is truly so great, God should be praised not with something from the usual repertoire, not with old familiar songs but rather with something fresh and new.

This second phrase is so very critical to our psalm today, as it sets the tone for all the praise that the psalmist wishes to offer God. Strangely enough, though, Robert Alter points out that much of what follows in Psalm 96 has actually been woven together from phrases and lines that appear elsewhere. Yet I think there is still something new amidst this conglomeration of tried and true phrases of praise to God that creates the wonderful and rich harmonies of a new song to give deep and true praise to the Lord.

First, this call to praise is for everyone.

Sing to the Lord, all the earth…
Declare [God’s] glory among the nations
[and God’s] marvelous works among all the peoples.

This praise cannot be limited or restricted by the standards of the world, and everyone should hear this invitation to praise God and raise their voices to proclaim a new song.

Beyond this call to praise for all humanity, the psalmist suggests a deeper meaning of the greatness of God. God is not just great because of some inherent greatness but because “the Lord made the heavens” and all other gods are nothing more than idols.
The psalmist acknowledges that we don’t have an automatic inner sense that there is some sort of divine presence in our world, and God’s greatness cannot be assumed as true for everyone simply because we know it. Instead, we see the depth and breadth of God’s amazing love through the wonders of creation and all the other marks of God’s greatness that the psalm describes. So with our eyes opened to the wonder of God’s glory, we can begin to ascribe glory and strength to God rather than to our own accomplishment.

But ultimately the psalmist makes it clear that this new song requires our own words and acts of praise and thanksgiving. The psalmist gives us some surprising images of what this might look like. The heavens will be glad, and the earth itself will rejoice. The sea will roar, and all that fills it will join in. The field will cry out, and everything in it will rise up with praise. And even all the trees of the forest will sing for joy. Our opening hymn today (“Earth and All Stars”) gave us some more modern images of the things that might sing a new song to the Lord: not just “earth and all stars” but also “steel and machines… limestone and beams,” “classrooms and labs, loud boiling test tubes,” even “knowledge and truth, loud sounding wisdom” should cry out with a new song.

Joining all the elements of creation, new and old, using these songs as our model, we are called to sing a new song of praise for our own time and place, echoing the rejoicing of the past while offering our own new song that speaks to our own experience of God’s wonder in our world and the real joy that we find from God. It picks up on the voices of the centuries to share a new word for this time and place. It approaches the strangeness and wonder of our changing times with honesty and hope. And it gives others a space to join in and offer their own words of praise.

This call to sing a new song rings more loudly in my ears than usual today. After worship this morning, following some snacks and birthday celebrations, we will hear a report from our congregational consultant Bill Weisenbach. After three months of research into our neighborhood, conversations with us, and prayerful consideration, Bill will tell us a bit about what he has learned. I’ll leave the major points to him, but I will go ahead and tell you that after reading his report and talking about it with Bill and the Session, I am more convinced than ever that we must heed the psalmist’s call to sing a new song in our life together here. Now I’m not at all suggesting that the solution to all our ills will come with a change in the music for our worship—in fact, I’m pretty confident that our music and style of worship is the least of our problems! When I say that we must sing a new song, I mean that I am deeply convinced that we must find a new way to live out and give voice to the life we share in this place that is sustainable for the long term and has meaning in 2013 and beyond. We need a new song for this new time.

Like Psalm 96, the new song for the days ahead will certainly lift up pieces of what we have sung before. We do many things well in our life together, and we can find much inspiration for our new song in the practices that we already share, in our Reformed and Presbyterian heritage, in our broad and deep Christian roots, and in our universal life of faith. Yet our new song also must speak to these new times, to the declining resources in our midst, to our changing and increasingly diverse neighborhood where Protestantism is rare, to our own aging congregation, to all the challenges of life in 2013 that pull all of us in so many different directions, and most of all to the reality that people simply don’t think about religion and faith and spirituality in the same way that they did 142 years ago when this congregation first gathered to sing a new song to the Lord.

This new song will likely not be a single magic solution, a simple song sung in unison—like so much good music, it will have different parts, with some taking the lead and others adding rich harmonies to make it all the more beautiful. But learning a new song is not easy. As I’ve started singing in a choir regularly again over the past year, I’ve been reminded of how much time goes into preparing for a performance—and even into getting ready for the rehearsals! There will be a lot of steps involved in finding and learning this new song, and as you’ll hear later, I’m grateful that Bill and the Session both are committed to the process along the way. There will be some interesting explorations to help us find the right song to sing, some clashing chords and wrong notes as we learn it, and some challenging rehearsals as we work together to make it beautiful and sing it well. Even so, I am confident that this new song for us can be just as faithful if not more as the one that we know so well—and that we can find it and sing it more beautifully than we ever imagined.

So over the coming days I ask you to think about your new song. What new song of praise will you sing in the days ahead? What does our new song for this congregation need to look and sound like? What can you offer to this new song as we prepare to find it and start singing it together?

As we go into the days ahead, may God open our hearts and minds to the new song emerging among us, may God guide us as we learn its words and explore its new harmonies, and may God strengthen our voices for these new ways of praise as we journey through the days ahead until we sing a new song to the Lord forever and ever. Lord, come quickly! Amen.

Speaking Up and Singing Out

December 23, 2012 By Andy James

a sermon on Luke 1:26-56 for the Fourth Sunday of Advent
preached on December 23, 2012, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Music is an integral part of this time of year. We’ve been hearing holiday songs for most of this month already if not longer, and there is incredible variety in style and subject. Nearly every popular music artist makes an album of holiday songs, but the subjects of holiday songs stay pretty much the same. The secular songs talk about winter, cold weather, snow, family, and friends, and the religious ones tell popularized and shortened versions of the various Christmas stories from the Bible along with some material from legends and history.

One of the greatest and most common subjects of these songs is Mary, who is also the main subject of our reading this morning. While we may not hear these songs quite so frequently on the radio, these songs about Mary are some of the best holiday music out there, if you ask me. They take a lot of different forms and focus on many different parts of the story. A lot of these songs are settings of the Magnificat that we just heard read and will sing ourselves in a few minutes, and at our Taizé prayer service the other night, we sang another very simple setting of it that managed to show the spirit of joy in Mary’s song in only a couple lines. Other songs about Mary simply attempt to tell the story of how Jesus came to be born, like a well-known carol from France that tells the story of Mary’s encounter with the angel Gabriel or the song I just sang by John Bell from the Iona Community in Scotland. Still other songs reflect on Mary’s reaction to the news that she would bear God’s son, with one I heard this year even taking a very earthy view of Mary’s encounter with the angel as it depicts in word and song the strangeness of this very intimate encounter between an angel and a young girl.

But as much as I love all this music about Mary, this year I have realized more than ever before how difficult it is for me to identify with Mary. I haven’t been visited by an angel, so I can’t know what it was like for her to experience Gabriel’s presence as she did. I am not a parent, so I can’t go into Christmas drawing connections between the birth of my own children and the birth of Jesus. And since I am not a woman, I can’t imagine what it is like to carry new life of any sort into the world, let alone a son who would be so special and transformative!

With all these limitations, I think it is very easy for me to miss important things about this story—but all of us stand at a disadvantage here because this story has almost always been told through male eyes. The gospel writers were all men, and although Luke tells this story so beautifully, no man could fully capture the feelings and challenges of a story that is so closely connected to a woman’s experience.

We in the church have too often quieted the voice of women over the centuries. While there have been a number of notable women who have contributed their scholarship and spirituality to the life of the church, it has only been in the last one hundred years that women have been given voice in pulpits in many churches, and those who have a closer experience to this key figure of our faith remain locked out of leadership in so many traditions even today. There is something very much missing when half of the human race is not allowed to offer their own perspective on such an important moment in the story of our faith.

And yet amidst such quiet for women, Mary spoke up—even if we have to hear it through the voice of Luke. Mary spoke up when no one seemed to care, when she faced exclusion from society for getting pregnant before she was married, when her story of divine parenthood for her child just wasn’t believable. Mary spoke up not just to claim something for herself, not just to reclaim her personhood, not just to announce that she too had a voice, but Mary spoke up so that others might hear, so that others could understand what she was going through, so that others could join her in praising God for this new thing that was taking shape in her.

This wasn’t an easy thing for her to deal with in general, let alone for her to talk about—her acceptance of it wasn’t a given. God didn’t ask Mary to sign up for a special trip, give up an evening to go to a sales presentation, or even to make a big donation to a favorite charity. Instead, through the angel Gabriel, God asked Mary to give up nine months of a relatively normal life for the pain and struggle of pregnancy. God asked Mary to take on the responsibility of raising a son at a very young age when it wasn’t entirely clear if she would have to do so alone. God asked Mary to stake her reputation as a virtuous woman on a visitation from an angel that she alone witnessed and that others had no incentive to believe.

But the reality is that Mary didn’t have much else to give—or much else to lose. She herself points out her own lowliness, and it seems that there is not much else she could do to be a part of what God was doing in the world around her. Yet in spite of all the obstacles, all the pain, all the ridicule it could bring, she somehow welcomed the angel, listened carefully, and responded hopefully, “Let it be with me according to your word.”

But her acceptance was not the only way that she spoke up. As she sorted out what all these things meant and talked to her relative Elizabeth, another woman who faced pregnancy in an unusual circumstance, Mary suddenly figured it all out. In talking with Elizabeth, she moved from a meek moment of submission and acceptance to a joyous offering of praise and thanksgiving. As she recognized more of what this child would mean, she was ready to praise God, not just for the gift she had received but for this child who would change everything for everyone.

What is our Mary moment? What sort of request in our lives would bring us to wonder and reflect as she did? What could God ask of us—male or female, rich or poor, young or old—that would challenge us and bring us to this kind of new life? What would make us confront our fears and our challenges and speak up with a word of hope and praise?

Because as a man I can’t know the full meaning of what it would be to give up as much as Mary did, I suspect any comparison I might offer would fall a bit short of the incredible offering that she made. But the great medieval mystic Julian of Norwich wrote of what she learned through her own visions of Mary:

I was not taught to long to see her bodily presence whilst I am here, but [instead] the virtues of her blessed soul, her truth, her wisdom, her love, through which I am taught to know myself and reverently to fear my God.

Perhaps then our words and actions can live out this truth, wisdom, and love of Mary each and every day. We can join in Mary’s commitment to opening ourselves to God’s work in us just as she did—not just being virtuous but living in faithfulness, truth, peace, justice, and love with one another and modeling these things for our world so that God’s new way might take hold in our world. And we can offer our own words of praise for what God is doing in us and around us, for mercy that transforms lives and hearts, for strength that scatters the proud, brings down the powerful, and lifts up the lowly, for generosity that fills the hearts and minds and stomachs of those who are in need, and for promises kept that show us how God has been, is now, and always will be at work in our world.

So as we bring our preparations and waiting to a close and join in celebrating this Christmas, may we do our best to be like Mary, opening ourselves to whatever God may be asking of us, speaking up to call others to join in God’s transformation of our lives and our world, and singing out in joy for God’s wondrous gift of new life born in a manger some two millennia ago and taking hold in our hearts once again this Christmas.

Lord, come quickly! Amen.