Scripture: Luke 1:46-55, 68-79
I’m continuing with the theme of gifts, non-material qualities that we may need more of in our lives or that may point us in the direction of a greater human wholeness that I believe is what the gift of Christ represents, a holy, human wholeness that we strive and pray and wait expectantly for. I also want to continue this morning with the story of Zechariah, whose imposed nine months of silence led me to reflect on the gift of quietness two weeks ago, whose intemperate son, John the Baptist led me to reflect on urgency last week, and whose words, known as the Benedictus, spoken when he was finally able to speak again, lead me, along with Mother Mary’s words we heard at the top of the service, to reflect today on the gift of voice.
What do I mean by “the gift of voice”? There are actually several ways I want to try to answer that question, some of them more straightforward than others. Let me start with one way to think of voice as a gift that I think will be clear, though it is not necessarily easy.
There are just times for speaking, where speaking out or speaking up is clearly called for. Ecclesiastes says, “For everything there is a season and a time for every purpose under heaven…a time to be born and a time to die…and among the many times that follow it says there is a time to keep silence and a time to speak.” To be sure, times to keep silence, the need for a quietness of spirit, a receptiveness of spirit, a listening spirit, a calmness of spirit, all the things I was trying to talk about or alluding to two weeks ago. But just as surely, after everything that can be said about that has been said, there is still a time when there is a need for speaking, for our speaking, for our not remaining silent.
There are just times where what is called for is not silence but speech, and not someone else’s speaking but our own. We all know there are such times, even if we don’t recognize them in time, even if we don’t always have the courage or the presence of mind to speak when that time comes, we know there are such times. A hateful word is spoken, a hurtful joke is told, a bigoted remark is about to pass unchallenged, a stereotype is about to be accepted as truth…all of us have been in situations like this where we know some word needs to be spoken, not so much because it’s going to change someone’s mind or strike a mighty blow for human dignity, but because if we don’t say something, our silence will diminish us. I’m not meaning to be moralistic about this. I’m not wanting to say what awful people we are, what terrible moral failures we are on those occasions when our silence is deafening. I am just trying to say that it is a wonderful gift when we are given the ability to speak in such situations because I think it is like being let out of prison, like Zechariah must have felt when he could finally talk after not speaking for nine months, like having the blind see and the lame walk and the tongues of the mute unstopped. And it is an even greater gift when we are given the ability not just to speak but to speak in a way that has more love in it than anger. That is one thing I mean by the gift of voice.
Then there is the related but broader question of being called to respond not so much to some immediate situation that presents itself and that requires a quick decision on our part but where there is an ongoing situation that requires voices to be raised about some situation or against some injustice or on behalf of justice or of peace. Will my voice be one of them? Will I take opportunities to speak when I am presented with them? Will I make opportunities to speak? Or will I be content with mostly silence?
Again this is not a question of finger-wagging preachifying, suggesting that everyone all the time needs to be a voice railing away at injustice. I do recognize, however, that when other people have the gumption or the audacity to speak out, even if they don’t do it at the most convenient time, even if they make me uncomfortable, even if their words are not measured and their tone is not friendly, even if they are a little confrontational and maybe a bit unreasonable and not playing nice, if I can recognize that someone is speaking some justice-caring, peace-seeking word, I know it is a gift. There are too few such voices. Not that I receive it that way right away all the time, but I know in my heart it is a gift. And I know that should I find myself being able to speak in such a way, it would also be a gift, a gift I had mysteriously received. These are gifts we have to give each other, because we empower each other when we speak. We help to loose one another’s tongues, and in speaking we enlarge our own humanity. That is another dimension to what I mean by the gift of voice.
And then there is still another slightly different slant on this. For some people, voice is a gift because their voice has in general not been heard, not been accepted, not been recognized. Some people have been excluded from being heard as people whose voices matter. I’m not sure, I think I may have told this story at Sojourners some years ago, and so if there are some Sojourners who have heard this before, I apologize, but this memory came back to me in this context, and for me it is one of those memories that is lastingly engraved in my mind.
In the mid-nineties I was part of several church delegations that traveled to Guatemala to visit communities we were supporting financially, so that we would have a greater understanding and appreciation of the situation of the people we were helping to support. These were indigenous Mayan communities made up of people who had fled to Mexico to escape the violence that had been directed against them in the 80’s and now they were returning home to try to build new communities and start a new life. Ava and I actually met on the first of those trips. However, during that first trip and afterwards there was some discussion among us about the dynamics of being rich North Americans coming to offer our handouts to the poor indigenous people of Guatemala, and all the complicated dynamics that set in motion, including various parts of the community competing for the money we would go home and try to raise.
So the next trip we tried very hard to get ourselves out of the idea of being tourists or donors or do-gooders and we re-imagined the purpose of the trip—not to go to see how our money could be best spent or even to get an up-close view of the situation, but to engage in a cross-cultural Bible study, where we would be, at least in our own eyes, not so much people who had come to help as fellow human beings and fellow Christians—at least for part of the time. So our missionaries on the ground in Guatemala arranged for a visit that would include significant time spent in worship and in Bible study led by people in the community.
One of the sessions was set up to be a women-only event, a women’s Bible study (except that the males in the delegation would be allowed to stay and listen). The leaders of our group had no idea how many people would show up. They expected a few handfuls. The women had lots of work to do. It wasn’t clear whether the male leaders of the community would get the word around. They might have felt threatened or not really approved of a gathering of women.
But when the time came women poured out of nowhere into the community center. Several hundred women with children attached to their hips and ankles. The plan apparently had been to begin by having everyone say a few words about themselves, and the leaders decided to go through with the plan, at least to the extent of having everyone stand up and say her name. Because they asked each person to come up front, even though the only thing each person said was her name and maybe some short something else—I don’t remember—this took a while, as each person separately made her way through the crowd and then went back to her place while the next person gathered up her children and started to come forward.
In fact, it took several hours and as time went on, it became a little monotonous, downright boring, I was thinking, one person after another taking way too long to just say her name and sit down again… and it became apparent that we weren’t going to have any time for Bible study. And I was feeling sorry about that, because I had been looking forward to it. And at one point I was just about ready to lean over to the missionary who was sitting near me intending to say, “Isn’t there something we can do to move this along?” Before I had a chance to do that though, she leaned over to me and said, “For most of these women, this is the first time in their lives that they have said anything in front of a group.” Needless to say, I decided to keep my mouth shut about moving things along. Suddenly I saw this processional of women coming forward in a different light. They were receiving the gift of voice. As they said their names, they were claiming an identity.
For many people the gift of voice is such a gift. It is a claiming of a place in the universe, a claim to be recognized, a claim to the dignity of being paid attention to. I personally read Mary’s words in Luke in this light. “My soul magnified the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God, my savior…” These words are not spoken by Mary mother of God, by Mary Queen of Heaven, by Mary Intercessor for Sinners. She did not sit down and compose a recitation the church would call the Magnificat. She speaks as an outsider, a woman, a single mother-to-be, who is not expected to speak or in any event to be listened to. Her voice is a gift which recognizes her existence and which speaks in a larger way for all outsiders, who deserve to have their existence recognized. And her words are not pretty churchly words turned into songs and readings and used to decorate the Christmas season. They are words of rebellion. They echo the words of prophets and anticipate the voice of her son. “God has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. God has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly, God has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich sent empty away.” “God has anointed me to bring good news to the poor,” Jesus later said, “to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free…” For some the gift of voice is a claim to their own personhood, and…or a call to recognize the personhood of all. And indeed for all of us the gift of voice is a gift that helps us to define who we are.
Aspiring writers talk sometimes about the need to find their own voice, by which I take them to mean that they are looking for a certain way of expressing themselves, a style of writing that is particularly their own and that expresses who they are. Is the voice they write in going to be humorous, sad, ironic, compassionate? That kind of thing. In a similar manner, we all may be working away at finding a voice, not just any voice, but a particular kind of voice that says more of what we want it to say, a voice that says a little better “I love you” to the people we want to say that to, a voice that is maybe a little less judgmental, or hostile, or nagging, or less certain of itself, a voice that is gentler, or more courageous, or more vulnerable, or more curious, or more compassionate. Individually, we are gifted when our voices represent who we want to be, just as it is a gift when our voices can speak of the kind of world we want to be.
At Sojourners I believe we are seeking a particular kind of Christian voice. We look, for instance, for a voice that is explicitly Christian and that expresses belief, but does not exclude doubt and disbelief. We try to speak in a voice here that expresses questions and honors all kinds of searching, but that does not exclude belief. A man once said to Jesus, “I believe; help my unbelief.” When we speak in that way at Sojourners, I count it as a gift.
But it is not only that man’s voice that may be echoed in our own. I believe—this may sound audacious to say—that the voice we strive for here at Sojourners is also one that echoes nothing less that the voice of Christ himself, whose voice in turn echoed the voices of prophets before him. In all honestly, I can’t claim that I know precisely what I mean by this. I can’t give you details on what it would sound like if somehow the voice of Christ echoed in our own, or tell you how we might go about making that happen. But I can say that this is one way I think about what it means for me to be a Christian. It is not to admire Jesus from a distance. It is not to see him as a great teacher who we are supposed to learn from or whose teachings we are supposed to follow. It is also not to accept certain propositions about who he is. It has to do more with understanding Christ as God’s word, God’s voice among us—not necessarily uniquely the voice of God, or pre-eminently the voice of God or superlatively the voice of God. That is not the kind of voice I want to be given, a voice that trumpet’s Christ’s superiority. For that is not the voice I understand Christ to have had.
The Christ I look for is one whose voice saves and does not condemn. His voice is one that heals and does not wound. His voice is one that honors and does not scorn. His voice is one that echoes the voice of prophets before him and I pray that his voice may echo in me, in all of us here, so that our voices may speak words of justice and mercy, so that our voices may speak words that are saving words, not condemning words, so that our voices may contribute to healing and not to wounding, so that our voices may honor and not scorn and not do harm to our sisters and brothers. I wish for Christ’s voice in some way to echo in us. It would be a great gift, one for which I wait and pray. Amen.
Jim Bundy
December 17, 2006