"Close to Home: Seeking Sanctuary" a sermon on Luke 1:39-55

Luke 1:39-55
“Close to Home: Seeking Sanctuary”
Preached Sunday, December 19, 2021

This past Wednesday, bell hooks, prolific and profound feminist and womanist writer died at the age of 69. bell hooks wrote more than 30 about race, gender, religion, and class in ways that were both prophetic and deeply loving. While I encountered her work while in graduate school, her writing was accessible and jargon free. If you have not read any of her work, I highly recommend her to you and ask that you seek out her writings.

Her death is truly a loss for the world. The good news is that her work lives on in such titles as:

All About Love
The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love
Communion: The Female Search for Love
Salvation: Black People and Love
When Angels Speak of Love

Just a few of her titles but you may have noticed a theme, yes, love.

bell hook’s writing was filled with love. Love for women, love for black women. Love too for men, black men, all men. Even in books where she deals with subjects of rage like the book “Killing Rage: Ending Racism” love undergirds all her writing. Love for self, love for others. That through lifting up the voices of women, of black people, and especially black women, all would find more room for love in their hearts and lives: Love that is not complacent with injustice, love that strives to end oppression, racism, sexism. That through the work of prophetic love, of speaking and writing truths, even hard truths, we all might come to be better, to do better, to love better.

On this Sunday that we light the candle of love, on this last Sunday of Advent, while we have been exploring the idea of home in worship and sermon series, “Close to Home” and while on this Sunday while many are missing the loving and prophetic voice of bell hooks I would like to quote her on the idea of homeplace in her book “Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics.”

The idea of home place is about Black people making homes for themselves. Homes for themselves where they could thrive and not just survive. Homes for themselves where they could be viewed as subjects not objects. Homes for themselves where they could seek sanctuary and refuge despite the racism, sexism, and hardship that the outside world would thrust upon them.

She writes, “the task of making a home place…. was about the construction of a safe place where black people could affirm one another and by doing so heal many of the wounds inflicted by racist domination. We could not learn to love or respect ourselves in the culture of white supremacy, on the outside; it was there on the inside, in that homeplace most often created and kept by black women, that we had the opportunity to grow and develop, to nurture our spirits.”

She goes on to write that by making the home a homeplace, a place of love, it also made the home a place of resistance. Resistance against a world that treats others as less than due to their race, gender, and class. Through the safe loving refuge, sanctuary, that homeplace provided, those who were loved and affirmed within its walls could work outside the walls for a world where all are loved and affirmed.

For, as bell hooks said elsewhere (paraphrase): Love is transformative and challenges us in both our civic and private lives. “Real love will change you.”

This idea of the home being a sanctuary for love and love spurring us to transform the world to end oppression are the same themes found in our Gospel reading this morning.

Our Gospel this morning picks up with two other women of color, Mary and Elizabeth, both pregnant, seeking and creating homeplace together.

Mary had received news from the angel Gabriel that she was favoured by God and if she would consent, she would conceive and give birth to a Son, Son of the Most High! Holy Son! God’s Son! The Messiah. In this same news, she was also told that her cousin Elizabeth, through infertility and old age, had also conceived a child.

The text then says that Mary hurried - she went with great haste - to the house of Elizabeth. Like she got up from the angel talking to her and she went!

Why did she go? Did she go because she was afraid of how Joseph would react? Did she go because she needed the assurance and affirmation of Elizabeth? Likewise, did she want to offer assurance and affirmation to Elizabeth? Elizabeth who knew the pain of infertility, Elizabeth who herself may have been feeling the anxiety of her unlikely predicament…

I think it would be fair to say that the two women both needed each other. They needed to create a homeplace for the two of them and the unborn children in their wombs.

And so Mary “set out and went with haste…where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit.”

When Elizabeth knows that Mary has come to her, to create a safe and loving place for them and their children, she and her child are overcome with joy. Filled with the Spirit. Filled with love in this space and the first thing she does is she blesses Mary - she gives her a blessing - blessed are you among women…You are blessed, you are welcomed her in the house, come, seek sanctuary here, here in this home where we have each other, where we can bless one another, love one another.

And Mary, having found the blessing, sanctuary, safe space and love that her soul needed, she starts singing a song, a song of praise for God, a song of love, AND a song that envisions a world of love for all:

“His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation.
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.”

Because Mary found a homeplace, a place of sanctuary, a place where she could be affirmed and loved, she then prays to God, envisioning a just world for all: for the lowly, the hungry, the poor. A world where the oppressor is brought down and the oppressed lifted up. A world where, as the prophet Micah says, “they shall live secure, for now he shall be great to the ends of the earth…” for the Lord of Love and Peace has come.

Now, in our daily Advent devotional, one of the writers called Mary’s Song, the Magnificat, a protest song. And, it is a protest song because it is a song of love. And love, as bell hooks said, love changes our private and civic lifes. Love causes change and transformation because love means we can not be complacent with injustice. And that is what Mary sings about, what Mary prays to God about. Having found a place where she is loved and welcome as she is, pregnant, young, poor, unwed, a member of an oppressed people - she then envisions a world where all are loved and welcomed as they are. A protest against a world where that is not the case.

We’ve been using bell hooks word, homeplace. I would also offer up a word I’ve used several times, a more religious and familiar word to us: sanctuary.

I would define sanctuary not as 4 walls with an altar table and pews…I would define sanctuary as a place where love flourishes. For some, this is our homes. And still for others we know that homes are not a safe place. For some, it is the church, the literal sanctuary. And yet we know the sad truth that, again, for many church has not been a safe place. Sanctuary can be a place, a person, a state of mind.

Today I ask: where or who or how is your homeplace, your safe place, your sanctuary? Where is it where you feel entirely affirmed and loved, as you are. Where is it that love flourishes. Where is it that you become filled with the Holy Spirit - where you are led to bless others, where you are lead to envision a better world for all - to want all the world to know sanctuary - to know love - to know God’s love - and to flourish in that love?

Moreover, how can you be or help create sanctuary for others? Are you someone that others feel safe coming to? Do you create welcome, safe, and affirming spaces for those seeking sanctuary. Does your presence give permission for love to flourish? And not just for those in your family, your inner circles…also for those outcast and marginalized, those who experience sexism, racism, homophobia, bigotry… If someone comes to you, do they know that you will be affirming of who God created them to be, in all their beloved uniqueness? That is my prayer for each of you. Admittedly, we all could use some work to be better conduits of sanctuary for others. To educate ourselves, to test our assumptions and norms, to do the inner work, alongside God with prayer and discernment, to become better, sanctuaries for others.

That is my prayer for each of us this Christmas:

That we each may find sanctuary, that we find places and are with people who allow God’s love to flourish in our lives
And that we would each be sanctuary for others.

May it be so that we all could sing with Mary, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my Spirit rejoices in God my savior…”

Amen.