3^rd Sunday in Advent

(Choir Concert)

Isaiah 35: 1-10, Luke 1: 46b-55

Singing the Song

Elizabeth Macaulay

My mother’s mother was a singer.

She was an alto who spent time singing on the radio and in polite society. She loved to make music through song.

Her singing was stilled when she developed TB and had to have one of her lungs removed. She spent time in a sanitarium and when she emerged she had lost her ability to loft her soul in song.

My mother was a singer. She too was an alto. I remember hearing her sing solos as I was growing up. She would sing the alto solos in the Messiah, and she was heard singing at many funerals. I remember Sunday mornings when she would warm up her voice while vacuuming. That way she didn’t have to listen to or worry about the sounds she was making as she prepared to sing in church that day.

Like her mother, her voice was stilled before its time. But for my mother it was not an issue of physical limitations. It was a psychological tightening – the noose of perfectionism – that quieted her song. Because she came to dislike the sound of her own voice, she shut it down.

I am a singer. I am a soprano – I will say NOTHING about how things improve through the generations… I learned in Jr. Choir at church that singing is vital to me. Praise and lament and frustration and pure joy can be given voice because I can sing. I have been a paid section leader at churches, performed regularly at the Big Top Chautauqua and the Old Rittenhouse Inn, played plenty of coffee houses, and was a soprano in Duluth’s version of the Dale Warland Singers. All of which is to say that I experienced some success as a singer. (And this trumpeting of success has more to with my story than with my ego. Really. Although I AM a soprano…)

And, regardless of what others thought of my voice, I came to a point in my life where I was so wracked with anxiety about it that I almost shut my voice down. I became so convinced that I was so far from perfect that I had no business singing at all. When I went to perform, a noose would tighten around my voice and my breath would come too fast and I began to question whether the sharing of my song was worth the anguish of my fear.

I wrestled and prayed for nearly a year. Under cover, because I was so embarrassed by the intensity of my emotions. I went on that way until I knew that I would either have to quit singing or come to a new understanding of what I was singing for.

Finally, I came to this place in my life:

I decided that God had given me a voice. Imperfect as it was. God had given me a voice and music in my soul and a yen to share messages through the power that is music. I could either walk away from those gifts that call to witness to the wonder and wrench of life through music. Or I could say “no” to the gift and stifle the life within and around me that was desperate to be sung.

I gave my sure-to-fail flawed and small self over to God.

And my voice has not been stilled. It has been freed from the prison I sought to keep it in.

What has this to do with a girl of some 14 years who is told that she is to bear the light of the world?

She could have said “no”. No, I am too small, too vulnerable to the scorn of others, too confused, too alone, and too afraid. She could have strangled the power of her own voice.

But instead. She sang. Mary drew in the power and mystery of that star studded night and that awesome message and she drew upon the power of the kinswomen before her – Hannah and Elizabeth and Rahab and Deborah.

And she sang. Of a Messiah. A Messiah who would come to right the injustices lived in the streets of her very village. A Messiah especially attentive to the needs of the hungry, the poor, the outcast. A Messiah who was made flesh in the womb of a woman who knew the vital and necessary power of singing her song.

She sang. Because she could and must. Because her God had promised that she of the fear and confusion and youth and inexperience. She would magnify God. She would make God big to those around her.

And so she did.

And so, my beloveds do we.

God has given us each a voice. A voice unique and a voice flawed and a voice called to give voice to the teachings of Jesus.

A 14-year-old girl said yes to the power of her voice. And the world turned toward a peace vision we are seeking yet to live.

Let us not let the bands of fear stifle our songs. Songs of hope and songs of our belief that in us God is magnified and in us and our joining together in the living of the Jesus way the world WILL know the joy of unstoppered voices and hearts.

Ah, sing!

Amen