The memories of the exodus from Egypt and the daily experiences of life in Galilee shaped Mary’s resistance refrains. Accordingly, she wove lyrics together with lament and imprecatory heat. Other verses she filled with praise or gratitude or messianic hope. Pleas for deliverance were common in her songbook. Both trauma and liberation were hallmarks of her hymns. If trauma could be transformed into songs, maybe song could be a part of diminishing the deep distress of Galilean life. Most likely, villagers knew some sacred stories, some psalms and parables from the oral tradition of their culture, but few read or studied all of the holy words. It took time for stories and songs to move among networks of regional villages and to pass down through families. So, Mary in Nazareth began with a handful of old songs circulating in her community, maybe a few from her mother, Anna. Maybe she rehearsed them as she journeyed from Nazareth to Judea’s hills and Ein Kerem.

In the three months Mary spent with Elizabeth, they would have talked about Elizabeth’s descendancy from the priestly line of Aaron, and of Mary’s lineage. Perhaps there were songs Elizabeth taught her—old songs new to Mary. And perhaps Elizabeth helped her learn not only the words of the old songs but also the meanings and histories attached to them. They would have searched and learned together from the matriarchs of Israel, about their suffering and survival and even joys amid struggle.

Together, Elizabeth and Mary reflected on the words of their sacred traditions and likely considered how they embodied the witness of their predecessors now, in their current landscape.  The story would continue with them.

When Elizabeth called Mary blessed, in the words of Deborah’s praise of Jael, it wasn’t only the song but the solidarity between the women that pierced Mary’s young heart. Grafted into generations of women practicing liberation through subversive songs and solidarity, Mary was formed by song, and then she composed song, creating a legacy, weaving herself into the unwritten genealogy of women who birthed the sons and daughters of Israel.

She came to see her place among her people, singing, “From now on all generations will call me blessed.”

And as she sang of God’s goodness toward her, she sang also of generations before who met God’s mercy. And she sang for generations to come. Hers was no solitary song, but a prophetic chorus born of solidarity with many matriarchs, and with Emmanuel, working salvation even now through her.

But the song was personal; it sprouted from her own reversal. In the Magnificat of Luke, Mary sings of her low estate, a status typically translated as “poor” or “humble.” But there is a fuller connotation to this word, tapeinōsis, that refers to humiliation or distress. And this can be seen earlier in the Hebrew Bible, as the word is used to connote the sexual humiliation of Dinah, the concubine in Judges, and King David’s daughter Tamar, to name just a few. It might even be that Luke’s use of this word in Mary’s song is an intertextual nod to a passage in Deuteronomy, where the law directs response in handling the seduced or sexually humiliated betrothed virgin. What if Mary sings of her own humiliation and God’s astounding redemption of her shame in this present moment? Instead of punishment, blessing? What if she sings as the first fruit of God’s grand reversal? What if she goes on to sing of God exalting the other humiliated ones with such confidence because she has already experienced the beginning of such holy upheaval herself?

Mary’s anthem tells of those brutalized by the empire, literally and metaphorically, who will know God’s recompense.

Liberation will overcome humiliation and stigma; God’s justice will have the final victorious word for those like her in the world. Mary understands that her own experience of reversal will be shared with all the meek ones. And her song will set a trajectory for the future, where her humiliation is transformed into incarnation in a way that foreshadows how her son’s death by imperial crucifixion, another humiliation, will be transformed by resurrection. This God of Mary’s song upends all the empire’s violent tactics.

With her advent song composed in the hills of Judea, Mary forged a new resistance movement. The Magnificat grew from her time with Elizabeth, from their conversations and robust singing as they walked the uneven roads of Ein Kerem side by side. As their bellies grew, so too did their convictions about God’s coming deliverance. No surprise then that Mary bursts out with this song, braiding together songs of old with her new understanding of God’s work and celebrating God’s mighty deeds among the meek, like herself and her community.

With boldness, Mary declares an astonishing reversal in which the proud will be confused and the mighty dethroned, while the humble ones will be elevated to those vacated positions. Her song envisions a world order where the village elders, once trampled by menacing soldiers and crooked politicians are vindicated. Local leaders will finally manage their own affairs with equity. The hungry, her neighbors in Nazareth among them, will be seated at tables full of good food. They will be able to savor the bounty from their own fields, the fruits of their own labor. And the rich, who gained their wealth through exploitation of her neighbors, will be sent away with empty pockets, now experiencing the pangs of poverty in this reversal of empire economics.

Mary sings out a new social order that upends the status quo as advent begins to turn tables on those who benefit from the injustice of empires and their economies— long before her own son would himself overturn tables, enacting protest in the temple.

Some songs soothe; others become subversive anthems to galvanize radical hope and future action. The song Mary sang was one of change already afoot.

Together, Elizabeth and Mary, the mothers of advent, shaped the infrastructure of peace. Their bodies, metaphors within the songs they sang, spoke about newness God was birthing into the world. In their flourishing friendship, they collaborated to create and embody novel paradigms. They spoke about possibilities and limitations, challenging one another and allowing hope to generate. Together, they did the work of theology, in cooperation and communal engagement, gestating God’s peace, which reversed the unjust order.

So many of the hymns composed during the Maccabean Revolt sang of nationalistic salvation, of revenge and violence. But the mothers of advent teach about disarming in the move toward God’s justice. In Mary’s advent anthem, we see no vindictiveness. And we find that same spirit in future years in her son, when in the synagogue he reads from the scroll of Isaiah the words of jubilee announced there but omits the words of wrath. In the advent trajectory set by his mother to reverse unjust structures, not with a spirit of revenge but restoration, Jesus followed.

In the company of women peacemakers in Israel and Palestine, I hear ancient cadences in work for justice. Muslim, Jewish, and Christian women all sing of a future birthed by nonviolence, love, and justice for all who call the land home. Some have suffered the loss of children to the violence of occupation or the resistance, yet they come together in their grief to lament even as they compose new songs of hope. Others make music with their feet as they march, arm in arm, to demonstrate the desire for justice across their landscape. Still, other mothers share laughter like a song as they make jam, not conflict, together. Their songs are contagious and keep the lyrics of liberation alive in me.

It’s occurred to me that the call to make America great again is not new. I heard it in the Old Testament and I’ve caught whiff of it in the New Testament as well. Of course, in the Bible they aren’t talking about America but about the greatness of Israel. How can Israel be restored to its former glory? I think we see two very different strategies depicted in Scripture. Let’s take a look!
 

Jerusalem was destroyed in 587 BCE. The Babylonian forces razed the great city; temple included, and took many Israelites into captivity. For generations they lived as the enslaved underclass in a foreign land. But even the Babylonians were conquered by the Perians.
 

The Persian emperor decided to allow a small group of Jews to return to Jerusalem. He probably thought a thriving economy could pay him tribute taxes – if they could pull off an urban resurrection. This is the story of Nehemiah and Ezra, the men who returned to a ruined cityscape to reclaim the former glory of their beloved Zion, the high and holy place.
 

The leaders determined to do three things: rebuild the wall around Jerusalem to ensure it’s future security, teach Torah again so that Jews could reclaim their faith tradition and ban intermarriage to move toward ethnic purity. Security, identity and ethnic purity were pillars in the agenda to make Israel great again.
 

Building the wall did not come without challenge. The Samaritans, still living in the vicinity, were offended by the project and tried to thwart the construction of the wall. But in the end, their efforts failed and the wall was rebuilt to secure the city.
 

Ezra, scribe and priest, has been credited with the early construction of the sermon. This was the tool he employed to teach the Torah to the Jews who, generations in another land, forgot their stories and songs. He preached at regular intervals believing Scripture would be the cornerstone to reclaiming the Jewish identity.
 

But that was not all. Ezra was deeply concerned with the ethnic impurity of the returnees. They lived, loved and married in Babylon. Was there any pure seed among them anymore, with all the intermarriage to Moabites and such? So he instituted a firm policy against intermarriage to re-establish ethnic purity. This echoes the earlier instructions of Moses who wanted Israelites to avoid marriage to Canaanites and, at all costs, Moabites. So there was precedent for this kind of thinking when it came to tribal purity.
 

I found this cursory reading somewhat resonant with our current political context. We are concerned with security, identity, and even ethnic purity. We think, maybe like Nehemiah and Ezra, addressing these matters with exclusivist policies will restore our former national glory. We talk about controlling borders, limiting refugee resettlement, and religious litmus tests. We water the seeds of suspicion about people not from here or not like us. We decide that excluding them will be the solution.
 

(Enter Jesus)
 

Matthew’s Gospel begins with a long genealogy meant to demonstrate the pedigree of Jesus. Except it includes anomalies like Rahab (the Canaanite) and Ruth (the Moabite). They are impure, according to Moses and the rebuilders of Jerusalem. How could King David, the ultimate Jew, come from this line? How could these women be the foremothers of Jesus, the Messiah?
 

I imagine Matthew was taking a page out of his Rabbi’s playbook – “you have heard it said… but I say unto you.” You have heard it said by Moses and Ezra that Canaanites and Moabites cannot be part of Israel, that they will compromise its greatness. But I say unto you… And then Matthew writes about the Anointed One who had a different vision for how to make Israel great again.
 

Jesus came from contaminated seed. Jesus came from the backwaters of Nazareth where little good ever sprouted. He lived beneath the poverty line and worked a menial labor job. People wondered if Joseph was really his father, if you know what I mean. He spent time with the wrong people, the drinkers and harlots and sinners. So many times the Pharisees pointed to the company he kept, guilt by association. In the end Jesus was crucified as a state terrorist, dying between the kind of people he lived with day in and day out. Not exactly a great record for ethnic purity.
 

We notice that Jesus let everyone come to him. Street kids flocked to him, the lame and blind called to him, those inflicted with contagious diseases cried out to him and he tended to them. Women felt at ease with Jesus, they were respected and welcomed as followers. Among these women was the first evangelist, the first witness to the resurrection, the first preacher and his primary funders. Jesus interacted with Roman functionaries, Samaritans, and people the temple would not allow in. His policy was radically inclusive – and offensive to some.
 

The greatness of God’s Kingdom would be determined by who got in, not who was left out. Jesus knew the Hebrew Scriptures well. He knew what Nehemiah and Ezra feared in their day and why they leaned on the strategy of exclusion. But the life of Jesus testifies to another strategy for greatness, another way to combat fear – welcoming others in your life and into your national story. According to Jesus even our enemies shouldn’t be excluded, but somehow incorporated.
 

I think that as Matthew writes his Gospel he wants us to see that the entire life of Jesus was a rebuttal of the old ways of exclusion. Jesus incarnated a radical inclusion. It would have confounded Moses and the others, but Jesus was always pushing us to reimagine his Kingdom.
 

The ultimate picture of a restored Israel is the New Jerusalem. It is a city where everyone parades up to the city and into the temple – a house of worship for all people. It is an audacious and amazing hope – a place where inclusion wins the day and we are together at last. This is when (and how) Israel will be great again. If we say this is only a spiritual dream then we miss the entire earthly example of Jesus who was, himself, a temple for all people.
 

So while we ought to be careful about making easy parallels between the ancient context of the Scripture and today, this observation gives me pause. Jesus leaned toward inclusion as an agenda for restoration and greatness, not fear or exclusion. As I consider my own preferred agenda I want to try and calibrate it by the witness of Jesus.

This post first appeared at Kristen Howerton’s website – Rage Against the Minivan.

“Mama, I’ve been meaning to tell you something. I don’t believe in God anymore.” My eleven year old son told me with a matter of fact chirp how he is thinking differently about God these days as he hears more on the playground, in Sunday school and around town.

“Tell me why you don’t believe in God anymore, ” I asked. He rattled off a litany of things about how he has never seen God with his own two eyes or heard the sound of God’s voice, and how can God be real when people still die, still fight, still go hungry. “And how can I believe in someone like Jesus who throws stones at people?” he asked with all the indignation a fifth-grader could muster.

This got my attention because it was so obviously a misunderstanding about the woman caught in adultery, a story he no doubt learned in Sunday school. “Do you want to hear me tell the story?” I asked. He agreed to listen.

I explained that a man and woman were caught having sex together – he understood right away because our previous conversation was ‘the talk’ and so the details were quite fresh in his youthful mind. I told him how the woman was taken away to stand before a group of men and answer for her actions. “Mama, what happened to the man? Wasn’t he adultery-ing too?” he quickly asked. “Yes, they both made the same poor choice, but this story is about the woman. We don’t find out about the consequences for the man in this story.” Both of us were curious about the fate of the man, but I pushed forward.

The woman stood before a group of men. She probably was not fully dressed and probably felt a good amount of shame already. Then someone asked Jesus if they should stone her to death like the law demanded. (My son had a handful of questions about God writing such a mean law, but again, I told him that would be a conversation for another time.)

Men holding stones in their hands, at the ready to punish her, surrounded the woman. Jesus addressed them with this instruction, “Let the person here who has not made a poor choice throw the first stone.” One man, I imagined, remembered that he lied to his business partner earlier in the week. Another yelled with anger at his kids that very morning. Still another would have recalled his own adultery, the very same sin for which the woman stood and shivered accused, and how close he was to being in her shoes. Each dropped their stone and walked away.

“Mama! Mama!” my boy interjected, “Jesus is the only one who didn’t ever make a poor choice! He is the one who can throw the first stone!” And then I told him what Jesus did. I told my son that Jesus forgave the woman for her poor choice, that he told her to not repeat it, and he let her leave in peace. “Jesus didn’t throw stones, son. And Jesus shows is what God looks like, what God sounds like and how God behaves in the world.”

“So… God doesn’t throw stones, Mama?” I assured him that when we look at Jesus, we see a God who does not throw stones at the woman caught in adultery or at us when we are caught in our own mistakes. “And I wouldn’t believe in a God who threw stones, either. You were right to know something about that kind of God wasn’t true, wasn’t worthy of your faith.”

Soon after we had another long conversation, just the two of us. He wanted me to tell him about Holy Week. So for over an hour we traced the steps of Jesus, Peter, Judas, Mary and others through the final days of his life on earth. And when Jesus was on the cross, forgiving his killers, I reminded my son that here again we see The God Who Doesn’t Throw Stones. Again at the beach, over breakfast with Peter, we see Jesus again not throwing stones at his friend who denied him.

We imagined together that if Judas were sitting next to Peter that morning, Jesus wouldn’t have thrown stones at him either. Our God overflows with forgiveness, even under the most extreme circumstances. We are learning together that the God we believe in isn’t the stone-throwing kind.

“What was her name?” my daughter asks. “Did anyone save a picture of her?” “Do you know where her house is so I can see where she lived?”

Her questions come fast these days, always asked with great curiosity and sometimes intensity. A salvaged photograph would mean she could see what her birth mom looked like – do we share brown skin, did I get my long lashes from you, is there any resemblance between us?

At night she burrows in between the duvet and me. Her long fingers interlaced with mine, she giggles into my ear and declares that she wants yet another hug. She closes her eyes with a gentle smile under my waterfall of “I love you’s.” Our connection is secure, even as her curiosity is incessant.

I understand. After all, I have a birth mom, too. I don’t wonder about her name, how she looked or her address. I’ve never been interested in the details beyond her relinquishing me to an adoption agency, the good one that introduced me to my own mother. But I know deeply, somehow, what it is not to know and accept never knowing as part of adopted living. Maybe it is the price of redemption.

With my son it’s about all the whys related to rejection. Why didn’t she keep me? Why didn’t she want me? Why can’t I meet her? Why can’t I help her get out of poverty?

One night he opted out of dinner. “I’m fasting tonight, mom.” Then he offered grace and asked Jesus to provide a meal for his birth mom instead of him. Another time he dreamed of her offering him a dinner invitation. When he woke up, he asked me if I’d let him go visit her for that dreamy meal someday.

I assured him he could enjoy her company. I had a question of my own – “When she smiles, does she have your banana-shaped dimples? You had to get those dimples from somewhere!” He closed his eyes, trying to remember, then said he couldn’t see her that clearly. “I’ll look harder next time, Mama.”

This summer we talked over pastries and mango smoothies about how he gets to have both of his moms, how he doesn’t have to choose between us. “I know, ” he said. Then we talked about Mesi and the recent World Cup game. We laughed and talked for two more hours, like any mother and her son.

On his way out the door to an afternoon soccer practice, he turned and looked me in the eyes. “Mama, you’re the answer to my birth mom’s prayers. She couldn’t afford to raise me, ” he explained, “so she asked God to bring someone who would take care of me for her. God made the right choice putting us together.”

Through my tears I saw how deeply he understood that both of his mothers have prayed for him, have wanted for him and sacrificed for his well-being the best we knew how. It’s an uneven collaboration, but still a joint effort between mothers.

We are women in a strange kind of solidarity, raising children between us. One births, another raises. Together we seek the welfare of our children.

My son knows his birth mother relinquished him due in part to bone-crushing poverty that robbed her of resources to feed him. The underbelly of the economy weighted so heavy on her she felt there was no other choice but to wrap him in her skirt, put him by the roadside, and pray someone would find him. My daughter recently learned about her birth mother dying of AIDS and so involuntarily relinquishing her. How unfair she didn’t have access to medicine and adequate healthcare. How wretched that she never got to hold her newborn daughter and savor their likeness. There is deep sadness embedded in adoption. I won’t deny it.

My son and daughter now carry the awareness that their birth mothers struggled under unjust systems and broken economies. We mourn the injustices as we lament the loss of these mothers. We also sing the song of adoption as sacrament, and we mean it. But our song rises from the soil of lament, the tears cried for lost mothers, severed connections and the perpetual unknowing we host in our bodies. Our family shaped by adoption is both complex and celebrated.

As adopted ones we learn that everything, even relinquishment, can be redeemed. But amid redemption we remember the lost ones, grieve the injustices and lament the brokenness. We embody Friday’s death and Sunday’s resurrection both.

I sat in my study leafing through yellowed documents stiffened by time. I read the letter typed in courier font by Sister Bertrille telling my parents they’ve been approved for the placement of a child. I notice her clear, careful signature. In a subsequent letter she happily grants their request to adopt me saying, “This will be a truly wonderful event for you and your little one.” Again I study her tilted cursive, the seal on my holy writ. The year was 1969.

I find a black and white photograph of her in the file. I stare. I cry. She is the woman who administered the sacrament of adoption to me. The sensation reminds me of my first holy communion, the first of many times I’d approach the Lord’s Table.

I wonder if Sister Bertrille knew as she signed each letter, as she placed me in my mother’s arms that adoption would be more than just a wonderful event. Did she know it would be an event without end?

As I’ve grown up in the company of the adopted, even adopted children of my own, I’ve come to see that Sister Bertrille isn’t the only one who speaks of adoption as if it were merely a one-time event. Recently author and adoptive mother Sara Hagerty said, “We prefer not to refer to our children as ‘adopted children’ as we see adoption as having been a one-time event. We just call them our children.” I understand her desire to not label her children as ‘the adopted one’ or ‘the biological one, ’ and I agree. But what caught my attention was the idea of adoption as a one-time event.

This echoes Russell Moore, author of Adopted for Life, who says, “Adoption is a past-tense verb, not an adjective.” The belief is that when the adoption proceedings are finalized, the adoption is done. The unintended implication is that the action of adoption remains in the past. But nothing could be further from the truth for those in the company of the adopted.

Adoption is a present tense and always active verb. It is a sentence without a period because there is never a full stop to the formative work of adoption in our lives.

I was adopted on April 28, 1969 and have the court papers to prove it. My adoption happened. But I also testify to the truth that my adoption happens. I am continually shaped by the graces of adopted living, constantly molded by hospitality, generosity, acceptance and an undeniable redemptive energy. Adoption is both a past event and a present tense reality for the adopted tribe.

In this way adoption reminds me of baptism. We were baptized into the community of faith – many people even inscribe this date in their Bible to mark the singular occasion. From then on we are baptized people living into our baptismal identity. Baptism is never so far in the past that it does not impinge on the present. Here we see a sacrament with a once and always quality about it.

Likewise, adoption happens once and always.

But the slow and steady hands of hospitality have formed me into a woman who welcomes others, a woman who’s had some practice in creating safe spaces and learned the cadence of solidarity. I’ve lived like the wide-open space of a loom, wholeness woven over the years with the threads of relinquishment and redemption in turn, fashioning me into a blanket able to embrace others with empathy and offer hope. Kneaded into my story are unknown bits, hidden details likely to never be disclosed. Even so, my capacity for mystery grows and allows me to live with what is (and isn’t) revealed. Over decades, adoption has shaped me into the person I am today – gifts, imperfections and all.

Adoption is so much more than a one-time event receding into the past tense. Adoption is a sacrament and spiritual formation at work in us in the present.

One of the things most deeply formed in adopted people is the capacity for radical inclusion. We know what it is to be welcomed by a family without the prerequisite of biological connection. Through years of family living we develop a comprehensive understanding of what is necessary to be family – belonging, not biology. We learn that anyone can be your family, your kin, if you let them.

Jesus said as much before the crowds in His hometown. In front of His own mother and siblings He said that anyone could be His family if they did the will of His Father. Speaking into a social context where family affiliation was in every way definitive, Jesus announced that family belonging was more that shared genealogy or clan membership. Jesus widened the definition of family by saying everyone gets in.

The company of the adopted includes Jesus, the adopted son of Joseph. His own earthly experience of adoption allowed Him to practice what He knew about family beyond biology, connection beyond clan. And as adopted ones, we learn those same lessons and follow His example in forging belonging across boundaries of ethnicity, nationality and any other line of demarcation the world constructs.

Adoption is a one-time event – the record of where it all began. But adoption is also a continued means of grace. It constantly shapes us in acceptance despite our differences and regular doses of redemptive energy. Our families become the place we can safely practice radical inclusion. Adoption happens day after day, the graces never receding into the past but ever present.

The company of the adopted, following in the footsteps of Jesus, enters the world with gifts on offer. We create authentic community, we welcome those who on the surface appear most unlike us, we pioneer belonging in the most unexpected places, and we embody the family Jesus dreamed of.

Adoption is, once and always, transforming a fractured world.