December 22, 2019 - Advent 04, Benedictus and Magnificat: The Music of the Christmas Revolution

The smaller groups in our church community are inside our homes where we go deeper, build friendships, and walk out the Christian life with each other. HOME CHURCH GUIDE + “Breaking the Ice” question (group facilitator) + CHECK-INS: Introduce, check-in + CARE: Needs in the group + COMPASSION: What is the group planning? Are you inviting your neighbours to join in? + GROUP ANNOUNCEMENTS Church-wide, group-only + DIG IN: Discuss questions as a group + END AND HOMEWORK: Final questions, prayer huddles for personal requests. Consider breaking into small groups (huddles) of 2-4, by gender, if large enough. DISCUSSION questions: 1. What would make you celebrate wildly, without inhibition, right now? 2. What causes Mary to launch into song like this? 3. What does this song say about God? 4. Why does it seem hard to learn to sing scripture instead of just the songs of the world around us? Talk about the power of art to conform us to the culture or to the counter-culture of Jesus’ life and teachings. 5. Almost every word of the Magnificat is a Biblical quotation. What wrongs in Canada seem too massive to do anything about, but need to be righted and changed in the society that you long for? 6. What small or big ways can you be involved in the work God desires in the world? 7. What parts of Mary or Zechariah’s song do you connect with? Why? 8. Zechariah’s songs weave the spiritual and political together, what do you think of that? 9. What is similar between their two songs? 10. How can we learn to sing the words of scripture in prophetic ways that empower us in the midst of life? 11. Other thoughts on art and sentimentality vs. art as truth-telling and empowering joy. Prayer Requests: NARRATIVE LECTIONARY ADVENT 4: Luke 1:5-13, [14-25] 57-80 46-56 Magnificat 67-80 Benedictus BIG IDEAS FLUFFLAND OR REVOLUTION? ART AS ESCAPE OR ENGAGEMENT... “What are the most sure-fire motifs for sentimentalists? Surely these would be the top three: children, cute animals, and motherhood. Hence the universal appeal of Luke’s Christmas story, with its baby [Yoda, um, I mean] Jesus, its sheep, and its young Madonna. If sentimentality, as Flannery further wrote, is “an early arrival at a mock state of innocence,” then the function of babies, animals, and Madonnas is to convince us that things really are not as bad as they seem, that that human race and the created order really are quite attractive and--well, innocent. This is not what Luke had in mind” (Fleming Rutledge, 377). TRUE PEACE COMES FROM WITHIN AND OUTSIDE The peace of Christ is not fake peace “...Peace, in this world, is often a euphemism meaning that the enemy [other humans] has been displaced. This is not peace” (F.R., 339). ADVENT IS FUTURE-LEANING Advent is the opposite of romanticizing the past and the human tendency to sentimentalize. Nostalgia and sentiment play no part in the season. Advent refuses to dwell in a past that never was. Advent is about the future. (FR, 338). ADVENT + CHRISTMAS INVITATION AND NEXT STEPS