The Ground Keeps Score | 12.14.25

Fr. Bliss Spillar, our Senior Pastor, preaches on the third Sunday in Advent. 

Intro for Sermon Podcasts

Outro for Sermon Audio

We are a community hoping to live the Jesus-way in our city as a people of God’s hospitality, God‘s restoration, and God’s shalom.

Learn more about All Souls Charlottesville: www.allsoulscville.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:58

So for the last two weeks of Advent, we have been reflecting together on poetry. Nicole, who isn't here this Sunday, she's in Denver, said to me on the first Sunday after we spent time together reflecting on the poetry that I had written for us for Advent. She said a phrase to me that poetry or that Advent can only be explained in poetry, not prose. And I think that's right. The last two weeks we've sort of passed around the mic, reflected together. This week we're gonna do something a little bit different. It was a little bit of a last-minute change. Shelby and I were on the way back from Charleston last night on the plane. My iPad died and the movie went away. And so I was forced, and my book was up in the and I didn't feel like getting up, and so I was forced to sit there and just think. And both some, and I'm gonna bring some of this up, some of our experience in Charleston, uh, the litany this week being the magnificent, uh, there's just a different way in which it began to sort of shape my imagination for today. And so let's begin in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Lord, over these next few minutes, may the words of my mouth, may the meditation of all our hearts, be true and good and beautiful and pleasing in your sight. In these words, may only truth be spoken and only truth be received. Amen. Amen. One of the beauties of sitting with poetry in Advent and even hearing the last two Sundays, uh, sitting in the silence with you and listening to you respond, or even uh as Providence did last week, share your own poetry. Uh, one of the things I've sort of stumbled into this Advent is a lot more listening than explaining. And uh one of the things I love about this, and this is one of the things I was thinking about at 10 o'clock on a plane last night, was that that reflects the beauty of the Christmas in the Advent story because it is full of silence, especially male silence. Joseph dreams, but he does not sing like Mary sings. Zechariah is struck mute. The prophet recedes into the background. The angels who are presented at least with male pronouns in the story appear briefly and then disappear. And at the center of this story is a young woman who gives maybe what is the longest and most clear theological poem in all of Holy Scripture. And the thing about Mary is Mary doesn't whisper, she sings. And so today, rather than trying to speak over her song, I want to let it lead us. And alongside it, I want to gently weave my poem for the third Sunday of Advent, not to compete with Mary's voice, but to listen for its echo in our own lives. And so let's begin where Mary begins. My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God, my Savior. Mary does not begin with explanation. She does not begin with argument, she begins with a response. Something has happened to her, something is going to happen to her people, and she cannot remain silent. To magnify is not to exaggerate. It is to bring into focus what is already there. It is to bring into focus what is hidden at first glance. A magnifying glass doesn't invent detail, it reveals it. One of the things Shelby and I did in Charleston was visit the Gibbs Museum, and currently they have um Rembrandt's etches on display. And there were magnifying glasses at the beginning. And at first we didn't pick up the magnifying glasses, but as we got to some of these like smaller than a playing card etches, we walked back and got magnifying glasses. And there was detail that you just don't notice at first glance with the naked eye. And in Mary's song, Magnifying the Lord, she is not making God greater. She is letting God be seen. And what she does, and what she sees, does not arrive with spectacle. Which is why I opened up this Advent poem on the back of your worship bulletin with sometimes joy begins where you least expect it. A flicker in the wilderness, a soft hum under the ache, a promise arriving through cracks you thought were only wounds. That is how her song begins, not with triumph, but with attention, with something quiet and insistent that is stirring beneath the surface of her life. And here she is. She's young, 12 or 13. She's unsettled, and her future is suddenly very complicated. The consent that she gives to bear God is going to cost her everything. And here we are, week three of waiting, carrying our own wilderness stories, the ones that made us tired, the ones that made us doubt. Had I heard Amy's beauty, truth, and goodness, I maybe would have added the ones that make us crabby. Mary's song, friends, does not float above reality. It rises from within reality. Listen to what she names next, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Before Mary speaks about the world being turned upside down, she speaks about being seen. God has looked, God has noticed, God has paid attention. Last week, Christy brought up uh Hagar, the first person in the scriptures to name God, naming God as the God who sees, which, I love this, is in defiance of what the angel of the Lord instructed her, which was to refer to God as the God who hears. And she steps in and goes, nah, God is the God who sees. This is not a distant God issuing commands. This is a God whose first movement is regard. To be known by God, friends, is not to be exposed. To be known by God is to be held. And Mary sings this because she has been held and she is the one who will hold God. She names herself as lowly, not impressive, not prepared, not powerful, and God doesn't correct her, God moves toward her. Still, the prophet whispers, strengthen your weak hands, steady your trembling knees. The Holy One is coming toward you with healing in every step. Because, friends, God's whisper matters. Because Advent does not wait for our steadiness before God draws near. God comes while hands are still shaking, while cheeks are still wet with tears. But now listen carefully to the verbs that Mary uses. He has shown strength with his arm. He has scattered the proud. But notice the tense, it's past tense. That's not accidental. She's making a statement about God. None of these things have fully happened yet. The powerful are still powerful, the hungry are still hungry. The empire is still the empire. And yet, Mary speaks as though the future were already reliable. This is not denial, it is trust in the memory of God. And so maybe the invitation today is to trust the slow work of joy. Not the quick rush of feeling, but the deep steadying of hope. Biblical patience is not passive. It is attentive. It watches the soil even when there is no evidence yet of rain. Mary's past tense language is not wishful thinking, it is covenantal memory. God has acted before. God will act again. But listen also to how she names power. The proud, the powerful, the rich. Mary doesn't spiritualize these words. She does not soften them. This is not only an interior rearrangement, this is a reordering made public. As I mentioned, Shelby and I were just in Charleston, it's one of our favorite cities. And it's a city that knows how to sing beautifully while also hiding whole histories beneath that melody. Charlotteville has a lot in common with Charleston. One evening, uh it was for my birthday, which is today, but this was the birthday trip. So it was my birthday, so we got to go on a ghost tour, like a southern Gothic style ghost tour, which, if you were ever wondering what to give me for my birthday, it's to uh nobody else came on the tour except for the two of us. And so at 10 o'clock at night, we're standing in one of the oldest botanical cemeteries in the entire city, and there is an elderly Scottish man quoting Annabelle Lee by Edgar Allan Poe to us. And I was like, this is what dreams are made of. And some of you might be like, that's not what I would go do in Charleston, and that's fine, there's a lot more to do. But for me, this was it. And so we went on this two-hour-long walking uh ghost tour through narrow streets, through old alleys, listening to ghost stories. And at one part we stopped in what is called Philadelphia Alley. And as we're walking out of the alley, the guide pauses and points to the brick footpath beneath our feet. Pressed into the bricks were small handprints. And he told us that the history of those handprints are five, six, seven-year-old African slave children who were forming the bricks before they were fired, before it became permanent, children whose names we do not know, whose lives were treated as disposable, but whose presence literally remains set into the ground. Charleston has known uh poets who blessed power as it wanted to be seen, but it's also known a lot of poets who tell the truth about where power actually operates. One of the things I love to do before going to a new city is looking up the poets. The Welsh have a line: if you want to know about God, go to the poets. I think the same is true of a place. And one of the poets, he's one of the more recent poet laureates of Charleston, is uh a black poet by the name of Marcus Amaker. He writes about black life, memory, land, and who the city is really for. And his poems refuse the polished postcard version of a city, and instead it listens to the ground. Like Mary, his work is not loud for its own sake, but it's clear. It asks who gets lifted, who gets erased, and what it costs to pretend beauty has no history. And one of the things is I was reading on my way there and while I was there, there's a line that appears again and again in both his poetry and his interviews, and it's this the ground keeps score. And so standing there in that alley, looking at those small hands pressed into the bricks, it was impossible not to feel the truth of that line. The ground keeps score, even when the city tries to move on, even when beauty invites forgetting, and that is the shadow side of beauty. Even when history is paved over. In that way, A-Maker's poetry and Mary's song recognize each other. They both insist that faith, like poetry, must tell the truth about power, or it just becomes decoration. And Mary's song does exactly this. It refuses a cleaned-up story. It remembers that empires would rather smooth over. It tells the truth about who is lifted, who is filled, and who has been pushed to the margins. The magnificent is not a spiritual metaphor. It is a poem and a song that knows exactly where power operates and sings anyway. The magnificent is explicit that God's power moves downward. We often imagine this song of Mary as the song of a doe-eyed teenager. But this is a song of liberation. It is a song of protest. It is a dangerous song for a 13-year-old Jewish Palestinian girl to sing. Not only because it confronts evil, but because it is so clear in its confrontation. It's a melody that turns the world upright, scattering the proud, lifting the lowly, and filling the hungry with good things. And friends, hear this clearly. What she offers to us is the reality that joy is not naive. It is born from a God who remembers the forgotten. Mary is not sheltered from consequence. She sings, knowing her body, her reputation, her future are exposed, that a sword will pierce her heart, and she sings anyway. And then in our readings this morning, another voice enters the story. That frontier dwelling prophet who has a fierce voice that is now softened by prison walls, sends his question into the world. Are you the one or should we wait for another? And friends, if that isn't the question at the heart of Advent, I don't know what is. And if you've never asked that question, this might be the season to ask that question. Because it's not doubt, it's faith that's refusing to lie. John doesn't ask for reassurance, he asks for clarity, he asks for truth. And Jesus does not answer with theory, he answers with evidence. The blind are seeing, the poor are hearing good news. Grace is happening in real bodies with real names and real places. And that line matters because it tells us where to look for God, not in abstraction, not in ideology, but in bodies, in names, in lives being put back together. Return with me to Mary's song. He has helped his servant Israel in remembrance of his mercy. Remembrance is the key word. God's mercy is not improvised, it's remembered. It reaches back, it gathers promises spoken generations ago, and it refuses to let them expire. And friends, this, this, Mary does not sing only for herself, but for a people and for a place. For a long story of God's faithfulness to those that history forgets. And that brings the song to us, and you beloved, who long for joy that lasts, your waiting is not wasted. Friends, that is not cheap reassurance. That is memory of a God who remembers. The desert in you is already stirring, already humming with unseen rain. And so we hold steady. Let your heart lean toward the song rising beneath your ribs, not loudly, not triumphantly, but faithfully. Because nothing true is lost. Not a tear, not a prayer, not a hope whispered in the dark. All of it is gathered by God, who is making the dry places bloom even now. Mary's song does not come at the end of the story when everything is resolved. Mary's song comes because God has been revealed and magnified. And in a story where so many men fall silent, her voices, her voice teaches us how to wait, how to trust, and how to tell the truth. And so today we listen. We let her song carry us in these bodies, in this place, even now.