A friend sent a video of her operatic daughter singing in the Messiah.  Her voice rises true and powerful, a pro among sharply dressed pros.  But what caught my wife’s tender eye was the young woman’s fiancé, also a singer in the choir, standing just behind our friend’s daughter in the video.  When she opens up into her solo, his face lights up with the most unfeigned, young-love, admiring smile.  The story of them crosses his eyes like a sun ray.  You hear her voice, but you see his heart sing.

What makes your heart sing?  During Advent we celebrate Jesus’ coming into the world.  When Mary gets the news that she will be the mother of the Messiah, she breaks out in song.   Magnificat anima mea Dominum.  “My soul magnifies the Lord” (Luke 1:46).  That place where Jesus and his good news (the two are inseparable) touches her life caused her heart to sing.

Where’s that for you?  

Instinct tells us to sing over the places where things are going well.  We traveled over Thanksgiving, and the YMCA where we stayed invited families gathered at long cafeteria tables to share what they’re thankful for in 60 seconds.  Speed run thanksgiving.  I said stuff and stuff and (of course) all of my family.

But Mary’s heart doesn’t sing because things are going well for her.  The circumstances of her pregnancy are suspect to her community and even to her beloved fiancé Joseph.  In short order, Mary will face giving birth in a stable far from family, a death threat against her child, and a forced move to another country.  Mary’s life got turned upside down.

But it matters who does the turning.  Mary didn’t stumble under a bombshell of bad luck.  What turned Mary’s life upside down was the right-side-up-making power of God.  Jesus the Messiah was coming into the world!  The turmoil is productive.  God is doing something in Jesus that the world can never truly comprehend and the darkness cannot squelch.  Mary is singing in a prophetic key, like Zechariah and Simeon after her.  “My soul magnifies the Lord” is Mary’s heart song, true and powerful, and it breaks free not because of all the nice things she has in her life (though there must have been those), but because God is bringing about the greatest of all goodnesses, and he’s doing it through her.

The Swiss theologian Karl Barth wrote in his Epistle to the Romans that the believer is the one who perceives God’s Messiah and Message “which contradicts the course of the world” and rising to faith through tumult says “Nevertheless” and “In spite of this” (p.39).

I can mostly handle the “nevertheless” and the “in spite of this.”  I’ve been there.  I’ve read that news.  I’ve brute force faithed my way through things.  But I haven’t always sung.

That’s why I need the solemnity and celebration of Advent.  Mary sings in the place of contradiction.  Magnificat = nevertheless.  I need to pay attention to where my heart sings true and powerful, because that’s where the good news of Jesus is touching something real within me.  In spite of whatever else might be going on, that place is where I realize I’ve hit pay dirt.  We all need this.  We all need to pay attention to what makes our heart sing.  

Here’s mine.  I recently started teaching a Bible study in a community space downtown.  I relish going deep in the Word in preparation, and the eclectic group that gathered was engaged and thoughtful.  There was a sweet Spirit in the room, and we filled the place and had to go for more chairs.  

Leading a Bible study is a very churchy thing for a pastor to do, so no surprise there.  Except that at the moment I don’t really have a church in the regular sense.  (Well, an interim pastorate at a good and generous congregation some Sundays, and a growing few of us meeting for worship in our living room some others—but that’s another heart-singing story).  It’s just a little offering of a little gift and God running something against the current.  Everything about it makes my heart sing.

Where’s that for you?  Advent’s the season to notice.