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| Miriam's Song by JJ |
Joy doesn’t rise from comfort
but from conviction,
not from absence of sorrow
but from trust that God’s future
is breaking into the present. ...
Joy is the sound of survival
(even in desert spaces).
This third week of Advent is focused on joy, and this past weekend, we looked at this theme through the Advent song of Isaiah 35, and then considered what our own Advent song might be:
1 The desert and the parched land
will be glad;
the wilderness will rejoice and blossom.
Like the crocus,
will be glad;
the wilderness will rejoice and blossom.
Like the crocus,
2 it will burst into bloom;
it will rejoice greatly and shout for joy ...
4 say to those with fearful hearts,
“Be strong, do not fear;
your God will come,
He will come with vengeance;
with divine retribution
He will come to save you.”
5 Then will the eyes of the blind
be opened and
the ears of the deaf unstopped.
6 Then will the lame leap like a deer,
and the mute tongue shout for joy.
Water will gush forth in the wilderness
and streams in the desert.
7 The burning sand will become a pool,
the thirsty ground bubbling springs. ...
10 and those the Lord has rescued will return.
They will enter Zion with singing;
everlasting joy will crown their heads.
Gladness and joy will overtake them,
and sorrow and sighing will flee away.
In this passage, we read of multiple shouts and singing with gladness and joy overtaking people who have experienced the desert and shared sorrows along the way. They were, and we are, invited to dare to believe that there is a song of resurrection even in the places once thought too dead to blossom with any life.
Due to the timing of this message, I smiled even more at God's providence because the next day I read these words in one of my favorite reads of 2025: Life is Hard. God is Good. Let's Dance: Experiencing Real Joy in a World Gone Mad:
The Song You Will Sing
We start with a lady singing (in a desert, once seemingly facing desertion and death, but now experiencing deliverance), and then flash back to a misty morning many years earlier along a river.
A young girl is there.
She's very scared.
She's standing still at the water's edge.
She's watching something.
And she's crying.
We see that she's watching a little basket, floating on the water among the reeds. Inside the basket is her little brother. He's just three months old. His mother and father didn't know what to do with him, because they are living as the slaves of a fearsome, genocidal ruler. He fears the growth of the Israelite population in his land, and he has a policy: all Israelite baby boys must be immediately drowned in the Nile.
The family tried hiding him. For months, they tried. But now they had no choice but a move of utter desperation: they were hoping somehow God would take care of him. The girl, Miriam, "stood at a distance to see what would happen to him" (Exodus 2:4).
Then things got worse.
In modern times, imagine the genocidal ruler is, say, Adolf Hitler, and of all the people who could walk by at that moment ... we see Hitler's own daughter.
Now the story is over ...
Not only will the baby be drowned
but the whole family
may have to die as punishment.
But pharaoh's daughter, the princess, opens the basket and feels sorry for the crying baby. Our hero girl, Miriam, makes a genius move: "Should I find a Hebrew woman to be the baby's nurse?" she asks the princess. The princess says yes, and even says she'll pay Miriam for helping. Miriam walks home, carrying her little brother, Moses, back safely from the reeds. Can you imagine how she felt? What was she thinking then? How did that just happen?
The rest of Moses' story (in Exodus 3-13) tells of how he went on to become part of the tyrant's own household; how Moses killed an Egyptian man for beating an Israelite and went into hiding for decades; and then how God decided it was time for Miriam's little brother to spring into action as an eighty-year-old man who negotiates with Pharaoh, sees God send plagues to Egypt to overthrow their "gods," and then ends up with a ragtag nation of Israelites running for their lives, chased by an army of death.
Now we see them come to the water.
Standing in more reeds
(like Miriam stood in the reeds before).
It's Pharaoh coming after Moses again.
What will Miriam do now?
Moses tells the people,
"Don't be afraid.
Just stand still and watch
the LORD rescue you today"
(Exodus 14:13, NLT),
mirroring the language used
to describe what Miriam
was doing so many years earlier,
standing and watching to see
what would happen to
her baby brother.
Shortly thereafter, on the other side of the Red (reed) Sea, the Israelites stand after watching Pharaoh and his unstoppable army swallowed up by the water. Everybody starts singing and dancing and thanking God.
Then Miriam remembers.
She remembers that baby,
those reeds,
that river.
All the fear.
The hopelessness.
Maybe wondering if the God
of the Israelites cared at all or
really was powerful enough to defeat
the seemingly more successful
gods of Egypt.
In the end,
it wasn't her baby brother
who drowned among the reeds.
It was evil itself.
So she starts her own song.
She sings about the goodness of God.
She couldn't have scripted this.
And now she can't resist singing.
If I could sit down with Miriam, I'd ask her to remind me: How does all this end? I've seen some beautiful things ... But there's an ache to life — the trauma, fear, and heartbreak. So much pain in the world feels overwhelming if I stop to think about it.
What was all this about?
How does this end?
And maybe Miriam would say,
"Don't be afraid.
Just stand still and watch
the Lord rescue you today."
And maybe we'd believe her.
Maybe we'd start believing
we really are safe, after all.
We'd wonder why
we didn't see it all along,
when Jesus told us we'd have troubles
but to be of good cheer:
we could have been of good cheer.
Miriam had to sing her own song.
I wonder what your song will be.
+ adapted excerpts from
Chapter 26:
"The Song You Will Sing,"
pgs. 200-203
by Brant Hansen
Miriam's story above summarized by one author remind me of these words about joy by another author:
Joy is a mystery
because it can happen
anywhere, anytime,
even under the most
unpromising circumstances,
even in the midst of suffering,
with tears in its eyes.
+ Frederick Buechner,
And like Yeshua's Miriam (the Hebrew name for Mary is Miriam) and her Magnificat song of protest for good, Moses' Miriam sang a song in a time when she could have felt deserted, but instead shouted her praise built on previous songs to God, offering a fresh overflow of crescendo in her present moment.
Miriam looked for God to come.
And when she saw Him, she sang.
So may we all.
Advent
(God's coming to us)
leaves in its wake a trail of songs.
From Mary’s magnificat
to the herald of angelic hosts,
from the shepherds
to Simeon’s praise,
songs poured forth
from those who witnessed ...
Joy made music.
Bonus Posts
With presence and peace in Christ,
Rev. Mike “Sully” Sullivan
