Scriptures: Psalm 85: 8-13, Jeremiah 6:13-14, Luke 1:46-55
I have a different kind of message this morning, and some of it may not sound very spiritual. When I say different I mean different from my approach of the last two Sundays. As most of you know by now, our theme for Advent is “things that make for peace”. So far I’ve been doing that more by offering just some thoughts that occur to me as I think about things that make for peace, and to the extent I’ve actually identified some things that make for peace, they have been attitudes that I have felt would provide the soil out of which peace might grow. I’ve suggested for instance that an attitude of confession might help in the search for peace, or a willingness to dwell—and to dwell with others—in places of darkness. For me, these kinds of attitudes or stances are certainly among the things that make for peace.
But today I want to be more direct, and I want to talk at least in part not about attitudes but economics. Things that make for peace. I want to say this morning that one of the things that would make for peace in a practical, out-there-in-the-world sense, one of the things that would help to stop the killing and the waging of violence in our world would be for the material wealth of our planet to be redistributed so that everyone has enough and no one has way too much. I’m not sure that that would be sufficient to bring peace on earth or to lead people to beat their swords into farming equipment. I am pretty sure that without that vast re-distribution of wealth we can cry “peace, peace” all we want, but there will be no peace.
Without meaningful redistribution of the wealth of this planet, there will be no peace. Not when the richest 20% of the world’s people earn 86% of the world’s income, consume 80% of the world’s resources, and produce 83% of the world’s garbage, while the poorest 20% of the world’s people account for about 1% of all those categories. There will be no peace. Not when the United States, which has about 4% of the world’s population uses about one-third of the world’s resources. There will be no peace. Not when more than a billion people live on less than $1 a day and about 3 billion, half the world’s population doesn’t have basic sanitation or health care. Not when the gap between rich and poor, a gap that is already huge, continues to widen both within countries and between nations and regions of the world.
Do I have to give more figures? I can’t vouch for them. I’m not an expert on globalization, the world economy, or international relief. I just pass on to you numbers that I can easily put my fingers on, and you have seen essentially those same numbers too. We all know the story they tell, even if one set of figures is a little different from another. I doubt if too many of us question the story they tell. In fact, my suspicion is, and maybe yours is too, that the story the figures tell doesn’t even begin to tell the story. It doesn’t begin to tell the story of children living in slavery in the 21st century, or of the cost of poverty in terms of the lack of respect, the sense of disposability and hopelessness that people may live with.
The real difference between rich and poor in the world is more than a matter of income and health care and goes way beyond what the numbers can suggest. And it means that we live in an inherently unstable world that is filled not only with poverty but with resentment and hopelessness. At some level at least I think we know this.
We also know that this is not likely to change anytime soon. To recognize the reality is not to suggest that there’s some easy remedy. And I don’t bring all this to a worship service because I have a particular program to urge on us. I have already said that I’m not an expert at these matters. And a worship service is not the place to debate the particulars of where well-and-not-so-well intentioned efforts to relieve world poverty have gone wrong in the past or what we ought to do in the future. It is something—the gap between rich and poor—that we simply cannot ignore if we are going to talk about “things that make for peace”.
Although…we do our best, don’t we. To ignore it, that is. When I say “we”, I guess I mean those of us who are relatively well off in general, but I also mean relatively well off church people in particular. I’m reminded that at Ava’s former church in Chicago, one of the most active lay people in the church was named Rich Christian. When I first heard his name, I made a comment to Ava about how I thought if my name was Rich Christian I would want to change it, or at least ask people to call me Rick or Richard. As I thought about it though I realized that in a sense my name is “rich Christian”. I have that name too, not because I have chosen it or because I have tried hard to achieve it but just because that’s part of who I am, if not in my own eyes, then in the eyes of many others. A rich Christian. Or perhaps I should say “privileged Christian”, because of course money isn’t the only issue here. And I need to be aware of and to explore my privilege in a world drastically divided between rich and poor, just as I need to explore my privilege as a white person in our society, just as I need to be aware of my privilege as a male in our society. Still, when we are among the privileged, we do our best quite often not to deal with it, not even to acknowledge it.
And so we hear the Christmas scriptures as though there were nothing very troubling about them. Mary’s song, for instance, which we call the Magnificat because it begins with the words, “My soul magnifies the Lord…” This is sweet and humble Mary speaking, pious Mary, handmaiden-servant Mary, obedient Mary, blessed Mary, holy mother Mary. We hear her praising God, giving thanks to God for considering her, lowly as she is, and for choosing her to give birth to a savior. We can hear those words fairly easily because they are the outpourings of a grateful heart, extolling the goodness, the mercy, the compassion of God, ready to be used by God in whatever way God chooses. These are virtues we can recognize and so far they are all suitably spiritual. And on top of that it’s all part of the simple and heartwarming story of a child born in humble surroundings to humble parents growing up to be the messiah. Your basic rags to riches story.
But then there’s the second half of what Mary says. God has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts, brought down the powerful from their thrones, lifted up the lowly, filled the hungry with good things, sent the rich away empty. We have various options on what to do with those words. We can ignore them, just pretend they aren’t there, not talk about them too much at all. Or, we can treat them as just part of Mary’s thankfulness that God has by-passed all the rich and famous people and has chosen poor, humble me, showing maybe that occasionally there is some consolation in this world for those not among this world’s rich and famous. Or,—but this is rare—we can understand her words as announcing a new social order, in which those who are proud of their privilege and think they have a right to preserve it are scattered, in which the powerful and the rich, the hungry and the lowly are no longer, are no longer, that is, powerful or rich or hungry or lowly, and are no longer “the powerful” or “the rich” or “the hungry” or “the lowly”.
I believe that last is how we ought to read them and how we need to read them. Mary spoke, I believe, not only as one who was just honored to have been noticed and chosen by God and wanting to say thank you, thank you, thank you. She spoke, whether intentionally or almost in spite of herself doesn’t really matter, she spoke as a prophet of a new creation because that hope, that promise of a new creation was already growing inside her. She spoke what was inside her. She was about to give birth to one who announced and spoke often of the coming reign of God and who would proclaim release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, and the setting free of those who are oppressed. In the light of Christ’s birth, in the light of God’s purposes, the world as it was, the world as it is, is inherently unstable, unpeaceful. Jesus said that in a thousand ways, and before he was able to say it, Mary said it too.
But we are selective. We’re selective as to who gets what in our world, and we’re selective about how often and how much we let it bother us, and we’re selective about what portion of Mary’s words we pay attention to because they might ask us to ask some questions of ourselves and our place in the way things are. But holy mother Mary, faith-filled, heart-overflowing-to-God Mary wouldn’t be so brazen as to talk about the gap between rich and poor…and to suggest that we have some thinking to do about it too…she wouldn’t do that, would she?
We’ve also become selective about what outrages us. Planes fly into buildings, killing thousands of people, and the outrage is widespread and immediate. Enormous resources are mobilized in short time to help the victims, find the perpetrators and to try to prevent such things from happening in the future. But where is the outrage when millions of people die less quickly and less visibly from hunger or from inadequate health care? And what kinds of terrorism outrage us, and does our outrage depend some on who the victims are? Which of the events out there in the world do we allow to disturb our inner peace?
These are troubling questions to me. But I have always felt that Christmas ought to be a troubling time. The way I experience Jesus, his presence within this world as it is cannot help but trouble us—not so long as injustice continues and peace is, therefore, little more than a wistful dream. In the end, it is not just that the search for a non-violent world will go unrewarded so long as the gap between rich and poor continues. In the end, our inner life will be troubled too, though we may continue to do our best to protect ourselves.
When Mary was first approached by the angel Gabriel with the news of her impending pregnancy, Luke records her response in a verse I have always liked. Gabriel comes to Mary and says, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.” Sounds o.k., but Luke says that Mary was “much perplexed by these words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be.”
There’s some humor in those words, but also wisdom. We do well to be perplexed, or troubled as some translations say, we do well to be perplexed and troubled at what sort of greeting this is that we receive from God at Christmas, this gift of Jesus, this gift of one who scatters the proud and brings down the powerful, the gift of one who comes to set at liberty those who are oppressed, the gift of one who helps us to dream of the day when justice and peace will kiss, and thus make real peace possible. His coming challenges the world as it is, and it makes me ask questions, perplexing questions, not just about the world out there but about myself. I may not have answers to the questions, but they continue to haunt me, or at least I pray that it might be so. Amen.
Jim Bundy
December 16, 2001