Scripture: Luke 1:39-55
As some of you know, I’ve been stay-at-home sick for the better part of this last week. I will spare you the details except to say that my doctor said it would be ok to come to church today, if I felt up to it, but there should be no hugging or shaking hands if I did—for your benefit and for mine, I think. So if I reflexively act like I’m about to do one of those things, run. As it happens, I did start to feel a little better yesterday, enough better that I was pretty sure I would be able to make it to church, but not better enough soon enough to really work on putting together a sermon. What I decided I had enough energy for was to just jot down a few ideas or pieces of a sermon that were on their way toward being a sermon but never quite made it. So what I have to offer this morning is not so much a sermon as sermon fragments.
Fragment One:
I recently received a letter in the mail that looked like it might be one of the many fund raising requests you get at this time of year, but I opened it anyway and the first sentence said, “This is not a request for money.” It turns out that this was from a project that was called “Redefining Christmas” or something like that. It said it just wanted me to know about this effort and tell others about it. And it essentially said, “Check us out on our web site at…” Redefining Christmas sounded like something that might interest me so I saved the letter, but when I went back to look up the letter I couldn’t find it, so I typed in the URL the way I remembered it: www.redefiningchristmas.org. The response I got on the computer was a list of paid advertisers: Wholesale Christmas gifts, or custom holiday ornaments, Christmas specials from Kmart, or Christmas pajamas for $39, fine Christian jewelry, or a Christmas edition of the Bible in a special holiday gift box with free shipping. None of this sounded like any redefining of Christmas to me, but then I guess it depends on what you thought needed to be redefined. It turned out, after I goggled redefining Christmas, that what I must have been looking for was a web site that was sort of a clearing house for non-profit groups that might make good gifts if you gave to one of the groups in someone’s name, not a new idea, but a worthwhile one, and the website was possibly useful, though not as interesting as I had hoped. In any case, I thought all of this might be a lead-in to some comments on redefining Christmas, or maybe re-imagining Christmas would be a better phrase.
Fragment Two:
…has to do with the second part of Mary’s speech or song known as the Magnificat. Millie asked me, when I sent her the bulletin, whether it was a mistake that the scripture for this week is the same as the one from last week, and no it isn’t a mistake. I had always intended to give two sermons on the magnificat, focusing today on the second part that says: “God has shown an arm of strength; God has scattered the proud in the thoughts (or imaginations) of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; God has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.” It has been noted often that these words don’t fit very well with the image of Mary as pious and thankful.
I talked some last week about my desire not to see Mary as just a passive figure, and here, if you take her words seriously, she is definitely not passive; she has something to say. And it occurred to me that just paying attention, taking her words seriously, might be one way to try to redefine Christmas. If you want Christmas to be a “feel good” time in church as well as outside of church, if you want to talk about love, joy, hope, and peace without saying anything very specific or in any way challenging about any of that, if you want to talk just about how good it is to know that God is with us, if you want to talk about how God loved the world so much that God entered the world in a human way in human form, if you want Christmas to be like that, then it would probably be best, and certainly easiest, to just ignore this second part of the magnificat. It just doesn’t help you to stay on message, on that generic, non-controversial, white bread kind of message. Instead, it introduces a whole different kind of theme. It introduces the possibility of a world that has been turned upside, where the proud have been scattered, the powerful brought down, the lowly lifted up, the hungry filled, and the rich sent empty away. Her words suggest that she knew better than anyone what her son was going to be about. Some people have even described what she had to say as revolutionary. Barack Obama was accused of being socialist on much less evidence than what we get from Mary’s words. That kind of a thought was a second piece I was working with going into the sermon today.
Fragment Three:
However, that word revolutionary gives me some problems. Mostly because it tends to be used approvingly by people who aren’t at all revolutionary. I didn’t want to—I was saying to myself—I don’t want to talk sort of glibly about how “revolutionary” Mary was from my very non-revolutionary position of comfort. I mean I guess people can do that, point out that Mary said these revolutionary words, as a matter of interest, a matter of detached interest. But if they do, if we do, we preachers, we should make clear that we’re keeping Mary at arm’s length here. We don’t mean to take her seriously. What she says is just interesting, not compelling; it doesn’t make any kind of a claim on us. We’re not actually going to do anything revolutionary—or even very radical—or even very risky. We’re not going to go off into the Blue Ridge and start plotting an insurrection. We’re not even going to protest the government by refusing to pay taxes. We’re just not really very revolutionary folks, and we should be reluctant, I think, to make Mary into one. True in a way, maybe, but it just doesn’t quite fit with her or with us.
And so it seems a little inauthentic for mostly comfortable Christians to talk about how revolutionary or radical Mary was. She doesn’t really have much to say to us in this way, does she? Unless we’re willing to take her seriously, which means take her to heart, which we’re not ready to do. This is not just your basic rags to riches idea, not a reminder that the messiah, like many leaders, can come from a humble background. Mary isn’t just pointing that out. Her words do carry us into a world of inequality, enormous, unjustifiable, and unstable inequality and they point toward an overturning of that inequality. Her words point us toward a world 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”.
Mary 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. Jesus said that in a thousand ways, and before he was able to say it, Mary said it too. I do think Mary deserves to be understood in this way, but I don’t want to do that as though we can casually refer to how revolutionary Mary was, and then go home and watch the football game or wrap presents. There’s something not right about that, just as much as there’s something not right about ignoring what Mary says here altogether. I wasn’t sure how I was going to resolve that dilemma. My sickness and my consequent decision on what to do with this sermon saves me from having to resolve it. I can just tell you what I was thinking about. My guess, though, is that even if I had been up to presenting a finished sermon this morning, I probably wouldn’t have resolved that issue.
Fragment Four:
Fragment four is where I was sort of thinking that I might begin and end the sermon. Another “interesting” thing about what Mary says here is that it seems to be based on a prayer said by a woman named Hannah, who lived about a thousand years earlier, who became the mother of the prophet Samuel, but who become pregnant with Samuel at a very old age, and whose birth-giving therefore was as miraculous as Mary’s. She says—this is in the book of 1st Samuel, chapter 2–
“My heart exults in the Lord; my strength is exalted in my God…Talk no more so very proudly, let not arrogance come from your mouth; for the Lord is a God of knowledge, and by him actions are weighed. The bows of the mighty are broken, but the feeble gird on strength. Those who were full have hired themselves out for bread, but those who were hungry are fat with spoil…The Lord makes poor and makes rich; he brings low, he also exalts. He raises up the poor from the dust; he lifts the needy from the ash heap, to make them sit with princes and inherit a seat of honor…
The words are not exactly the same as Mary’s, but the thoughts are pretty close, so close that you could think that Mary’s speech was plagiarized in a way, that the gospel writers, who were writing many years later just sort of used Hannah’s words as a template for what Mary must have said. Maybe so. But it’s more suggestive to me to imagine Hannah’s words as echoing in Mary’s mind, across 1,000 or more years. They were in the scriptures Mary would have known. And I can imagine Mary giving a new voice to ancient words. And isn’t that what we do at Christmas after all, to try to give some new voice to ancient words? Like Mary, letting Hannah’s words echo inside her and bring her to speak in her own voice, we let ancient words echo inside us. Words like: “they shall beat their swords into ploughshares” and “God has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts and lifted up the lowly” and “the wolf shall dwell with the lamb…they will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.”
We hear the echoes of these and other ancient words. We let them in to us, and in mostly non-revolutionary ways, but in the ways we are able and as much as we are able, we try to give some new life to those words in ourselves and in our fragile troubled world.
Maybe we can do that much, I was thinking. I am still thinking, maybe we can do that much. Amen.
Jim Bundy
December 14, 2008