Roger Ray, pastor
Dec. 18, 2011 Advent 4
Luke 1:46b-55
46And Mary said, "My soul magnifies the Lord, 47and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, 48for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; 49for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name. 50His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. 51He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. 52He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; 53he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty. 54He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, 55according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever."
Sean, Barry and I get together every couple of weeks to look over the outlines of my future sermons. I usually have a few song suggestions for them to ignore and then they tell me what we're going to do each week. I've been a pastor for 33 years now, I know not to try to negotiate with either musicians or terrorists.... But I repeat myself. Seriously, they are both brilliant musicians and some of my suggestions actually do get a little airtime during our services.
But I have to tell you that the Christmas season is a hard time for us. I regularly remind them that every hymn doesn't have to match the theme of the sermon for the day and sometimes, those of us who grew up in traditional churches just like to sing hymns that we love for nostalgic reasons more than for their theology.
But when it comes to Christmas carols, we sit and read through the lyrics and generally find unanimous consensus that we just can't do it again. The ones we know the best tend to take the birth narratives very literally on the one hand and they all seem to focus on some kind of incarnational theology that we just can't swallow.
I'm so glad to have Jia Ling here to sing portions of the text Valerie read for us from Luke. Jia Ling, of course, sang from the Bach version and, pretty much, once Bach has treated a topic all mere mortals keep their hands off of ever trying to do it a different way.
The early church infused the Jesus story with the elements of Greek mystery religions, and insisting that, like the Roman Emperors about whom it was said that they were sired by the gods and that their mothers were virgins, that Jesus was every bit as magical and important if not more so than any Roman myth. But before the incarnational Christmas carols got a toe hold in the church, they wrote this very first Christmas song and set it on the lips of Mary.
I'll say more about the whole message of the two competing and contradictory birth narratives in the New Testament from Matthew and Luke next week, but this week I want to let the mother of Jesus have a moment at the microphone.
Now, this is not a literal story. Mary didn't just break out into improvisational song and someone remembered the words 80 years later and wrote it down in Luke's account of the birth. No, but this is a song written by the church that remembered Mary and set down a theological interpretation of the meaning of Jesus' birth.
Long before there was a "little town of Bethlehem," or "Silent Night," or "Angels we have heard on high," Mary sings a Christmas carol and, if you read it, you see that it is a song of revolution. It is a song of reversals of power.
When Mary first speaks about this child she will give to the world, she says that he will cause, well, it is there in verses 51 and 52, that he will scatter the proud in the imaginations of their hearts... he with throw the powerful down off their thrones and he will lift up the down trodden.... He will give food to the hungry and send the rich away with nothing.
If Mary actually said that you may see why the early church didn't let women preach! The Catholic Church put up statues of Mary and praised her for her virginity..... which suggests some really twisted psycho-sexual stuff to me but you can't make me talk about that today.... Unless you buy me lunch.... Cause, honestly, I kinda want to talk about it, just not right now.
This is prophetic preaching. It is threatening to the people who are in power. There is nothing about this that should have been perverted into "Joy to the world," because it really talks about a house cleaning!
Some of you know that I will be going back to Nicaragua for a few days next month to visit some of the jungle villages where I have worked in past years among the rural poor. These are the villages that were the most sorely oppressed during the Somoza years.
Prior to the 20th century Nicaragua was one of the most prosperous nations in Central America, but at the turn of the century our country installed a puppet dictator, Anastasia Somoza. And a member of his family ruled the nation for the next 50 years, enslaving the rural peasants to work on coffee plantations and banana farms. He was violent and greedy. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt is reported to have said, "Somoza is a real son of a bitch but he is our son of a bitch."
And that he was. But during those years of violent oppression, even the illiterate poor carried with them a copy of the song of Mary..... Ha esparcido a los soberbios en el pensamiento de sus corazones....he has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.....Ha quitado a los poderosos de sus tronos....
He has thrown the powerful down off their thrones.
The jungles of Nicaragua is one of the places where liberation theology was born before it was mentioned in American pulpits. They were poor but they were not stupid.... They understood Mary's Christmas Carol.... They knew what the birth of Jesus really was about.
The practice of carrying it as a sign of hope for the end of Somoza's rule was so common that the dictator required that people in that region carry with them at all times, paper proof that they had voted for Somoza.... The soldiers called it their "magnificat." The pope tried to crush the liberation theology movement, fearing that it would lead to socialism.... Which, for some reason, the pope found to be more distasteful than a cruel dictatorship.....this might be a long lunch.
The powerful, both in Rome and in Managua, wanted to shut Mary up. A lot of priests who caught a vision of liberation theology were killed throughout Central America. The most famous priest and poet of Nicaragua was Ernesto Cardenal. He managed to escape when a coup against Somoza failed in the 1950's. Ironically, Cardenal, was living very near my family home when I was born in Kentucky. He was a student of the famous Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, at Gethsemane.
But he returned to Nicaragua and rejoined the revolution, creating a community of liberation theology on the island of Solentiname. He is still alive though he has distanced himself from Sandinista president, Daniel Ortega, but then so has just about everyone else. He was elected to be a revolutionary but he is just another greedy Central American head of state.
But, you know, my friends, Mary was not the head of a political party. She didn't want to see one dirty ruler cast down off the throne to be replaced with different flavor of politician. What she was after was justice and that is what the early church said that Jesus was all about when they composed this first hymn.
So once I get to leave the airport in Managua, and Ortega's government is in the rear view mirror of the jeep and I get back under the shade of banana plants where the coffee bushes grow we will sing Mary's song again, we will remember the real Jesus and we will hope for the day when the hungry are filled and the downtrodden are raised up..... look can't you see that's what Mary's boy always wanted?
