Roger Ray, pastor
Dec. 23, 2012 Advent 4
Luke 1:46-55
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."
Images of Mary, the mother of Jesus, may be the most easily recognized in all of the world though we know almost nothing about her. Of the four gospels in the New Testament, Mark and John have no interest in telling us about the circumstances around the birth of Jesus or of Mary's unique story. Matthew has a long narrative but as is classic of literature of the period in that place, no woman gets a speaking line in Matthew's story. He tells the Christmas story from Joseph's perspective even though he is relegated to a "D list" role.
Luke is the only one to turn the spotlight on Mary and leave it there long enough for us to hear what the young mother has to say. And in spite of all of the statues, icons, stained glass windows, rosaries and pictures, very few people could summarize her short Christmas speech because what she has to say is quite revolutionary.
I think that Mary suffers from the ill effects of a good reputation. She is portrayed as a sweet, virgin child mother. She has put in more post-mortem appearances than Elvis and yet no one seems to actually listen to her. I never tire of pointing out the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church where most of her statues are to be found but if she were to walk into one of those churches in the flesh, they would not allow her to speak because she comes with the wrong set of genitalia.
But we shouldn't gloat too much about that because even in the more progressive churches where women are allowed to preach, they wouldn't long tolerate what she has to say. When Mary rises from the pages of the New Testament to tell us what she thinks, she forcefully insists that what her boy is going to do is to challenge all of the powers that currently exist. That the presidents, kings, prime ministers and bankers are going to be cast to the ground so that the poor and marginalized will be put in power. She says that all of us who have been used to being over fed are going to have to learn to live with going hungry so that the people have never had a place at the table will be allowed to eat their fill.
If Cesar Chavez had been there for that sermon he might have said, "Slow down girl, you need to turn that stuff down a notch."
Now, as a biblical scholar, let me say that I do not take this account of Mary's song as being historical. It is fairly evident for reasons I'll not go into now that there was an earlier version of Luke that did not have any of this birth narrative and when this was added to his gospel Jesus, Mary nor Luke were still alive. This is an account of the early church looking back on events. They are creating a theological narrative to preach their own convictions and yet.... And yet, there is an echo in this.... An echo of a historical reality.... Traces left of the anger a young woman might really have felt at the injustice, the violence, the hunger, the oppression of the world in which she lived who might have said something exactly like this and even if she didn't, the early church said it and, my good friends, damn us if we are afraid to say it now.
Like Mary, we live in a world full of violence, hunger and oppression.
Unlike Mary, we do not have an occupying army in our nation but we are occupied by an arrogant and sick mentality exemplified nowhere better than in the statement made by the executive vice-president of the NRA one week after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary school. As our nation is still in shock and grief, we waited to see if the NRA would make a sane offering in response to the carnage for which they are, in large part, directly responsible.
Sadly, no Republican elected official was willing to make an official statement on the topic until their owners and operators, the National Rifle Association, had made their statement. When I was a child, growing up in a home where there were many guns, with a father who took both his sons and his daughter out to teach us how to shoot and safely manage a weapon, the NRA represented both the 2nd Amendment and sane gun regulations.
In the past two generations, that once helpful organization has become nothing but a lobbyist group representing gun manufacturers, ginning up the paranoia and blood lust of a hugely profitable industry that sells weapons that no sane person would ever use and the sanity of anyone who wants to own it has become suspect.
LaPierre decried our nation's unwillingness to maintain a national list of the mentally ill, but based on what he said in his statement, I'm inclined to think that there may be a list of the majority of the nation's mentally ill..... forgive me for saying it, but if what he said represented the rank and file members of the NRA, that is list enough of the people who have no business owning a gun of any kind. Of course, we know that he does not represent the actual citizen membership of the NRA.... He really only represents the manufacturers who are getting nasty rich by exploiting the frightened, the paranoid, the insane.
For LaPierre, the unnecessary deaths of more than 30,000 Americans is insufficient to warrant a change in gun laws. So we are forced to wonder how many people would have to die before the NRA might reconsider their intransigent position? Would 300,000 deaths be enough? Would 3 million do it? Would the blood from human carnage have to rise to be knee deep? Would it have to come up to his neck before he would accept that something must be done? My fear is that if 30,000 deaths are acceptable that 3 million would be just as acceptable because what he is telling us is that he does not care about human life.
Several of you are psychologists, can you imagine being asked to certify the sanity of someone who has applied to own a weapon that has no practical use other than to kill dozens of people in a matter of minutes? Jesse James has been a famous outlaw for 150 years, but people, in his entire career, Jesse James killed 16 people!
We have people all around us now who go to Walmart or Bass Pro and say, "I would like to own a weapon that if I ever decided to use it for its intended purpose dozens of children, innocent theater goers, high school students, politicians will die and then we say that we should only sell these to people who are certified to be mentally healthy? What are we looking for here? Do they have to serve red wine with fish before we realize they might not be sane?
LaPierre squandered a real opportunity to come back to sanity. Rather than advocate for some sane regulations he returned to the same obfuscating tactics used after ever other mass murder insisting that it is not the guns.... It's video games, its our judicial system, it's the movies, it's the music.....in total disregard for the fact that it is clearly the proliferation of guns.
In Japan the kids play violent video games more than in the United States but they only have three or four gun deaths a year in their entire nation when we have upwards of 30,000. These are the people who bombed Pearl Harbor, who raped and pillaged their way through Korea and the Philippines. These people came to terms with their violent lust for world domination and they changed the very character of their nation. They don't have private ownership of guns and now for every Japanese citizen who is a victim of gun violence there are 10,000 American deaths.
This was not a new statement, it was an old lie. It is an official policy that says rather than doing what we know works, what has worked in other nations, we should actually make the situation much worse by putting more guns into the hands of citizens. Spending billions of dollars to put armed guards in a 100,000 public schools knowing that there were armed guards at Columbine High School and they could do nothing to stop the murders there.
America is not occupied by cruel Roman legions the way Mary's world was.... We are occupied by violence loving, greedy NRA representatives and their bought and paid for politicians and they stay in power because people of faith have chosen silence over standing up next to Mary and belting out a song that actually says something.
We live in a society surrounded by lies. We'll do almost anything to anesthetize our ability to think until we are able to forget.
Religious tradition has hidden the radical world changing message of Mary behind the image of a sweet, pretty teen-aged girl full of tranquility and virtue..... not at all the Mary we meet in the Bible.
In this time of painful crisis, I discovered a new image of Mary in the form of a 60 something, obese lesbian folk singer....Cheryl Wheeler, who wrote a song about the NRA obfuscation of the facts shortly after the Jonesboro School Massacre in 1998. If you will allow me to read the lyrics, this Mary sang:
Maybe it's the movies, maybe it's the books
Maybe it's the bullets, maybe it's the real crooks
Maybe it's the drugs, maybe it's the parents
Maybe it's the colors everybody's wearin
Maybe it's the President, maybe it's the last one
Maybe it's the one before that, what he done
Maybe it's the high schools, maybe it's the teachers
Maybe it's the tattooed children in the bleachers
Maybe it's the Bible, maybe it's the lack
Maybe it's the music, maybe it's the crack
Maybe it's the hairdos, maybe it's the TV
Maybe it's the cigarettes, maybe it's the family
Maybe it's the fast food, maybe it's the news
Maybe it's divorce, maybe it's abuse
Maybe it's the lawyers, maybe it's the prisons
Maybe it's the Senators, maybe it's the system
Maybe it's the fathers, maybe it's the sons
Maybe it's the sisters, maybe it's the moms
Maybe it's the radio, maybe it's road rage
Maybe El Nino, or UV rays
Maybe it's the army, maybe it's the liquor
Maybe it's the papers, maybe the militia
Maybe it's the athletes, maybe it's the ads
Maybe it's the sports fans, maybe it's a fad
Maybe it's the magazines, maybe it's the internet
Maybe it's the lottery, maybe it's the immigrants
Maybe it's taxes, big business
Maybe it's the KKK and the skinheads
Maybe it's the communists, maybe it's the Catholics
Maybe it's the hippies, maybe it's the addicts
Maybe it's the art, maybe it's the sex
Maybe it's the homeless, maybe it's the banks
Maybe it's the clearcut, maybe it's the ozone
Maybe it's the chemicals, maybe it's the cell phones
Maybe it's the fertilizer, maybe it's the nose rings
Maybe it's the end, but I know one thing.
If it were up to me, I'd take away the guns.
