Micah 5:2-5a
Luke 1:39-55
“Babies and Revolution”
1st Presbyterian Church, Birmingham, AL
J. Shannon Webster
20 December 2009
Advent 4
Poet and songwriter Nanci Griffith writes about lying in bed as a young girl, listening to
that powerful, unregulated radio station from Chihuahua fading in and out of the South
Texas night – “songs that rent the air,” she says, “flying ‘cross the Rio Grande, straight
into my soul.” Then she traces her life with music, writing:
Music is the life in me, it’s the melody I breathe
It gives me strength in harder times, and reason to believe.
Endless miles of highway, every step hard-earned,
It seems like it was all mapped out, every twist and turn…
And in the end I wouldn’t change a thing. I’d sing.1
In our Gospel text today, Luke gives us another singer, another songmaker – Mary,
Mother of Jesus. (This is just one of 4 songs Luke gives us in his Gospel; it is as if we
have the lyrics to his soundtrack, and need only make up our own tunes to go with them.)
And when we read the Bible itself, we discover a Mary who is not the gentle cardboard
cut-out of too many nativity scenes. She is a character not to be taken lightly. Her song is
a powerful song. Perhaps we Protestants have over-reacted with our avoidance of Mary?
Mary had gone to visit her cousin, Elizabeth (mother of John the Baptist). Both women
were pregnant, and as is often the case with those chosen by God, an unlikely pair –
Elizabeth past childbearing age, and Mary too young. Elizabeth sang to Mary: “At the
sound of your voice, the child jumped in my womb; blessed are you among women.”
(This is a musical!) Mary sang in response,
My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.
Generations will call me blessed; the Mighty One has done great things for me.
He has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has overthrown the powerful and lifted the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich empty away.
He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy,
as promised to Abraham’s descendents forever.
What do Luke’s two pregnant women talk about when they get together? Babies and
revolution. “God has thrown down the powerful and lifted the lowly.” That kind of talk
can get you imprisoned in some countries around the world. Mary’s Song, called the
Magnificat, was banned in Guatemala in the 1980’s. In an instance here in the U.S. the
same decade, a federal agent recorded one piece of evidence against a pastor, which
turned out to be the Old Testament lesson for the day, straight from Exodus.
Yet maybe that’s right – that someone understands that the Word of God is not simple
sweetness, and was all along intended to upend our carefully constructed realities.
John Ortberg, pastor of Menlo Park Presbyterian in California, wrote: “It appears from
the Gospel texts that only two people understood just how subversive this little life (baby
Jesus) would be: the most powerful man in the country (King Herod), and a powerless,
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penniless, illiterate Jewish peasant girl…. Then a rabbi came along and sang the strangest
song, ‘Blessed are the poor, blessed are the hungry, blessed are the meek.’ Where did he
get his material? Could it have been from his Mom?” 2
Mary was a daughter of her time, from a people occupied by a foreign army, with little
but faith and tradition to sustain them. In that political structure and time, to be faithful
was to be poor, because no one could profit without being corrupt, without collaborating
with the Romans.
“She is no longer singing the song,” wrote Barbara Brown Taylor, “the song is singing
her, and what music, what verse!” this teenager is “no politician, no revolutionary; she
simply wants to sing a happy song, but all of a sudden she has become an articulate
radical, an astonished prophet, singing about a world in which the last have become first,
and the first, last.”3
In Mary’s singing, if we pay attention, we should feel the hot breath of prophets and,
closing the distance, the coming rush of angel’s wings. Her song is the model for what
will become the Christian life. Just as our poet-friend, Nanci Griffith, was formed by
music on the late-night radio, our formation comes from the Magnificat, and the other
songs we sing that impel us to try and make this world more like the Kingdom of God.
So the “non-poor, non-oppressed, non-sick, non-disenfranchised of this world,” as Jurgen
Moltmann wrote, “will be moved toward an “attitude of solidarity with their victims.”4
We humans are in this together more than we know.
Mary said, “the Mighty One has done great things for me… he has brought down the
powerful and lifted up the lowly.” Perhaps she sang better than she knew, but in the grip
of the muse she knew this – her transformation from lowliness to greatness is a model for
all of the action of God in the world. This is what God does.
The prophet Micah said something similar in our Old Testament text – “You, O
Bethlehem Ephrathah, least of the clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one
who is to rule my people Israel.”
Within her body, at the point Mary sang her song, she carried the ultimate representation
of God’s way of working grace in the world – an infant that would be the world’s savior.
While our Hollywood-fueled imaginations are impatient with smallness, with slow
beginnings that have to grow, this birth was exactly the point. Already, in a turning
everything upside-down sort of way, God was beginning to act outside of human
structures of power.
Peace on earth would come, but not the Pax Romana. Glory would be shed on earth, but
not the glory that was Rome. And “the revolution will not be televised,” as the old Rock
song said (although it appears that in Iran it will eventually be Twittered.)
Jesus would change all expectations about the hoped-for Messiah, and what salvation was
about – moving it beyond national aspirations or religion’s self-righteousness. It would
become a revolution beyond what anyone imagined.
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With the birth of Jesus, Mary ceases to become the main character in Luke’s Gospel. But
we still might wonder about her – what did she think, what did she feel, as she watched
him grow, saw him become something beyond her comprehension? What loss did she
feel, and what gain? What pain at his death? What amazement at his resurrection? And
after a difficult life’s journey, every step hard-earned, perhaps she would have said,
“In the end, I wouldn’t change a thing. I’d sing.”
She is our metaphor. One thing leads to another. God’s visitation to Mary leads to God’s
visitation to us. The incarnation – God come to us as a human infant – is an ongoing
reality. I hope you think of that each time I carry the Gospel to the center of this room
with the phrase: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” And still does. If it is
true that this one small life (Jesus) is important, it is true of life itself. If it is true God has
shown justice and mercy to Mary, as she sang, it is true that this is what God does.
We are to be the ones who birth into this world love and justice and grace. God creates
human life to carry those wonders in. Scripture says, “We have this treasure in earthen
vessels.” When we get it right, that life looks like Jesus. As far back as the 14th century,
Meister Eckhart said, “We are all meant to be mothers of God.”5 So we have to learn
how that song goes.
But here is the Good News coming to us this Christmas – this revolution also is for you.
It is a revolt against all that stifles what human life is meant to be, a revolt against all that
dulls the senses and closes the heart, all that deadens the spirit and steals the music, all
that would rob the world of mystery or silence the voice of angels. God delivers us from
all that steals our hope; God delivers us from a world that has grown weary with itself but
has no place to rest. This revolution is for you. For you, the Messiah comes.
Only a few months after Mary’s song, another song would rend the air:
Glory to God in the Highest! And on earth, Peace, with those God favors!
Angel-song, flying down a Judean hillside and straight into the souls of Shepherds.
“Let’s go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened,
which the Lord has made known to us!”
3
Griffith, Nanci. Sing, The Loving Kind. Rounder Record Group. Burlington, MA, 2009
Ortberg, John. Living the Word, Christian Century. Vol. 126, No. 25, 2009, p. 20
3
Taylor, Barbara Brown. Singing Ahead of Time, Home by Another Way. Cowley Publications,
Latham, MD, 1999.
4
Moltmann, Jurgen. The Crucified God, Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 1993. p. 49.
5
Eckhart. Meditations with Meister Eckhart. Bear & Co., Rochester, VT, 1983.
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