Hilton Head Island, SC – Dec. 18, 2016
The Chapel Without Walls
Luke 1:39-45; 46-56
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “ He has put down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted those of low degree.” – Luke 1:52 (RSV)
Songs Of The Messiah
3) The Exalted King Of The Lowly
This is the third in a series of four sermons about the poetic Songs of the Messiah which are found in the first chapter of the Gospel of Luke. Previously we looked at two songs which were sung by the angel Gabriel when he announced to the virgin Mary that she was going to be the mother of the Son of God. Mary was a young teenage girl when she was confronted by the angel and his astonishing announcement. No matter how mature Mary may have been, she was still a young girl, presumably of very recent puberty. In her culture, she would have been thinking about marriage and eventual motherhood, because girls of thirteen or fourteen typically were given in marriage by their parents, so they likely thought about it.
But Mary was an especially unusual and religious girl. She instantly considered herself unworthy of this highest of all female honors. However, Gabriel persuaded her that indeed she was the one whom God had chosen to give birth to the Messiah of Israel. Therefore, after much internal turmoil, she acceded to the pronouncement of the angel, saying: “I am the handmaid of the Lord; let if it be to me according to your word.” If that was what God wanted, Mary would obey, despite her grave misgivings that she could fulfill the role God had assigned to her.
In his conversation with Mary, Gabriel told her that her cousin Elizabeth also was going to have a baby, and that in fact, Elizabeth was already six months into her pregnancy. According to ancient Christian tradition, but not biblical tradition, Elizabeth lived in a village west of Jerusalem called Ein Karem. Ein Karem still exists, but now it is well within the western boundary of Jerusalem. It is nestled in a deep valley. On the southern slope of the valley is the famous Hadassah Hospital, built with the contributions of Jewish women from all over the world.
In the village itself is the Church of John the Baptist, which, sadly, hardly anyone ever sees.
We are told in Luke 1 that Elizabeth was thought to be too old to bear children. She had been barren until that time. Thus Mary and Elizabeth were probably second or third cousins, not first cousins. It’s like in the South; in the South, everyone is a cousin to everyone else. The child Elizabeth bore grew up to become the one known as John the Baptist. Luke tells us that Mary “went with haste” to see her cousin. In the second chapter of his Gospel, the one about Jesus’ actual birth, Luke uses the same phrase about the shepherds after the angels had appeared to them by night in a blaze of heavenly light; they “went with haste” to find the baby in Bethlehem.
Mary wanted to congratulate Elizabeth on her very unexpected news, and also to tell Elizabeth of her own even far more unanticipated news. But when Mary walked through the door of the home of Elizabeth and Zechariah, and greeted her cousin, Luke says, “The babe leaped in (Elizabeth’s) womb.” John the Baptist already had a six-month head start on his younger cousin, and even in the womb, he recognized the obstetrical presence of the one whose ministry he would proclaim thirty years hence. It is a profoundly powerful narrative. Every detail of the story is pregnant with deep meaning, in absolutely every sense of that word.
When Elizabeth heard Mary’s account of what had transpired between her and Gabriel in Nazareth, Elizabeth exclaimed, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb!” They are words that should be familiar to everyone. Gabriel had said to Mary, “Hail, O favored one, the Lord is with you!” That which Gabriel said to Mary, plus what Elizabeth said to Mary, becomes the first part of the Ave Maria, one of the most beautiful and well-known of the liturgical verses of the Mother Church of all the various Churches: “Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus Christ.” It is the rosary prayer, recited millions of times every day by Roman Catholics all over the world. It is the beginning of a singular kind of piety even before the birth of Mary’s baby, Jesus, whom the Church – and the Churches – call Christ.
Having been told by Elizabeth that her baby moved sharply in her womb when he sensed the presence of Jesus, Mary launched into her own magnificent liturgical response, subsequently known as the Magnificat, from the Latin word for “magnifies”:
“My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
For he has regarded the low estate of his handmaiden.
For behold, all generations will henceforth call me blessed;
For he who is mighty has done great things for me, and holy is his name!
And his mercy is upon those who fear him from generation to generation.
He has shown strength with his arm,
He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts,
He has put down the mighty from their thrones,
And exalted those of low degree.”
Christian men and women, these are enormous words, powerful words, revolutionary words. Did you get it? Did it register with you? God specifically singled out the peasant status of Mary! “He has regarded the low estate of his handmaiden.” God deliberately chose an innocent young girl to be the mother of the one whom his followers would eventually call “the Son of God”! Not a princess in a palace, not a patrician in a huge town house or country house, not a cultured sophisticate, but a plebian, a peasant, a nobody!
Why? Why would God do that? It isn’t that Mary was unworthy, but God had so many other worthy choices. Why not select some eminent notable woman with a lengthy pedigree who came from a fine family who were admired among all the people of Judea?
Abraham Lincoln, the man who never joined a church but who was a deeply spiritual man to his core, provided the answer. “God must have loved poor people,” said the Great Emancipator. “He made so many of them!”
God did not want His Messiah to be like any of the others of the kings of Israel. He wanted His Christ to be identified with Everybody, not just with certain Somebodies. Even though Jesus was in the lineage of David, the greatest of the kings, he would not be regal in his bearing or in his actions; he would initially be a lowly Messiah among the lowest level of Judean society. Only long after Jesus’ death would anyone of patrician birth come to perceive the lowly Jesus as the exalted Christ.
In Matthew the birth of Jesus was regal. Magi came from the east, bringing him gold, frankincense, and myrrh. They were gifts fit for a great monarch. Jesus was all that, and much more, but I think that Luke’s birth narrative must have been closer to the historical reality. There it was a nothing thing, a No-Thing Thing.
Well, that’s not totally correct. Certainly it was something. It was a birth, and the birth of anyone, the birth of everyone, is a cosmic event. But with Jesus, as nearly everyone, it was not a royal birth. It was an ordinary obstetrical occurrence. At the time, nobody paid any attention to it. If the birth had been widely recognized, and people had believed that the Messiah had just been born, without question they would have shouted it from on the housetops. Angels may have appeared to shepherds, but they were seen by no one else. And then, almost before the angels arrived, they were gone, and the shepherds were left to go with haste into Bethlehem to see the thing that had come to pass. But there was no front-page story in The Bethlelem Times-Courier, nor was there a birth announcement on the eighth page. The Holy Family came, stayed briefly, and left, back to Nazareth according to Luke, and off to Egypt according to Matthew.
Listen carefully: At the time, it seemed like an utterly insignificant birth. Some Judean shepherds and some Persian magi may have been there, but apparently no one else was. If anyone knew the significance of what had just happened, they would have trumpeted it to the world. But they didn’t know, and they didn’t trumpet; they were silent. Silent night, holy night. It is we who are called upon to acknowledge the singular splendor of the birth, and now, it is we who sing, “Glory to God in the highest,” not angels. And truth be told, we aren’t very angelic, really, any of us. But it is we, and millions of others like us, who make Christmas happen every year.
Young as she was, innocent as she was, Mary got it absolutely right: “He has shown strength with his arm, he has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts, he has put down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted those of low degree.” God did that. And Jesus did that. God and Jesus don’t do life the way we try to do life; We try to get ahead, to make a success of ourselves, to leave a legacy. But the legacy of God and Jesus is to be found in changed hearts and minds, in faith enabling little folks to become big folks, God’s folks, not as the world reckons size, but as God reckons size. When the lowly are exalted, there is God’s kingdom established. Where little people are lifted up by bigger people, there does Jesus become the mighty king. The Divine Duo, God and Jesus, put down the mighty from their thrones, in order that they might stand on terra firma with the rest of us, and thus the lowly are exalted. Those who humble themselves shall be exalted, and those who exalt themselves shall be humbled.
God’s ways are not our ways; His thoughts are not our thoughts. No one gets ahead in the kingdom of God the way we try to get ahead in the kingdom of this world. In the kingdom of God, which Jesus proclaimed during his whole ministry, the first will be last, and the last, first.
Every day we are confronted in the news by illustrations of the transfer of presidential power. Current Cabinet members will soon be looking for work, and will likely move on to financially much greener pastures. Soon-to-be Cabinet members will assume new positions of responsibility. On January 20 five people will move out of the White House, and presumably one other, and eventually two more, we are told, will move in.
The kingdom of God is not like that at all. It is a world apart from all that, though it exists in the world along with all that. But it was initially established not among many of the kinds of people who live or work in the District of Columbia, or who attend The Chapel Without Walls or most other churches in American Christendom. The kingdom which Jesus so frequently talked about consisted of peasant farmers and village artisans and poor shoemakers and hod-carriers and servants and slaves and what are sometimes called “the wretched of the earth.” Mary was right on target, not even knowing she was: “He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He has put down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted those of low degree.”
There is no class structure in the kingdom of God. Everyone is equal to everyone else. No one is lord and master, nor is anyone servant or slave. Liberte’, egalite’, fraternite’: that could be the motto of the kingdom of God, if somebody else hadn’t thought of it.
Timothy Dwight was Jonathan Edwards’ grandson, and Jonathan Edwards was the man who preached the famous sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. In 1800, the Rev. Timothy Dwight, who then was president of Yale University, wrote the text for a well-known hymn. Its opening stanza declares, “I love Thy kingdom, Lord/ The house of Thine abode/ The Church our blest Redeemer saved/ With His own precious blood.” It is an excellent hymn. We have sung it many times before, and we shall no doubt sing it again.
But the Church cannot truly be identified as or equated with the kingdom of God. God’s kingdom is not fundamentally institutional, and by its very nature, the Church must be institutional. The Church cannot not be an institution. But the kingdom of God is extra-institutional and supra-institutional. It is a state of being; it is nothing like a state or a government or an ordinary kingdom.
The Church has too many problems to be the kingdom of God. That is true of every Church or denomination or branch of Christianity. The only church I have ever been associated with as a minister which had almost no problems is The Chapel Without Walls. However, its main problem may be that it has too few problems. It is a congregation of mainly older people, and there are too few of us. Without more people in attendance, we are slightly in danger of slowly oozing into oblivion, and oozing into oblivion is definitely a problem. But it is happening so slowly that almost no one is concerned about it, other than institutionally-worrying types, so it feels as though there is no problem.
All that notwithstanding, Mary in her magnificent Magnificat had it absolutely right: The kingdom of God is like nothing else on earth. It began very small with very small and unimportant people as God’s original subjects, including His Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth. Nazareth itself was a no-place place. But from that insignificant and obscure beginning, the wretched of the earth miraculously transformed a highly stratified first-century society into a rapidly growing second-century community which welcomed everyone in, regardless of status in the outside world. Luke’s Book of the Acts of the Apostles validates that notion many times over.
If the first followers of Jesus were big shots, all the little shots might feel frozen out. But if the little shots could convince the big shots to come in, something really big might happen.
What child is this, who laid to rest/ On Mary’s lap is sleeping? Neither she nor he look like all that much when he is born. But give them time; give them time. The kingdom of God takes time. And God has all the time in the world to accomplish what He intends. Give it time.