Hilton Head Island, SC – December 25, 2016
The Chapel Without Walls
Luke 1:46-55; Luke 2:22-35
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent empty away.” – Luke 1:53 (RSV)
The Songs Of The Messiah
4) The Penniless King Of Unlimited Wealth
Every seven years, or in certain blocks of years more frequently than that, Christmas falls on a Sunday. I have stated earlier in Advent that there should be a law in every nation of the world which prevents that from happening. Or maybe the Churches themselves should prevent its occurrence by some calendar meddling of their own. Evangelical Christians, and perhaps Roman Catholics, are willing to go to church on Christmas Eve, and then go back to church the next day, Christmas Day. But many Mainline Protestants, or Mainline-Protestant-types, are not sufficiently zealous to attend worship twice in less than twenty-four hours. That is a fact. It isn’t even necessarily a sad fact, but it is a fact, as is evidenced by our attendance last evening as compared to this morning.
Parents with young children feel they need to be with their children on Christmas Day when they open their presents. But no one who regularly attends The Chapel Without Walls is in that particular situation. However, many grandparents who do attend The Chapel have young grandchildren, and some of them may be with those excited grand-offspring even as we speak.
I did not imagine that we would be overwhelmed with people beating down the doors to get into Cypress Hall this morning, and unless my elderly eyes have totally deceived me, my supposition seems to have been correct. Nevertheless, those of us who are here are here. Thus we have the opportunity to contemplate the final two songs in the first two chapters of Luke’s Gospel in this four-part sermon series.
Last Sunday the sermon text was taken from Luke 1:52. It was part of what the Church has always called “The Magnificat” of Mary. Today the text is the next verse after that, Luke 1:53. There Mary said of God, “He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent empty away.” And how would God cause that to happen? The answer to that, Mary implied, was through her to-be-born-in-nine-months son, Jesus.
From Christmas onward through his earthly life, Christians have tended in their minds to elevate who Jesus was and what he did during his lifetime from what likely was the historical reality. We usually perceive Jesus as a highly exemplary and perhaps perfect human being who traveled throughout the region of the Galilee, saying and doing only good things, while also performing miracles. Well, he did do that, but that certainly would not have resulted in his being crucified. To whom would it ever occur to execute such a man? It would not simply be a terribly cruel injustice; it would truly be absolute insanity.
No, Jesus did not get into trouble saying and doing good things or by performing miracles. He got into trouble because he appeared to be a threat to both the Roman political and military authorities and also to the Jewish political and religious leaders. To put it into fairly contemporary American terms, the power structure of first-century Judea, both Roman and Jewish, perceived Jesus to be much more like a community organizer for the poor than someone sent by God. To them Jesus was more like John L. Lewis with the United Mine Workers or Cesar Chavez with the immigrant farm workers in California or like Sen. Elizabeth Warren with the mega-bankers or like Sen. Bernie Sanders with Bernie’s Beefed-Up Bunch. To the powers-that-be in first-century Judea, Jesus didn’t seem at all like Bishop Sheen or Billy Graham or Robert Schuller or Joel Osteen. And when the poor seem to be the focus of a movement and the rich are intentionally overlooked by that movement, the rich get very nervous.
Mary’s Magnificat somehow foresaw that side of Jesus thirty years before he even started to preach or teach. When her son would be born, Mary thought, God would begin to do astounding new things through him. “He has put down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted those of low degree. He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent empty away.”
Those are strong words, powerful words, even confrontational words. Was God about to send someone into the world to speak up on behalf of the poor and downtrodden? Jesus didn’t have the proverbial two nickels to rub together! He was a poor man living among poor people! Was Jesus the wrong kind of spokesman to the wrong kind of people?
For the most part, the first followers of Jesus were not the kind of folks who live in The Cypress or The Seabrook or Tidepointe or Hilton Head Plantation --- or almost anywhere else on Hilton Head Island. They were fishermen on the lake of the Galilee and peasant farmers and household servants and slaves. Almost all of them, including Jesus himself, were of the peasant class, which was by far the largest class in Judea. The first Christian disciples in the first few years of the New Testament Church were Have-Nots, with very few Haves.
But Mary was not the only one to get a glimpse into the tension-wrought future of her son. After Jesus’ birth, when he was still just weeks old, Joseph and Mary took him to the temple in Jerusalem to be blessed on their way back to Nazareth from Bethlehem. It was customary for parents to arrange for this blessing of the newly born.
When the holy family arrived at the temple, they encountered a man who had been waiting there all his life for the appearance of the Messiah. His name was Simeon, and he was a very old man. When Simeon saw Mary and Joseph and the baby, he suddenly and without any explanation began praying to God, “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word. For mine eyes have seen thy salvation which thou hast prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to thy people Israel.” Jesus was to have a ministry to Gentiles as well as Jews, and if he was to be the Messiah, there would be many Jews with whom that would not go over well. Jews were oppressed by the Gentile Romans.
How did Simeon know that the baby Jesus was the promised Messiah of God? Luke doesn’t say, and I certainly don’t know. But somehow he knew. And, like Mary, Simeon knew that it wasn’t going to be smooth sailing for Jesus. He said to Mary, “Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that is spoken against (and a sword will pierce through your own soul also), that thoughts out of many hearts may be revealed” (See Luke 2:22-35).
People who start movements among and for poor people often find themselves in troubled waters. They are suspect in the minds of powerful people. Are they a threat to law and order? Are they deliberate troublemakers? What is their real agenda?
Simeon wanted to alert Mary to the inevitable reality that her son would encounter serious resistance from those who possessed power. Furthermore, she herself would experience pain and sorrow because of Jesus. At least twice he publicly excoriated her for appearing to interfere in what he considered to be his business. And then, in the end, Mary watched in the deepest horror as her first-born child tortuously asphyxiated on a Roman cross. “A sword will pierce through your soul also,” Mary clearly remembered the elderly Simeon, now long dead, as having said.
It all began so inauspiciously! The angels who appeared to the shepherds and the kings who came from the east are wonderful additions to the story, but the essence of the story was anything but angelic or regal. “Away in a manger, no crib for a bed/ The little Lord Jesus lay down His sweet head.” “Jesus, Jesus, rest your head/ You have got a manger bed/ All the evil folk on earth/ Sleep in feathers at their birth.” It is a deep prejudice against the wealthy by the poor.
Early on, there were many hints of class conflict in the Gospels and in the Book of the Acts of the Apostles. To some degree, Christianity started out with an “Us vs. Them” outlook, and we were the poor and powerless, and they were the rich and powerful. Only in the second and third centuries of the Christian era and beyond were you and I, the middle class, the affluent, the Haves, welcomed into the inner circle of the Church. Or more likely, our kind being like we are, we probably shoved our way in, concluding that Christians had something valuable we didn’t have, and we wanted to get it. So in we came.
As it turned out, Jesus was a penniless king of unlimited wealth. But his wealth was not in money or property or palaces; his wealth was in people, in disciples, in those who decided to devote their lives to him and his causes rather than to themselves and their own causes.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a young German theologian during World War II. He and his theological soul-mates opposed Hitler from the beginning. They even plotted to assassinate Hitler. As a result, Bonhoeffer was arrested by the Gestapo, and he spent the last two years of his life in a Nazi prison. Days before the German Army surrendered in early April of 1945, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was hanged in the Flossenburg Prison. It was a cruel and pointless execution, but it, like so many other things, illustrated the terrors of a noble nation taken over by a twisted autocracy led by an even more severely twisted autocrat.
In the opening sentence of one of the last books written by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, he said, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” That was not meant to be taken literally, but rather figuratively. However, for Pastor Bonhoeffer, that was literally the way it ended. Perhaps he, as Simeon foresaw it for Jesus, glimpsed what would ultimately happen to him.
Eventually, over the course of several centuries, disciples of all nations and people of all kinds and shapes and sizes came into Christianity. The Messiah’s wealth is solely in his servants, not his invested securities. He has only us, but he does have us, if in fact he DOES have us.
When Jesus was born, no one could fully have predicted what he would accomplish in his brief God-led life --- not his mother or the angel Gabriel or Mary’s cousin Elizabeth or her husband Zechariah or Simeon. On Good Friday, by three o’clock in the afternoon, it didn’t look like Jesus had accomplished very much at all. Even on Easter it was by no means obvious. But in time, over the decades and centuries, Christmas became what Christmas is for us today.
I have never before used in a sermon what I am going to read to you now. But it seemed like a proper means by which to end this sermon. These words were originally preached in another sermon by the Rev. Dr. James Allan Francis ninety years ago, and maybe on this very date in December. Some of you will be familiar with these moving and memorable words, but others perhaps not. It is called One Solitary Life.
“Here is a man who was born in an obscure village, the son of a peasant woman. He grew up in another village. He worked in a carpenter shop until he was thirty. Then for three years he was an itinerant preacher.
“He never owned a home. He never wrote a book. He never held an office. He never had a family. He never went to college. He never put his foot inside a big city. He never traveled two hundred miles from the place he was born. He never did one of the things that usually accompany greatness. He had no credentials but Himself.
“While still a young man, the tides of public opinion turned against Him. His friends ran away. One of them denied Him. He was turned over to His enemies. He went through the mockery of a trial. He was nailed upon a cross between two thieves. While He was dying His executioners gambled for the only piece of property He had on earth --- His coat. When He was dead, He was laid in a borrowed grave through the pity of a friend.
“Nineteen long centuries have come and gone and today He is the centerpiece of the human race and leader of the column of progress.
“I am far within the mark when I say that all the armies that ever marched, all the navies that ever sailed, all the parliaments that ever sat and all the kings that ever reigned, put together, have not affected the life of man upon this earth as powerfully as has that one solitary life.”
Joy to the world! The Lord is come!