While We’re Waiting – Lift up the Lowly

The Fourth Sunday in Advent

Lesson: Luke 1:26-38, 47-55

Back in the early days of the TV show, “Saturday Night Live,” they did a sketch involving a weekly television show called “What  If,”  which  posed  hypothetical questions about historical events.   All the questions  came  from the  viewers  of  “What If?” or rather, from one viewer, a Mr. Kevin O’Donnell, age 10, a paperboy from Alton, Illinois.  In this sketch, Kevin asked, “What If Superman grew up in Germany, instead of America?”  A panel of experts, including a brigadier general and a professor of modern history from Wellesley, gave their opinions about what might have happened, including the possibility that the United States would have put much of its energy in World War II into   creating   a   kryptonite   bomb   to   stop Superman – or rather, Überman.1

A “what if” question occurred to me as I read our second Scripture reading today – the passage known as the Magnificat in Luke’s gospel.   We heard and thoroughly enjoyed Bach’s version of this passage last Sunday – I can’t thank Martha and the choir enough for that  blessing.    But  what  I  wondered  was: What if the Magnificat had been a part of the Christmas story?  What if Mary had sung this song sitting next to the manger, instead of one chapter earlier, where very few people ever read it?  Would we include it in our Christmas pageants?   Would we have Mary, played by one the little girls in the congregation, singing about bringing down the powerful and scattering the proud?  If we did, how might Christmas be  different? How  might Christians be different?

Even   in   its   silliness,   the   SNL   sketch reminds me that we need some humility when we try to speculate how things would change. But this “what if” question still plagues me. Because   our   theme   this   Advent,   “While We’re Waiting,” looks at what we might DO while we’re waiting for God’s promises to be fulfilled.  And this passage, the Magnificat, challenges us to “lift up the lowly.”  But – it goes beyond that.

Martin Luther said that the Magnificat “comforts  the  lowly  and  terrifies  the  rich.” Not that many years ago, there were places in El Salvador and Guatemala where the public reading of the Magnificat was forbidden as subversive     activity.2  Several biblical commentaries use the same word to describe the Magnificat.  That word is revolutionary.

Revolution means a drastic and far-reaching change in the way we think and behave.  It means  turning  the  tables.    I  heard  a  story about something that happened during a flight from Johannesburg, South Africa, to London. A European woman got on the plane.  She came down the aisle of the tourist section and discovered her seat assignment put her right next to a non-white African man.  She looked at her seat assignment; she saw it was correct. She asked her seatmate, “I’m sorry, are you in the right seat?”   He smiled and nodded yes. She turned around to see if there were any other empty seats in the section but she didn’t see any so she tugged on the sleeve of the flight attendant.  “Excuse me,” she whispered, “as you can see, I’m sitting next to a personwhose  skin  color  is  different  from  mine.” “Yes, ma’am, I can see that.”  “Well,” the woman said, “this is simply unacceptable.  Is there another available seat?”   The flight attendant  looked  at  her  strangely  and  said, “I’m sorry, ma’am; it’s against our policy to move people unnecessarily.”   “You don’t understand,” said the woman, “this arrangement will not do.  I have funds in my purse to arrange an alternative.”  The flight attendant said, “You do?”  “Yes, I do.  Would you please go up to first class and see if there is an available seat?   I just can’t sit next to this person.”   The flight attendant shrugged her shoulders, and walked up the aisle.  A few minutes later she returned.   She leaned over the European woman, tapped the man next to her and said, “I’m sorry, sir, I hate to do this. I have to make a seating change.  If you’ll follow me, we have a place for you in first class.”

Revolution means turning the tables.  For those of us with a seat at the table or a seat in first class, a seat with which we’re pretty happy, turning the tables doesn’t sound like such a blessing.  Cornelius Plantinga writes, “When  our  own  kingdom  has  had  a  good year, we’re not necessarily looking for God’s kingdom.”

That’s where the trust comes in.  In the passage that Joan Flood read this morning, Mary’s cousin Elizabeth says that Mary is blessed because she trusts God even though she is pregnant and unmarried and doesn’t know how this is all going to turn out.  “Let it be,”  Mary  says.     Yes,  the  Beatles  were quoting  Scripture.    We  might  at  first  hear, “Let it be” as passive.   Meek, mild, well- behaved  Mary.    “OK,  God,  whatever  you say.”  But then she lets loose with this song! So what she’s really saying when she says “Let it be according to your word” is that she trusts God’s love and God’s promises – God’s promise to redeem all of creation.  What God has done for Mary – choosing a poor peasant to bear the Son of God – anticipates and models what God will do for the rest of the poor, the powerless, and the oppressed of the world.3        Mary  is  the  beginning  of  a revolution.  The course of human history will be transformed by the child to whom she will give birth.

Interesting material for a Christmas pageant, right?   It’s “Away in the Manger” meets Occupy Wall Street.  How that hits us rather depends, I suppose, on whether our own kingdom has had a good year, as Plantinga put it.   Maybe things look fine in your kingdom, or mine, but we don’t have to look far at all to see that things are not fine for many people – not this Christmas.    In November,  the  Census  Bureau  released  its new   statistics   on   poverty.      The   official poverty rate is up 15.1 percent or 16 percent, depending on which measure you use.  Either way, poverty is on the rise.  And we have living,  breathing  statistics  right  here  in  our own congregation: folks out of work, struggling to pay the PG&E bill or even the rent.  And our guests at the rotating winter shelter in Duncan Hall on Friday nights.

Helping the homeless, building a stronger safety net – these are complex issues.  People with good intentions have widely divergent views on how we should respond, but whether we should engage these matters is, for the Christian,  beyond  dispute.    God  might  not take sides in political races, but again and again in Scripture, God takes sides with the poor.  Just a few chapters later, Luke records the first public words spoken by Jesus.  One Sabbath he enters a synagogue in Nazareth, and when he’s invited to speak he unrolls a scroll  and  reads  from  the  poetry  of  Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because God has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.”4 When he finishes reading he sits down and says that today, this Scripture has been  fulfilled. Jesus  is  saying  this  is  his mission statement, the reason he came.

So – while we’re waiting, both Mary and Jesus say in no uncertain terms: “Lift up the lowly.”   Now, the thing is, for those of you who might be worshiping with us for the first time, this congregation is deeply involved in doing just that.   Every once in a while, the teens  in  our  congregation  lead  us  in something called an Energizer.  Think of it as Christian line dancing to rock music.   My favorite  is  one  called  “Revolution.”     The lyrics of the song ask, “Do you want a revolution?”    Here at First Presbyterian Church of San Anselmo, the answer is yes. Not a big showy revolution, perhaps, but a quiet and persistent revolution to lift up the lowly.  The rotating winter shelter is just the tip of the iceberg.  We participate in Open Table, a project that strives to get one family at a time out of poverty for good.  We rebuild homes destroyed by Hurricane Katrina – all of which are owned by people without the resources to do it themselves.  We work for justice for the oppressed in Israel/Palestine. We started a reforestation project in Afghanistan.  Our deacons help individuals in dire straits.    Check out the Alternative Christmas Fair after worship for more ways we strive to lift up the lowly.

I’m not suggesting we pat ourselves on the back here but I am suggesting that perhaps we take the next logical step, besides continuing what  we’re  doing,  which  is  spreading  the word – teaching others that, like Mary, it is not powerless to say yes to God’s love for all people but it is in fact powerful.  Maybe we don’t put the Magnificat in the Christmas pageant – but maybe we do begin with the kids – the people for whom we have a unique responsibility and calling to teach.   And because of a news story this week I believe we start by teaching our kids empathy.

Empathy, of course, is the willingness to listen to another’s point of view, to put one’s self in another’s shoes and to be able to experience what they are feeling and thinking. Empathy allows us to experience someone else’s struggle as our own, whereas you can feel sympathy for someone and still feel superior   to   them.5          The   importance   of empathy was underlined this past week when a middle-aged, white writer for Forbes published an article entitled, “If I Were a Poor Black Kid,” presenting his ideas for how he would rise to success if he suddenly found himself  young,  African  American  and poverty-stricken.6   It set off a media firestorm, mostly pointing out the extent to which the writer simply didn’t get it, which is another way of saying he lacked empathy.  The best response I saw was from a senior editor of The Atlantic, who wrote that lack of empathy is one of the great barriers in understanding race in this country.  We might like to believe that if we lived in the Civil War-era South, we would have refused to own slaves, or that if we   grew   up   in   a   gang-and-drug-infested ghetto, we would be the ones to fight our way out and succeed.  But empathy requires us to understand that probably isn’t true.   We probably are not extraordinary.   Rather, he writes, to deal adequately with poverty and racism we need a “muscular empathy” rooted in curiosity.7

Empathy  can  be  taught.    It  needs  to  be taught  –  and  I  believe  this  needs  to  be  a central focus of the church of Jesus Christ, if, while we’re waiting, we are to lift up the lowly.  I found a terrific article with ten tips for teaching kids empathy – it’s too long to go over it here but I’ll post it to our website and put it in the footnotes to the sermon.8    But I ran across a story that might be helpful in explaining to kids why they need to exercise muscular empathy.