"Would Mary Occupy Wall Street?"

Luke 1:46-55

Fourth Sunday in Advent + December 18, 2011

Reverend Dr. David C. Brown
Pilgrim Congregational United Church of Christ
400 Glenwood Drive, Chattanooga, TN 37404

People sometimes ask me if I ever wanted to be anything other than a minister. Actually, there were a few pre-adolescent years when I wanted to be a chemist. My interest was stimulated by a chemistry set my grandparents got for me one Christmas. I remember conducting the experiments in the booklet, usually with great care! But I also remember a few frivolous (and, perhaps, dangerous) moments with my friend Mario McConney when we experimented with various combinations of vinegar and baking soda in order to produce mini-explosions. The goal was to blow a cork out of a test tube in order to see how far we could make it fly before landing.

To my knowledge, we never damaged any test tubes or shot out any eyeballs. Neither did any of our corks leave earth’s orbit. But we were fascinated by the dual notions of power and flight. Once we even tried to construct a boy-carrying glider that we could launch from the cliff on top of Scout Hill. But when we had finally lugged our glider to the top of the hill, we discovered that neither of us wanted to be the first to test its powers of flight!

But young boys are not the only ones fascinated by the dual notions of power and flight. Consider the report of Jacob Needleman, a journalist from some years ago when our space program was still going:

“I was invited, by Time magazine, to be a participant observer at the launch of Apollo 17. At that time, there were a lot of cynical people complaining about the space program. . . It was a night launch, and there were hundreds and hundreds of reporters all over the lawn, drinking beer and waiting for this tall, thirty-five-story rocket lit by these powerful lamps.

The countdown came, and then the launch. The first thing you see is this extraordinary orange light, which is just at the limit of light that you can bear to look at . . . It’s beautiful, everything’s illuminated with this light. Then comes this slow thing rising up in total silence because it takes a few seconds for the sound to come across. Then you hear a “WHOOOH!HHHHHMMMM!” It enters right into you. This extraordinary thing is lifting up. Suddenly, among all these cynical people and the wisecracking people, myself included, you can practically hear their jaws dropping. The sense of wonder fills everyone in the whole place, as this thing goes up, and up and up and up. The first stage ignites this beautiful blue flame. It becomes like a star, but you realize there are human beings on it. And then there’s total silence.

Then people just got up quietly, helping each other up. They’re kind. They open doors. They look at each other, speaking quietly and interestedly. These were suddenly moral people because wonder, the sense of wonder, the experience of wonder, had made them moral.”

As a fledgling chemist, I knew that great power often produces great awe. But as a veteran preacher, I have discovered that its opposite does, too . . . produce great awe, I mean. The awe of the rocket overwhelms. But the awe of the Child born at Bethlehem, humbles. It is the timeless message of Christmas . . . that the world turns on the One cradled in Mary’s arms.

Nowhere is this contrast better depicted than in Mary’s wonderful song called The Magnificat found in Luke’s Gospel. Over against a world then and now which is awe-struck by power, wealth, and prestige, Mary sings of an astonishing new reality that God is creating in the birth of Christ. In the birth of Christ, God is turning the world upside down. The proud will be humbled. The powerful will be made weak. The rich will discover how empty they truly are. And most wonderful of all, the nobodies of the earth will realize they are somebodies in the eyes of God. The forgotten will be remembered. The poor will be fed. The weak will be empowered for goodness. All of this will happen and is happening because of that stable birth.

This overwhelming, transforming, humbling power of Christmas is what inspired my (seemingly) frivolous sermon topic today:”Would Mary Occupy Wall Street?" It’s a long way from the first century to the twenty-first century, but one reality is always present: God’s never-failing intention to make this world the just place it should be for all people. God inspires a hunger for change in every age. Now it has bubbled up again in this Year of Our Lord 2011 with thousands of people rising up to challenge the political, social and economic oppression in our time. These protests have happened in almost every part of the world. In the Middle East this led to what is now called the Arab Spring and the fall of dictators. In our own country some of the 99%, the people forgotten by the wealthy and the powerful, have staged impromptu demonstrations around the country, the Occupy Movement. They are not just young people but all those who know that something is very wrong in our society when so few have so much and so many have so little. They are now scrambling to find shelter just as the Holy Family did the first Christmas. Would Mary and Joseph have joined them, the Occupy Movement? I really don’t know, but I do know this. The ultimate reality that Mary sang about in her song, “The Magnificat,” continues to work among us today with a power the world neither knows nor can overcome. That is what Christmas is all about.

When you and I truly experience the awesomeness, the power, of this Christmas moment, we are like those reporters witnessing the flight of Apollo 17: the wonder of it all changes us. Then, like those earliest Christians, we are ready to go out and turn the world upside down for Christ and God will be with us, Immanuel.