Luke 1:46-56 - "The World Turned Upside"
/“The World Turned Upside Down”
“And Mary said,
“My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for God has looked with favor on the lowliness of God’s servant.
Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
for the Mighty One has done great things for me,
and holy is God’s name.
God’s mercy is for those who fear the Lord
from generation to generation.
God has shown strength with God’s arm;
God has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
The Lord has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;
God has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.
God has helped God’s servant Israel,
in remembrance of God’s mercy,
according to the promise God made to our ancestors,
to Abraham and to his descendants forever.”
Sermon
When I was a kid, I remember reading through the Bible, looking for stories about girls. It was long before I knew what the word feminist really meant or heard a call to pastoral leadership. I just knew I was looking for stories about girls in the Bible because I was looking for stories that might sound a bit like me. I remember reading Mary’s song in Luke and feeling proud that a girl sang like this. There’s something about the power, the beauty, and the confidence of it that fills me with hope for who God is. Mary was a young, poor girl, living in occupied territory. She was every definition of marginalized and yet she was the one who God chose to usher in God’s plan of reconciliation with all humanity. The lowest of the low is raised up to be one who held Jesus within her body.
Her song makes me wonder what Mary must have been like as a young mom. How she must have taught Jesus how to walk, how to talk, how to pray. How she passed down the faith to him that had been passed down to her. Her song is part of a long tradition in scripture of songs of God’s great reversals. The Old Testament is filled with hymns, poems, and psalms that speak about God taking sides against Pharaoh or Nebuchadnezzar and turning the systems of power in this world upside down.
Mary’s song is particularly evocative of Hannah’s song from First Samuel. Hannah was the wife of Elkanah and she longed to have a child. When she finally, finally got pregnant, she dedicated her son Samuel to God and a sang a song that is, in some ways, part the reason I am here today. When I was discerning whether or not I should go to seminary, I did a meditative Bible study practice called lectio divina on Hannah’s song where we listened to the song read three times. When I heard the line, “the Lord is a God of knowledge” I realized for the first time that I wanted that knowledge and for me, that meant going to seminary. Hearing Hannah’s words that day set me on a course that led to me you. My faith, like Mary’s faith, is product of the faith that passed down to me from generation to generation.
Many of us have been reading our church-wide devotional “Do Not Be Afraid” and this week, it focused on Mary’s song and the deep resonance within it from the songs of Isaiah, King David, Hannah, and Miriam found in the Old Testament. When Mary was overwhelmed with the life-changing news from the angel, the words that came out of her were the values that had been instilled deep within her from childhood. I want us to take a moment and think about what values we inherited from our families and our ancestors.
When my extended family gathered on Zoom for Thanksgiving this year, we shared memories of Thanksgivings in the past and my mom shared about her childhood memories. She grew up on a farm in a rural part of Northern California and told us that every Thanksgiving, her mom would invite their old neighbor who lived alone to join them. As a kid my mom was always resistant, wanting it to be a family holiday, but my grandma insisted that he would not spend the holiday alone. I was surprised to hear that my mom didn’t want a stranger at Thanksgiving, because her story sounded exactly like my childhood. Nearly every Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, or major holiday that we spent at home included an outsider at our table. My mom is an English as a Second Language teacher at the community college in town, so every year she would invite someone to join us. I was exactly like she was as a kid, whining about how it was a family holiday and I wanted to be just us. But my mom ignored my complaints, and so family holidays often included a Ukrainian family, a Chinese exchange student, or a 10-person refugee family from the Congo.
When I was young, I didn’t know that my mom and grandma were just practicing what the Bible calls “welcoming the stranger.” They didn’t use churchy language about “welcoming outsiders” in some theoretical way. They just saw people who were lonely and chose not to leave them out. That kind of hospitality is now one of my biggest values and it is because I have learned it from them. I can only hope that someday I will have kids in my house learning firsthand what it looks like to welcome a stranger, outsider, foreigner, and refugee to the table.
Like my family’s tradition of bringing outsiders to holiday dinners, Mary’s song is also a part of long tradition in scripture of praising God for taking sides with marginalized and turning the world upside down. Her song is not an anomaly in scripture. I believe that is important because if we say her song is an exception, then we don’t have to take it seriously. We could brush it off as metaphorical or relegate it to being simply churchy language that has no practice implications. Those are tempting responses because Mary’s song is incredibly radical and it will change how we live our lives, if let it. When we strip away the familiar biblical language, it sounds more like protest chant than a pretty Sunday morning hymn. Mary sings about God stripping power from the wealthy and elevating the poor. She says God is filling empty stomachs while emptying the rich. Mary is proclaiming loudly, so all can hear—this what God has come to do—to turn the world upside down.
Mary’s song brings another song to my mind from the hit musical Hamilton. In the song “Yorktown,” the scrappy, underfunded, American colonists succeeded in defeating the seemingly undefeatable British army. At the end of the battle, the cast sings over and over, “the world turned upside down.” The world as they knew it, where Great Britain dominated as the unchecked global superpower, had completely changed.
People thought that Great Britain’s dominance was inevitable. This was how things had always been in everyone’s lifetime, so they assumed it would always be that way. But at Yorktown, they learned that systems of power that we think are inevitable are capable of being turned on their head.
Have you ever felt the world turn upside down? When systems of power you thought were inevitable suddenly proved not to be? Perhaps you remember the end of Apartheid in South Africa or the falling of the Berlin Wall. The passing of the Civil Rights Act, 9/11, or the Great Recession.
Or maybe it was something a lot closer to home—a family member who surprised everyone and came out as gay. Your parents divorcing after years together. A military transfer that sent your family to a place you’d never thought you’d be. A job loss… or a job offer. An answer from God or God’s seemingly endless silence to your questions. It’s not always bad when your world gets turned upside, but it is almost always disorienting. It takes time for things to go from looking like only wreckage to seeing new life that wasn’t possible before. New love after divorce, surprising joy in a new city, doors opened in a career you’d never considered before. But when your world turns upside down, no matter the cause, it can be discomforting, exhausting, and overwhelming.
Maybe it was something else that came to mind when you heard talk of the world turned upside down. The pandemic. The pandemic has turned our world upside down, hasn’t it?
It has caused discomfort and pain. The routines we took for granted disappeared in an instant. The future is impossible to plan. Everything from toilet paper supply chains to church gatherings have been disrupted. But for some, disruption doesn’t even begin to cover it. There are people who have lost more loved ones in a year than they could have ever imagined. Unemployment and underemployment are an acute crisis. More than 12 million Americans owe more than $5000 in back rent and utilities because of this pandemic. Researchers estimate that up to 40 million people in this country could be facing eviction when the federal protections expire in January. That is 1 in every 10 Americans, including millions of children. Christmas isn’t going to be the same for many this year.
And yet, the Pandemic hasn’t been bad for everyone. For the ultra-rich, testing and medical treatment have continued to be available on demand. America’s billionaires have profited off this pandemic by over $930 billion dollars. Wealth inequality that was already bad before the pandemic has spiraled out of control these last nine months. Senators sold their stocks after closed door hearings while telling the public not to take safety precautions. Countless politicians failed to pass legislation for months to help suffering families and still they retained their seats in Congress. The political systems of power and wealth are stronger now than ever. The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting so much poorer, and the worst is still yet to come. Our country, our whole world, is in an urgent crisis.
And then Advent brings us Mary’s song. A song about God’s desire to turn the world upside down. No matter how disorienting it might be for all of us, a world turned upside down would be very good news.
This week, I came across “Operation Santa” from the US Postal Service. Since 1912, when kids mail their letters to Santa each year, the Post Office collects them and gives Santa a little help in answering the all the letters he gets. For the past few years, the letters have been put online for other people read and serve as one of Santa’s elves by adopting a letter. It’s meant to be a heartwarming experience of Christmas joy, but I came across some letters this year that stopped me in my tracks. Like this one, from Kayla,
And this one from Julian
These children are writing to Santa Claus to beg for help for their parents. They are 10 and 11 years old and their Christmas wishes are for money to keep the lights on and couch that turns into a bed, so their parents’ backs don’t hurt in the morning. As I read these letters this week, I sat in my office and bawled my eyes out. To live in the richest country in the world where children write these kinds of letters to Santa is heartbreaking in a way that I struggle to find words for. They are desperately in need of a world turned upside down.
Which us brings us again to Mary’s song. When Mary sings about God “filling the hungry with good things” she is talking about real people, about kids like Kayla and Julian who do not have enough to survive. She’s talking about people who can’t afford housing, who can’t afford food, who ration medicine, or have to treat the ER like a primary care doctor. The poor are not theoretical—they are real people and God seems not to be at all interested in what they might have done in their lives to become poor, only that they get what they need.
They need a world turned upside down, but that doesn’t mean one that mirrors the unequal systems that define our world today. The opposite of patriarchal system where women are systemically discriminated against is not a matriarchal one where women are paid more than men for the same work. The solution is not a system that advantages women over men. That is the same system with a different name. The great reversals that Mary attributes to God are not about the poor taking up the unjust practices of the rich. A world turned upside down is not a transfer of power, it’s an equalizing of power. It’s a world in which in power is not used harm others. It’s a world where what you gain is measured only by what you give away.
You can hear it, can’t you? How Mary’s song is prelude to what we will hear from Jesus throughout his ministry. In the Kingdom of God, Jesus says, the first shall be last, the servant is the greatest, the rich shall not enter, and the meek inherit the earth. Turing economic and political power upside down is what Jesus came here to do. Jesus, raised by his powerful, prophetic mother, took up the scroll of Isaiah and proclaimed that his calling was the work that God has always been doing—
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because God has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
God has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
This is what God came to earth to do. To bring good news to the poor. When I hear Mary’s song of the hungry being filled, I think of how many times in the gospels Jesus went around feeding people. He was feeding them because they were hungry. That is what God came to do. And as the head, heart, and hands of Jesus Christ, that is what we are called to do too. It’s why we became a Matthew 25 church—because we want to actively engage in the world around us so that our faith may be alive and we can wake up to new possibilities.
Our world still needs to be turned upside down. The Kingdom that Christ came to bring to earth is not fully here. We have seen glimpses of it, yes, but the work is still very much ahead in building God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.
As the very first doses of the vaccine are being distributed around the country this weekend, there is hope out on the horizon of the end of this horrible pandemic. It can be tempting to say, “we just want life to go back to normal.” But if we want life to go back to normal, it’s because the old normal worked for us. We had enough privilege and security and money to get by. But the old normal wasn’t working for everyone. As the unprecedented scale of the protests after the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery showed us—"normal” was never good for everyone. Yes, “normal” meant church potlucks, family gatherings, concerts, movies, and picnics. But “normal” also meant mass incarceration fueled deep racial bias, broken immigration and criminal justice systems, a tenth of our population living in poverty, rampant gender discrimination, ableism, and growing homelessness. But these systems are not inevitable. This is not how things have to be. They are products of thousands of choices but we can always choose to do things differently.
So instead of waiting for the world to return to normal, let’s use this time to do God’s work and turn the world upside in the hopes of creating a better one for everyone. Let’s hear Mary’s words not as pretty song to sing on Sundays in Advent, but as a rallying cry—let us fill the hungry with good things. Let us take seriously our own ego and pride and hold our fellow siblings in Christ accountable. Let us work to take down those in power, and the systems that support them, who are not working in the best interests of our fellow humans. Let us remember, as author Glennon Doyle says, that there is no such thing as other people’s children. There are only God’s beloved children and God has come to earth, as the tiny baby of poor, brown skinned woman so that we might have life and have it to abundance. May we join with Mary, with our hearts rejoicing in God our savior, in bringing that abundant life to all who need it. Amen.
