The Gospel Lesson                                                                     Luke 1:39-56

In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.

And Mary said,

“My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior for he has looked with favor on the lowly state of his servant. Surely from now on all generations will call me blessed, for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name; indeed, his mercy is for 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 brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty. He has come to the aid of his child Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever.”

Sermon Text

Throughout this month we have been looking at the way that Christ’s coming into the world, and Christ’s resulting Kingdom, bring us into a new way of being. By first acknowledging that Hope we are given in God’s promise that those who stay alert have nothing to fear. By then seeing the promise God made long ago that our Baptism would give us new ways to bring Peace into the world through our repentance. Culminating in a call to consider how we might redeem the world through transforming ourselves, and in so doing bring Joy where previously there was none. Now today, we look to the thing that must undergird all of this – Love, pure and all encompassing, that lives itself out in Justice.

Justice is usually used in our day to day life to describe acts of retaliation. In other words, we use them to mean “punitive,” measures applied to people after they’ve done something wrong to punish them for doing something they should not have. This is the model our society uses most often after all. You commit a crime, you’re arrested, and then you are fined or imprisoned to “serve your time.” This vision of justice is grim. There is a price to pay, and after it has been paid, then you can return to a lesser kind of freedom than you had before. This is not the kind of Justice that God dreams of.

Justice is defined in two roughly equivalent terms across the Greek and Hebrew Scripture. In Hebrew it is called (“tzedakah,”) and in Hebrew “δικαιοσύνη,” (“dikaiosune.”) The words differ from our concept of justice in that both of them have a focus on right relationship to the people around you and to God. For the Hebrew scriptures there was an emphasis placed on Covenant loyalty to God and in the Greek culture there was an emphasis on working for the good of the culture and city around you. Christianity fused these two ideas and added an additional emphasis, to embrace fully the sacrificial love which Jesus epitomized in his ministry.

The first place where Jesus’s love was first described was not in John’s proclaiming repentance to the people gathered around the Jordan nor in Jesus first reading the scroll in his hometown synagogue. Instead, it was found when Mary went to visit her cousin Elizabeth, and the infant John the Baptist first jumped for joy to meet the Messiah. Mary, who had been chased out of her hometown by rumors and worries, had finally found confirmation that her child was everything she had been promised he would be. The result is a song of unbroken praise, where she proclaims just how God’s loving mercy makes Justice roll like a river through this world.

Firstly, she acknowledges that God chose to work through her to achieve something this wonderful. She, a poor teenager in a backwater village in an underdeveloped corner of the Roman empire, was going to be the one through whom the salvation of the world would come. “Now all people will call me blessed,” is not a statement of vanity, but of humility. She, through nothing but God’s Grace, was made to be the first evangelist – sending Christ into the world to save it from itself. Though she would give everything, her first-born son whom she loved in the process, she received the blessing of being part of God’s grand plan of redemption.

It was not just something done for her though, God was fulfilling a complete rerouting of human history through Jesus’s birth, life, death, and resurrection. The strong arm of God, reaching out into the world was prepared to scatter the powerful people of the world. Within two years of his birth, the King of Judea, a tyrant who had tried to keep power through theft and intrigue, assassination and manipulation, would be brought to the edge by the news of his existence. Powerful priests from far off lands would bow before him, understanding something his own people could not. Even the full might of Rome would be nothing to him, as the nails and spear they placed into his flesh would give way to resurrected life.

God’s opposition to power was not completed in simply opposing the kings and rulers of the land though, it was found in the must fundamental and revolutionary aspect of the Kingdom of God. This is, of course, in the community of mutual care that God brings to fruition wherever the Spirit rests. The hungry are fed and those who had withheld food from them are turned away. In other words, God sees the scales of this world tipped so far in favor of the rich, that God pushes God’s support fully behind the needs of the poor. Pushing the scale into balance through preference to those in need. God promises Justice through lifting of the lowly, opposition to the rich, and refusal to concede to the evils of the powers that be.

When we read this prophecy of Mary, all that God will achieve through her son, then we should quickly realize that we do not epitomize this Justice which God has asked us to take part in. We are not fully sold out for the needs of the people around us, nor do we oppose the powerful – no we usually fawn over them in one way or another. We fail to acknowledge God as our King, we fail to see the strangers among us as our siblings, we fail to be an obedient church. Yet, there is always hope for us.

Christmas, the day just a few sleeps away from us, is the day that God set into motion the complete reconciliation of all creation to the divine. When the total divinity of God’s eternal Word would take on the form of a poor human baby, ultimate power suddenly becoming poor, defenseless, and weak… When this took place, all the order of the world was turned on its head. The lessons taught by Moses and the prophets found their fulfillment in this. God was no longer content to bend Heaven to Earth, but sought to join the two forever. Through our baptism into the Kingdom, through the complete transformation of our lives, we are allowed to see beyond ourselves into something grander. God’s Justice, born in love, is breaking out among us. What will we do to take part in it? That is the question we all must weigh in our hearts this Christmastide. – Amen.