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.

Sermon Text

Last week we dug into Malachi’s prediction of John the Baptist’s coming, the promise of peace that comes from abandoning violence. We focused on Matthew’s version of his ministry last week, but this week we go into Luke’s version. Luke gives us a big crumb to chew on though. It sounds a lot like what we talked about, but that nugget really changes everything. Last week we were given a map to peace through repentance, but this week we talk about the work of redemption. How do you make good on God’s commandments in a world that so often works against God’s will.

I’m speaking specifically here about something we addressed on Christ the King Sunday. In an imperfect world, where we cannot change easily change the systems we are a part of, how can we do what is right, honor God, and further God’s kingdom? The answer comes in different forms depending on what kind of work we’re doing, but I truly believe there is an answer for how to do God’s work no matter the circumstances we find ourselves in. It just means that we have to think through what we do and how.

I’ll give you a question to chew on before we go into the scriptures. Imagine that you worked in retail, something many of us probably did at some point. You are paid commission based upon how many people you can get to sign up for the credit card your company offers. Not only that, but part of your performance review includes signing people up for these cards. You will lose opportunities to be put on the work schedule, you will not be considered for promotion, and you will not receive any addition pay if you do not regularly enroll people in this credit program. One day, someone comes through the line and their bank card declines. They could afford their purchase if they signed up for the card, receiving a 50% credit on their first purchase. Do you sign them up… Or do you let them pass? We’ll come back to this question later.

John the Baptist, as we discussed last week, preached a message of repentance to all who would hear him. This repentance was not open to a few people, but to all people. This openness meant that the people who heard it needed instruction on how to live out their repentance in their own life and circumstances. A general teaching, “Bear fruit worthy or repentance,” works just fine on paper, but “bearing fruit,” means different things in different circumstances. While John only answers three questions in our scripture today, we can extrapolate a great deal from them.

 Firstly, John makes a simple demand of his followers. “If you have more than you need, share it.” I don’t think I need to say much about this, but it is important to note exactly what it means. It is never optional for us to give to those in need, to live alongside people who may be different than us in more ways than one. We are always called to be in community with other people, and that community has to be built on a willingness to lend a hand when it is needed. We also cannot pretend that our help is only meant to be at a distance – we are called to give of ourselves, in time and in resources both, to ensure all people have what they need to not only survive, but to thrive.

The next admonition he gives is specific to two given professions. Firstly, of a tax collector he says they should take only what they are required to take, and of a soldier he demands that they not use their power to exploit the people around them. These both require a bit more context to understand fully. Judea, you see, was an occupied nation. Rome had ruled over the kingdom for about one hundred years by the time John was preaching by the Jordan. Soldiers were taken from all over the empire and placed in just as many places across it. They wielded not only a sword, but the complete mechanism of the Roman empire behind them. If a soldier threatened you, you had no recourse but to give them what they wanted – they ruled the whole world after all.

Likewise, tax collectors were instruments of the Empire and its oppression. The people were made to pay to fund not only their own local governments, but the larger imperial systems. The people were made to pay for the opulence of the Emperor and the continued oppression of their own people. Tax collectors, again shielded from consequence through their proximity to power, would often take more than was required of the people. If the tax was two days wages, then they would take 4 – keeping the extra money taken for themselves. Add to this the tendency for tax collectors to be hired from the local population and you had people who not only were stealing, but stealing from their friends, family, and neighbors.

John asked those who came to him to give up, not only their personal sins, but their participation in greater evils. When a solider was stationed in a foreign land, it was expected they would use the power they had to get what they wanted out of the locals. When a tax collector took money, they were expected to take something for themselves. John looked both in the eye and said that, regardless of expectations and regardless of earthly consequences, God demanded they be better than the systems they were a part of.

A sad reality of the world as it is, is that we cannot work for just about any large company or group without having to take part – either directly or indirectly – in something that feeds into human suffering. No multinational corporation exists that does not abuse some people or group somewhere down the chain of supplies or management. No business exists that does not extort money from people for their services on some level. Unless you work in a local business, you will find yourself a part of a system that seeks to put profits over people, and even then we must always be careful what we contribute into, even in the smaller world of Clarksburg, of Harrison County, of West Virginia.

We can easily give up hope then, to say that since this world is fallen and we all have dirt under our nails, that we should just give in and lean into the filth a bit more. John, and scripture as a whole, does not afford us that option. We have an obligation, even if it is expected we will take advantage or do harm to people, to choose the better path. While it is often unavoidable to be caught up in the mess that is this world, we are still called to rise about those circumstances. The soldier and the tax collector both worked under Rome, but the circumstances that put them into these roles did not need to define them. If they did their duty and nothing more, it would give them space to do what is right. By learning how not to do harm, they could begin to learn to do good. For us who have far more freedom, even more must be expected of us.

Let us return to the scenario we began with. You are expected to sell people lines of credit, but it is obvious that the person in front of you needs anything but another source of debt. Do you push them to get the card so they can complete their purchase, or do you keep silent about the deal? I won’t answer that question for you, you should be able to answer it after all we’ve talked about. While it is asked of you to sell people on this line of credit, if the only thing it gets you is commission and preference – in other words things beyond your contract – then it is truly a discretionary matter. If we look across any work we do, I think we’ll find that discretion is often hiding in the midst of life’s impossible situations.

Think on what you do, if you’re actively employed or if you’re retired, if you volunteer or if you are in a paid position, and ask what you do that helps people and that hurts people. How can you identify the lines you are not willing to cross? What can you do to further the Good even in the midst of systems that often cause more harm than good?

We all have a part to play in dismantling evil around us, and John asks us to begin by not taking advantage of the situations we are in and not coming up with excuses about why evil is ok when we do it. Repent, bear fruit worthy of repentance, and be transformed. – Amen.