Fairhaven Sermon 12-22-2024

This past week, I saw a video online that I watched most of the way through before I realized that it wasn't actually a joke. I thought it was a joke. It was a pretty typical looking movie theater, and up front were a handful of British soldiers, the fully uniformed kind, you know, in the red coats and the tall, bare-skin hat. And these British soldiers marched to the front of the movie theater, in front of the screen, and commanded the audience to stand in this movie theater.

And they lifted trumpets and horns and began to play a fanfare. And so once that fanfare concluded, all the flourishes, they moved into the United Kingdom's national anthem, God Save the King. And at that moment, King Charles III entered the balcony of the movie theater, waving to his subjects around him and below him, who all clapped and cheered the king. Because he had come to watch Gladiator 2.

And I don't totally know why, but this whole scene was just so funny to me. All this ceremony, this great display of power and formality to make way for the king of, you know, what was until 60 years ago, the largest empire in the world, much larger than the Roman Empire they're watching on the movie screen. And they made way for the king to come sit in a squeaky chair that probably had Raisinets melted into the cushion. His expensive leather shoes were probably sticking to pop puddles on the floor.

And the choice of the movie itself, it's not like this was some kind of high art, you know, film festival piece that we'd associate with royal tastes. It was a gory action film, Gladiator 2, just barely more highbrow than an Avengers movie or something. It hardly seems to fit the noble fanciness of the occasion with the band and the bowing and the music. And so all this to say, the king's night out at the movies, despite being a completely serious event as far as everyone in that theater was concerned, seemed to me almost to be kind of a parody of royalty and power, demonstrating how absurd it all is when you start really looking at it.

Because when it comes down to it, the king is just some guy who by accident of birth owns an enormous amount of land and a couple castles and has his face on a bunch of countries' coins. God did not handpick and put him on the throne like King David. And I don't mean to pick on our British friends either. God didn't elect President Biden.

God didn't elect President Trump. Those are just two guys, two men who find themselves in command of a handful of aircraft carrier groups and some nuclear weapons. Nor is this only true for political figures. The same for your Warren Buffets, your Elon Musks, your Jeff Bezos.

They're not divinely favored. They're not immortal. They're not special in God's eyes, no more so than you or me, and maybe a bit less than whoever is currently standing asking for money on the corner of 51. Royalty, military power, obscene wealth.

They're flimsy. And in an eternal sense, they're not real. They're meaningless. They're fading away.

The tales from scripture that we turn to at Advent remind us of this, refocus us year after year on what is true and what is passing away. The past few weeks we've heard from John the Baptist, that wild-eyed prophet who brings the voice of God to the people. And he does this on the margins of civilization, out in the wilderness along the Jordan River, while the kings, the governors, the emperor, the priests go about their business in the bustling cities, just completely disinterested and unaware of what John's doing out there. God bypasses royalty, bypasses the greatest military the world had ever seen, bypasses the temple in which he was believed to dwell, and the priests whose job it was to hear from God.

And God speaks instead through this strange man in the wilderness who lives on locusts and wild honey. And the prophetic call to prepare the way of the Lord then as now comes not from palaces and cathedrals, but from the midst of this dusty, undignified crowd of people whose names we don't know. And this morning, we come to marry the mother of Jesus and see a very similar kind of situation. The Messiah who's been promised for generations to be seated on the throne of David, to save his people, to free them from shame and oppression, he's born among human beings.

And is he conceived by a king and a queen in Jerusalem or Rome? No. Is his conception marked by an imperial proclamation, an army parade, or God's voice tearing open the heavens for everybody to hear? No. And in fact, if we rewind a few verses here in Luke chapter one, it seems the total number of people informed about the impending coming of the one who will be called the son of the most high is one single person. And that one person who knows what is to come is Mary, who is nobody.

The angel Gabriel tells her she will have a son conceived by the Holy Spirit. She consents. And then we're where we begin our reading today. Mary is this young teenager who's now pregnant with Israel's Messiah.

And she heads out, presumably on her own, to visit her elderly aunt, Elizabeth. And Elizabeth too is nobody. If anything, her identity is rooted in her husband. He's a priest and she's the priest's wife.

Beyond that, she's just some old lady without any influence, without any power. But she too has experienced a miracle. She is pregnant in her old age with the boy who will one day be called John the Baptist. So Mary arrives at Elizabeth's house in the Judean highlands.

And without a word of explanation, Elizabeth's unborn son jumps for joy in her womb. She feels it. John recognizes the coming of the Lord Jesus, who's probably not even yet a visible bump. John just knows.

And Elizabeth, filled with the Holy Spirit, knows. The world is about to turn upside down by these children who are still months away from even taking their first breath. Why do I have this honor? Elizabeth asks. That the mother of my Lord should come to me.

These pregnancies, both miraculous, are bigger miracles than they even appear. One baby conceived by a virgin, another by a very old woman. Yes, that's miraculous. But it's more than that.

Because they will come to first proclaim and then usher in the kingdom of God on earth. And so Mary sings a song that has come to be known as the Magnificat. She sings, I rejoice in God from the very depth of my being. He's favored me, despite me being nobody in this world except for his servant.

And everyone forever will call me blessed because of what he has done for me. He's faithful to those who love him. He is strong. The arrogant and the rich and the powerful, she says, are yanked down from their places of honor and authority while the nameless and the irrelevant are lifted up.

He fills the hungry. He snubs the rich. And he has been and always will be faithful to his people. The God of Israel, she sings, turns the world upside down.

Worldly power is nothing. Worldly honor is nothing. Riches or fame or strength, nothing. How can they be if this teenage peasant girl from Nazareth has been chosen to be the example of faithfulness for all time, the mother of God? How can all those things matter if God picked Mary? God promises reversal.

And Mary, even more than any of her biblical forebears, experiences it firsthand, the kind of reversal that Jesus would bring into the world in which one day we'll be all in all. And Mary's song is such an incredible moment. It rings down through history. It's a rebel song.

It's a song of revolution. Quite literally, it's declaring that every human king is illegitimate. It's prophesying their downfall. It's proclaiming the days of the rich living large while the masses suffer are coming to an end, that God's going to do something about it.

In Europe, for almost a thousand years until the 1700s or so, Christians had a festival to commemorate the reversal that Mary sings about. This was a really rowdy kind of festival, one that eventually got suppressed, but one that maybe we can learn a little bit from. In countries across Europe, France and the south of Europe especially, there was a carnival-like celebration called the Feast of Fools, which, like God's choice of Mary to bear Christ into the world, mocked and belittled tradition, hierarchy, power, and wealth. This was every winter in the spirit of the Magnificat.

A Pope of Fools, they called him, would be elected for the length of the festival from among low-ranking priests. One of these low-ranking, no-name priests would become the Pope for a week. It's like whenever a town elects a dog mayor as a novelty thing. Some priests would dress as women and then sing and dance in the church.

During Mass, monks would wear their vestments inside out. They'd hold their books upside down, and the ones that wore glasses would replace the glass with orange peels. And amazingly, this is the part that I like the best, they would bring a donkey into the church to be celebrated. They would all hee-haw, and then they would sing a special song to the donkey.

This lowly, goofy animal was honored as the animal that Mary rode into Bethlehem, and later Egypt, as the Holy Family fled King Herod. God made the donkey worthy and noble, more than any war horse, and it was sung in a mix of Latin and French. This is a song we have a lot of record of. Here's a couple verses.

In eastern lands the ass arrived, pretty and so strong, fit for burden. Hail, Sir Ass, hail. He eats barley, beards and all, and spiny thistles. He separates the wheat from the chaff on the threshing floor.

Hail, Sir Ass, hail. There's a modernized version of this song, actually, in our hymnal. I literally learned this two days ago. Number 227.

We're not singing that today, but take a look at it sometime. It commemorates a lot of animals, but the first verse is indeed about the donkey. But what a celebration this is. A donkey is made noble, and a peasant girl is made the mother of God.

Today is a day to remember that there are rare moments where the overturning that Mary prophesies breaks through into the world. Even if it's brief, it's like we get to peek through a window and see into the coming kingdom. Consider all the moments in scripture, in Jesus' life, whenever this happens. The feeding of the 5,000 from a boy's lunch.

The raising of Lazarus from the dead. Think about Jesus himself riding a donkey into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. This mock royal procession against military might, against the puppet kings of the emperor. Jesus comes as king.

And then there's the modern example, a modern example, that gives me chills when I remember that it actually happened. It's been a couple years since I've talked about this. I've got to get back to it. The Christmas Truce of 1914.

Christmas Eve 110 years ago, in the trenches of northern France, a miracle happened. Once the sun had gone down on Christmas Eve, German soldiers lifted little Christmas trees and candles over the edge of the trenches. They started singing Christmas carols. And British soldiers on the other side of no man's land responded by singing their own Christmas carols.

And this happened over and over again along thousands of miles of the front lines. And soon French and British and German soldiers had climbed out of their trenches and they spent Christmas with their enemies. They played soccer in the no man's land that was full of craters. They just went and played soccer there with each other because that united all of Europe, as it still does.

They shared cigarettes, chocolate, and liquor. And it was a genuine miracle. Some soldiers who wrote about it later, almost all of them actually, say that it didn't even seem like it was real. As they remembered the next couple years of the war and looked back on it, it seems like it wasn't even real.

There's an English captain who describes singing Auld Lang Syne among Scots and Irishmen and men from all over the German Empire. And he said a couple years later, if someone had shown him on film what he saw with his own eyes, he would have believed it was fake. And these unofficial truces ground the war to a halt until at least the 26th of December, longer in some places. And the fighting resumed then.

And many cases only whenever commanding officers who were terrified that all the men would just refuse to fight anymore, ended up forcing them out of the trenches at gunpoint. The war would go on for four more years. It would kill at least 17 million people. But it could have ended right there.

And this is obviously a very dramatic moment. We don't see miracles on this scale very often. We don't see God's peace break into the world in that dramatic way very often. But we can catch these glimpses of reversal, of God's kingdom taking root, and see the promise of salvation and redemption is on the way.

The same way Mary did when she sang her eternal song. We can see it. I wonder if you could think of whenever in your day-to-day life you've seen it, whenever you know in the depths of who you are in Mary's words, the glory and the power of the Lord. At the very least, we get it at least once a month, whenever all people, rich, poor, hungry, full, powerful, weak, are invited to share a feast at Jesus' own banquet.

And I was thinking about it and even the elements themselves experience this reversal, this elevation. Regular old bread and juice from shop and save become holy food. The body and the blood of the Lord. This is what the Magnificat is pointing us to.

These moments where the kingdom breaks through, where we see what one day is going to be everywhere through Christ. Mary sings that much of what we see, which likes to pretend that it's going to be forever, is crumbling into dust. Wealth rusts and rocks and crowns and guns shatter into pieces. And Mary insists and sings, and she knows because it's happening in her own body, that God is doing something else entirely.

God is making all things new. Christ the Lord is coming to save his people in the form of a fragile baby boy. And in fact, he's coming to save the whole world. Can you hear Mary's song with Christmas days away and Christ's return on the horizon? Can you sing it? And can the world hear us as we sing, as we live and proclaim the good news, the promise of a holy revolution? May it be so in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Amen.