Whose Side?
Preacher: The Rev. Andrew Van Kirk
Passage: Luke 1:39-55
I am sure this is going to be a real shock to you, but I was a bit of a nerdy kid. (You don’t look shocked.) For example, I spend three weeks out of my middle-school summers to take college-style courses for six-hours a day. Extra school! The first summer I took a course on Game Theory.
Game Theory is the academic study of strategic decision making among rational participants (I believe the study of decision making among irrational participants is called “parenting teenagers”).
And in Game Theory class, we talked about pies and how to negotiating the splitting of them. This game theory class also played a supporting role in the story of my call to the priesthood, but that’s a bit of digression. But mostly we talked about pies as models of resources.
The 1st century people of Israel thought of the economy as a fixed-size pie. This is all anachronistic; they had neither a concept of “the economy,” nor did they have pies, which is sad for them. But we’re not here to mourn the lack of pies in the first century. With a fixed-size pie, the ideal situation would be for this pie to be evenly divided up among everyone. And so there are many long Old Testament passages focused on how the land was to be divided up so that everyone got an equal portion.
In reality, even in the ancient world, the economic pie grows (most of the time). Sometimes it shrinks, and that’s very, very bad. But throughout most of recorded history, the economic pie has grown in size faster than the world has grown in population — which means everyone’s pieces of pie can get bigger, albeit at different rates. But that reality wasn’t easily felt, especially in the first century, and so it’s not the way the Biblical authors could conceptualize things. Their conceptual pie was one-size.
The implication of a fixed-size pie is that if someone has a big piece of pie, they have some of somebody else’s who now must suffer having a small piece of pie. There’s no other way to get rich except to take something that belongs to someone else. The rich, by definition, must have what belongs to the poor. Wealth couldn’t be created; wealth was theft.
Understanding this is critical to making sense of what the Bible says about the rich. Rich is a moral category in the Bible as much as an economic category.
Often enough, we know, the rich do exhibit significant moral failings which is why, even though our economic understanding is better, we still use rich as a negative moral category too, particularly in our political discourse.
Still, I want to be clear: one can be rich in the sense of having wealth without being rich in the moral sense, which to say morally bad, which is in fact a great poverty.
And I bring this up here because I want to preach about Mary’s beautiful song of praise to the Lord, the Magnificat, the canticle at the end of the gospel reading that we all just read together. But we can’t really hear Mary’s words without letting them confront us with a pretty direct question: Whose side are you on, anyway?
The proud, the mighty, the rich? Or the lowly and the hungry?
Here’s the prophecy of the Mother of our Lord:
The proud will be scattered in their conceit,
the mighty cast down from their thrones,
and the rich sent away empty.
Meanwhile,
the lowly will be lifted up and
the hungry filled with good things.
This is quite the reversal of things. Mary is saying that, in sending Jesus, God is upending the status quo. God is turning thins around. Overthrowing the established order. Reversing how things work. Which is bad news if things are working out for you the way they already are.
Proud, mighty, and rich, bad news for you.
Lowly and hungry, good news!
We are citizens of the most mighty country in the world, we are far, far richer than the average person on this planet.
Whose side are we on, here?
God’s heart is for the lowly and hungry. The question the person of wealth must face is whether their heart is also, like God’s, for the lowly and hungry, or whether their heart is for the proud and mighty and rich. Do you serve the needy, or the ones without needs?
My introduction about what “rich” meant in the first century was not a sophist argument to get us off the hook, not is this some oblique apologia for having a Financial Peace Announcement this Sunday. There really, truly is not a specific balance in your bank account beyond which you become a bad person. There is rather an unbalanced heart that will lead us down the path of the proud, mighty and rich — whether we have actually have enough money to write the check or not.
We will come to the manger in the humility of our poverty, or in the confidence of our wealth?
Close your eyes. I want you to find yourself on a path through the hill country of Judea. You come around a corner and find the mother of our Lord among the olive groves. You can feel the breeze that blew the loose strands of hair across her olive-skinned face. You’re close enough to see the telltale roundness, the first visible sign of her heavenly burden, beneath her robe. You can hear her trembling voice as she begins to sing “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord” – and then she catches your eye.
Is this teenage girl singing hope for you? Or she singing judgment at you? Who would Mary take you to be?
In my mind, I imagine I’d feel better meeting Mary the Queen of Heaven, the one who figured our what to do with Wise Men who had the wealth and leisure to travel and brought costly gifts out of their riches; the one who navigated the challenges and ambiguities of providing for a son; the one who had followed after Jesus with the other Marys, including Mary the wife of Cleopas, the Cleopas who was the steward of Herod, and so had access to riches himself; the one who in the very worst moment of her life, laid her son’s bloodied body in the tomb of a rich man from Arimathea named Joseph; the Mary who saw the nascent church grow and be cared for by the women, and sometimes men, of means who gave to work of the apostles. Mary, like all of us, lived in a world in “rich” proved imprecise as a moral category. As it turned out, even the rich got caught up in the world-shaking work of the Messiah.
Mary the Queen of Heaven surely could look on the deep relational poverty of suburban American life, the way we allow our work colleagues to blunt our hunger for true friendship until we retire; the way our privacy fences don’t even keep the neighbor kids’ ball from crushing our flowers, but do keep us from sharing life; the loneliness of widows whose spouses died decades too soon; the deep isolation of chronic illness — and Mary surely would say, “Yes — my son came for that sort of hunger and poverty too.”
Mary the Queen of Heaven surely would look at our young people, with their struggles with self-assurance, their angry despair, the way their digital world has taught them to long to be anyone but themselves — and surely Mary would say, “Yes, I bore Jesus for that sort of lowly adolescent too.”
Mary the Queen of Heaven could look down at a traffic jam, through the car roofs, and see a long line of functioning addicts: to the two-three (or four) glasses of wine at home; to TikTok; to prescription pain killers, porn, video games, streaming television, nicotine, and Mary would say, “Yes, he has come to help; God has remembered his promise of mercy.”
Yes, for all that, and for so much more, Mary gave birth at Bethlehem.
And yet what would Mary the pregnant teenage girl — whose face still had acne, whose knees hadn’t started hurting yet, whose hair was ungrayed — the young woman still new enough to this life to possess all the fearsome moral clarity of youth, what would she see in us?
Lord knows, there are enough such pregnant young women today, we could probably ask one.
I don’t want to accuse. I just want to be the sort of man that, if I were to meet the mother of my Lord beneath the olive groves in the hill country near Elizabeth’s house, she’d see me as someone who was on her side in this life. Because obviously that’s whose side God is on.
Amen.
