God Has Brought Down the Powerful and Lifted Up the Lowly

Rebecca Sheridan
Wednesday, December 14, 2022
Luke 1:46-53

    As we continue to reflect on Mary’s famous song, the Magnificat, these Wednesdays in Advent, here was the prompt for tonight’s theme: “God’s sense of justice overturns our human constructs.  In a world dominated by power and privilege, what does this “overturned justice” mean for us?”  Well, as they say in Norwegian, “uff da.” I was hoping Pastor Marc would preaching this week.  That’s pretty weighty stuff to reflect on tonight, a week and a half until Christmas!  But as we continue to pray for peace and look forward to the angels promise that God brings peace on Earth and good will to all, perhaps it’s worth taking another look at least on Mary’s marveling that in the birth of Jesus God brings about a great reversal, confronting corrupt powers and lifting up the lowly.
    Remember again that we guess Mary was pretty young when she sings this powerful song – maybe as young as 13-14 years-old; a teenager.  Yet her words offer wisdom beyond her years and echo the song of Hannah that we heard last week from 1 Samuel and Jesus’ own words in the gospels.  I remember learning in my adolescent psychology class in college that our frontal lobes, which are the parts of the brain that help us with impulse control and wise decision-making, don’t fully develop until we are 25, in males it takes even a little longer, maybe. I was only 20 years old at the time so learning that helped me understand some of my own poor decision-making in my college years.  But just because teenagers don’t always make the wisest of choices doesn’t mean that they don’t also have wisdom to share, like Mary.  My own children who are 5 and 7 sometimes blow me away with their insights.  I am blessed this year at Faith to have one of the best confirmation classes I’ve ever had – we talk about how God is three yet one and how you can believe in God and yet still have doubts and all kinds of deep thoughts and I look at the clock and often it’s five minutes past when class was supposed to end.
Mary’s song reminds us we can find God at work in unlikely people and places. In the wisdom of children and teenagers.  In young, poor parents traveling from Nazareth to Bethlehem with no place for them in any respectable inn, who trust anyway that God’s promise of salvation can be accomplished through people like them! Among shepherds watching their flocks by night on the outskirts of the city.  In a baby lying in a feeding trough for animals, we find the savior of the world.  
    Do we find them, though, Aren’t the shepherds, the holy mother and Jesus himself ways God actually finds us?  Isn’t that what Christmas is about?  That in all our striving, we discover it is actually God who has found us, God who is already there, God who has come down to give us love, joy, hope and peace, God who is acting to bring about God’s justice and salvation.  Notice that the Lord is the subject of all of these verbs in Mary’s song.  “The Mighty One has done great things for me,” Mary sings.  And then she sings not about all the righteous and just acts SHE or others have brought about, but what GOD, the mighty one, has done and will continue to do for generation to generation. “GOD has shown strength with his arm; GOD has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. GOD 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.”
    Certainly God can use us to feed and clothe people who are hungry and cold tonight. Certainly God can use us to bring about peace in places that are suffering from war, especially as we continue to pray for Ukraine.  Tonight let’s hear God’s great promise for us tonight in Mary’s song that our hope is in the Lord, and God WILL do these things.  Like Mary, we are simply bearers of God’s light and love. Perhaps that can help us worry and work a little less as if it all depended on us, so that instead we depend more and more on the Mighty One who indeed has done great things for us.  Amen.