We believe in God

Sermon for SMHP, Year C, Advent III, Luke 1 Series, Dec. 16, 2018

Luke 1:39-56                   

               ³⁹In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, ⁴⁰where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. ⁴¹When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leapt in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit ⁴²and exclaimed with a loud cry, ‘Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. ⁴³And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? ⁴⁴For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leapt for joy. ⁴⁵And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfilment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.’

⁴⁶And Mary said,
‘My soul magnifies the Lord,
⁴⁷   and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
⁴⁸ for God has looked with favor on the lowliness of God’s servant.
   Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
⁴⁹ for the Mighty One has done great things for me,
   and holy is God’s name.
⁵⁰ God’s mercy is for those who fear the Lord
   from generation to generation.
⁵¹ God has shown strength with God’s arm,
   and has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
⁵² God has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
   and lifted up the lowly;
⁵³ God has filled the hungry with good things,
   and sent the rich away empty. 

⁵⁴ God has helped God’s servant Israel,
   in remembrance of God’s mercy,
⁵⁵ according to the promise made to our ancestors,
   to Abraham and Sarah and their descendants forever.’

               ⁵⁶And Mary remained with her for about three months and then returned to her home.

          “Blessed is she who believed that there would be fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.

          We’ve been talking about faithfulness this Advent, and about how the people of Luke one, including Luke himself, exhibit such extraordinariness in the face of what God is doing through them.  And we’ve talked about how our faithfulness is a response to God’s faithfulness.  The Magnificat is all about God’s faithfulness.  Mary sings about all of the things that God has done, for her, and for her ancestors, all the way back to Abraham and Sarah.  God has ordered the world in a way that lifts up the poor, the hungry, the powerless. 

          And then God has invited us to co-create that world.  To live into a vision of the powerful brought down and the lowly lifted up.  Because without our conscious participation, that world will struggle to come to fruition.  God can and does intervene in the world, but God has, from the creation, given us free will to make decisions on our own.

          So how are we doing?  Are we co-creating a Magnificat world?

          Not so much.  In the past few months, our country has made a series of decisions which will impact God’s creation in devastating ways.  Just this week, 150,000 acres of public land in Utah were auctioned off for fracking, which is a very unstable way of breaking up rock in the oil drilling process.  We’re drilling in federal waters off of Alaska, rolling back protections for air and water, and, for good measure, bulldozing a butterfly sanctuary to make room for a wall to keep out refugees.

          All of this devastation is wrought by, and approved by, people who by and large make the same claims we hear Mary and Elizabeth making this morning. 

          “My soul magnifies the Lord,” Mary’s song begins, “and my spirit rejoices in God my savior.”

          We’ve heard similar statements of belief from the very people who are fricking and fracking God’s beautiful world, haven’t we?  “We believe in God,” they say, “and we also believe that a wall is more important than a butterfly.  And poor people wouldn’t be poor if they’d just work some of the wonderful jobs in the belly of the economy.  The ones that pay a full time salary of $15,000 a year.

          I want to be clear that I am naming this as a problem.  You cannot follow Jesus and denigrate the poor.  Sorry.  To paraphrase Matthew 6, we can’t serve two masters; we will hate one and love the other.  You cannot serve God and fracking.

          The actual quote is “God and money,” and isn’t it pretty much the same thing?

          The bad news is that the problem is getting worse.  Wealth is finding itself a lot of willing servants these days. 

          The good news—and there is definitely good news on this Gaudete Sunday of the Magnificat of Mary—the good news is that we have found the error that caused the problem, and Mary and Elizabeth have outlined its solution for us.

          So, in case you missed the error when it went by, let me circle back.  A moment ago, I said we have a lot of leaders (and followers) who say “we believe in God,” and also “we believe in a border wall” and “we believe the poor should just get jobs.”

          See, part of what has happened is, as it often is, grammatical.  Or maybe stylistic and semantic, but I think it’s grammatical and we can debate that later.

          We have been using the word “belief” wrong.  And “believe.”  The noun, and the verb.  Using them wrong wrong wrong.  We say “we believe in God.”  It’s the first line of the Creed, after all.

          But we also say “I believe in the free market.”  Or “I believe in socialism.”  Or “I don’t believe in climate change.”

          Or “I believe I’ll have another piece of pie.”

          Okay, so the pie thing isn’t a huge threat our future.  Maybe our wardrobe, but not global stability.  Some of those others are, though.  Here’s what happens when we “believe” all kinds of stuff at the same time:  We start to believe that all of these beliefs can coexist and it will all work itself out. 

          It doesn’t work itself out.  Because once you say, “I don’t believe in climate change,” or “I believe the poor need tough love” or “I believe in protecting our own people first,” then those principles—they’re not beliefs after all—those principles start to order your behavior.

          There’s no “believing” in climate change.  It’s a scientific fact.  That’s like deciding whether or not to “believe” in wood.  There’s wood.  It comes from trees.  There’s climate change.  It comes from CO2.

          Faith is something else.  We believe in God despite the fact that no scientist has shown us irrefutable proof that God exists.  As the writer of Hebrews tells it, “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”  (11:1)

          Now, the fact that we haven’t seen God doesn’t make our faith any less powerful than scientifically verifiable phenomenon.  In fact, and this is the crux of this whole matter, so pay attention to this part even if you zoned out when I got to “phenomenon:”  for us, as people of faith, it is believing in God that centers our lives.

          We order our lives around our belief in God.  God created the world and called it good.  God declared that we were to be stewards of the created world.  And if our belief in God is at the center for us, then we don’t hold other “beliefs” which run contrary to our call to be stewards of the earth.  Or our call to care for the poor.

          We have a wonderful role model for this sort of living, centered in our belief in God, our faithfulness as a response to God’s faithfulness:  it’s Mary.

          Mary believed God.

          Mary believed in God.  Elizabeth could see it on her when she arrived.  Elizabeth knew, at the core of her being, that God was doing something very special in Mary.  Just as God was doing something special in Elizabeth.  Even the child in Elizabeth’s womb, John, recognized that God was at work in Mary, and in Mary’s child, his cousin Jesus.

          God was changing the world, through God’s servant Mary.  And Mary knew it.  Mary believed it.  And all the decisions that she, and Joseph, made from that point forward were centered in their belief that what was happening in her was part of God’s plan to redeem the world.

          It was the continuation of God’s faithful interaction with the world, stretching all the way back to creation.  Mary’s song is an outline of God’s faithfulness:

⁵¹ God has shown strength with God’s arm,
   and has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
⁵² God has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
   and lifted up the lowly;
⁵³ God has filled the hungry with good things,
   and sent the rich away empty. 

⁵⁴ God has helped God’s servant Israel,
   in remembrance of God’s mercy,
⁵⁵ according to the promise made to our ancestors,
   to Abraham and Sarah and their descendants forever.’

          God has done all of those things because God promised to be faithful to us, and that faithfulness has been at the center of God’s relationship with us.

          Believing in God’s faithfulness, and responding with faithfulness of our own, is at the center of our relationship with God. 

          We are who we are because we believe in God.  Say it with me:  we believe in God.

          Say it every day:  I believe in God.  The creator.  The redeemer.  The sanctifier. 

          If that is the center of your life, then you can sing with Mary:  “my soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my savior, who has looked on me with favor.”

          Because you are one of the ones turning the world.

Amen