Sermon Archive

The Gospel According to Mary

© by the Reverend Dr. Byron E. Shafer
(Rutgers, December 19, 1999; 4th Sunday of Advent, Year B;
 Reception of New Members)
Luke 1:26–38 (NT, p. 58); Luke 1:39–55  (NT, p. 58)

The Fourth Sunday of Advent is Mary's Sunday,
the Sunday when we who are disciples of her son Jesus
proclaim her Gospel, the Good News according to Mary!

Mary did not write a book as her gospel.
Instead she conceived, and carried, and bore a child.
And, according to Luke, while Mary was carrying Jesus,
she gave voice to a psalm of revolutionary good news.
In an explosion of verse,
Mary sang a hymn of God's justice, a psalm of liberation,
the song I've just read as this morning's Second Lesson.

The message of Mary's song is good news,
but not the kind of good news the world may imagine.
Mary's song is not a celebration of the way things are.
Neither is it a sweet ode to love and charity.
Rather, Mary's song is all about change,
all about turning things topsy-turvy,
about altering the presuppositions of our lives,
about unloosing the old anchors for our security,
and establishing all new ones.
Mary's song is about our need
to be transformed by God.

The most surprising—yes, startling—thing about Advent is this:
the salvation of the world begins in the womb of one who is poor,
and not in the council halls or boardrooms of the rich.

As portrayed by Luke, Mary is poor, + pregnant, + not-yet-married.
She is young in a culture that values age,
female in a world ruled by men,
rural in a society dominated by city folk,
poor in an economy exploited by foreign occupiers.
Mary is, for Luke,
the representative of all those in the world who are
powerless, poor, hungry, and despised.

In a Latin American country, a priest asked his impoverished parishioners:  
(Robert McAfee Brown, Theology in a New Key, pp. 99–100)
What do you think the Mary who sang this song looked like?
And the responses came back:
The Mary of this song would have had rough hands
and bare, dirtied feet.
She would have worn torn clothes
and an old hat to keep off the sun.
She would have stood in the dirt and dust,
where we stand, the people said,
and she would have looked just like us.

Mary's song is a psalm of the poor, a song of liberation.
It praises God for advocating the rights and welfare of the poor.
It sings of God as one who prefers the poor over the wealthy.

Listen again to Mary's words:
"God has scattered
those who are 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."  (Luke 1:51b–53)

Mary's good news speaks of three revolutions directed by God:
the moral revolution of scattering the proud;
the social revolution of bringing down the powerful; and
the economic revolution of filling the hungry with good things.

It was to the third of these themes that I addressed myself last week,
when I spoke of God's call to us to assist homeless persons
by advocating on their behalf
for more units of affordable housing
and for more social workers and service providers
to tend the needs of the mentally ill and the addicted.

As I think you know, our church is one of about 150 houses of 
worship in New York City that provide shelter to homeless persons
in our own buildings as part of the network called
the Partnership for the Homeless.

And I'm pleased to announce this morning that
the Partnership for the Homeless will be holding a press conference
this coming Tuesday morning, December 21st, at 11:00 am,
right here on the front steps of the Rutgers Church.

The purpose of this press conference will be
to call on churches and synagogues to gather in prayer at their
houses of worship on January 1st and 2nd—to gather in prayer,
first, for constructive solutions to the problem of homelessness,
and, second, for a change of heart in our city's mayor
and his administration.

This Advent press conference will offer us the chance
to sing the song of Mary again,
to proclaim anew to the world her kind of good news:
the hungry will be filled.

And there's a second piece of Mary's good news that I want to lift up
this morning: the good news of the effectiveness and success
of the worldwide movement called Jubilee 2000,
a movement that seeks to help accomplish in our world
the task set for us as followers of God, 
the task set for us by Mary's gospel,
and by scriptures of other religious traditions as well—
the task of filling the hungry with good things.

The idea for Jubilee 2000 originates in the Old Testament,
where it is prescribed that in every 50th year, a time called
the year of Jubilee, all debts are to be forgiven (Leviticus 25). 
The proclamation of this jubilee year of debt cancellation
was found in last Sunday's Second Lesson, from Isaiah 61,
where it was listed as one of the tasks to be performed
by God's Anointed One, the Messiah.

Jubilee 2000 is a global campaign to cancel by the end of the year 2000 the 
unpayable debts of the world's 52 poorest countries,
37 of which are on the continent of Africa.

About half of this debt is owed directly to the individual governments of Japan, 
the US, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, and Italy—
the group of highly industrialized nations known as "the G7."
Most of the rest is owed to these same nations indirectly thru
the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
Only about 10% of the debt is owed to private banks.

Jubilee 2000's campaign for debt cancellation has been endorsed
by such religious leaders as Pope John Paul II, the Dalai Lama,
Archbishops Tutu and Ndungane of Africa, and here in the USA
by the National Council of Churches, the US Catholic Conference,
American Jewish World Service,
the Muslim Public Affairs Council,
and, most pertinently for us Presbyterians, the
General Assembly (1998) of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

And our own Scott Morton reported to me this week
that the Bearsden South Church in Scotland,
where Scott was pastor for nine years following World War II—
that the Bearsden South Church is so committed
to the Jubilee 2000 campaign that last June
that one church sent a delegation of 37 persons,
37 Presbyterians to Cologne, Germany, to bear
witness there at the meeting of the G7 summit.

And in response to the human chain formed by these Scot Christians 
and some 70,000 other Jubilee campaigners gathered in Cologne,
the G7 nations did make a good start toward debt cancellation
by forgiving about 1/4 of the total debt.

Since then, more good news has come in response to the campaign.
On September 29th, President Clinton announced the intention of
the US to cancel 100% of the debt owed by the poorest countries,
+ in November, the US Congress confirmed cancellation of debt
owed directly to the US for up to 45 of the poorest countries.
Still Congress has thus far refused to appropriate funds
for the cancellation of debts owed indirectly
to the US through the World Bank
and the International Monetary Fund.
So there's more work of persuasion to be done!

Why do so many Christians and persons of other faiths wholeheartedly 
endorse Jubilee 2000?

First and foremost, we care so much because debt repayments at
high interest rates are diverting money in these 52 poorest countries
from education and basic life-saving health care.
Many countries in Africa spend up to ten times as much on
servicing their debts as they do on health care—
this despite the fact that 95% of the children in the world
orphaned by AIDS are African and that well over 33%
of African children have not been immunized.
The UN estimates that if funds were diverted back from
debt repayment into health and education,
the lives of seven million children a year could be saved.

Second, we people of faith care so much about Jubilee 2000 because
of the tragic colonial history of Africa
and the slave trade carried on by Western nations,
the industrialized countries owe a historic debt to Africa
that is much larger than Africa's current debt to us.
And I believe it is yet another human rights violation against
African peoples that millions of their children are unable
to go to school because international debts,
incurred without their consent,
have to be repaid to wealthy nations like ours.

Thirdly, we people of faith care so much about Jubilee 2000 because, 
regardless of who is to blame for this huge build-up of debt,
those who suffer as a result are the poorest people in the world.
Some of the money borrowed got spent badly by governments,
wasted; some went into the pockets of dictators.
Some went straight back to the West through corrupt lending. 
Some simply acted as a subsidy to Western companies. 
And very little of it actually helped ordinary people. 
But it is ordinary people who now suffer
because of that debt.

Creditors and debtors alike have made mistakes.
But debt is leading to the demise of schools, clinics, and hospitals,
and the effects are no less devastating than if there were war.
The slate simply needs to be wiped clean,
so that, unburdened by debt, individuals and families
in the poorest countries of the world
can be given a decent chance for life.

The debt cancellation called for by Jubilee 2000
will not on its own eradicate poverty in the world,
but it will remove a significant barrier to progress and justice,
and it will help to fulfill the good news proclaimed by Mary,
a pregnant woman who was herself representative of
the poor, the powerless, the hungry, the despised.
And Mary's good news is this:
God will fill the hungry with good things.

Let us pray:

O God, like Mary, our souls magnify You, and, with Mary, we pray that 
You will transform and use us, to the end that we, too, may proclaim her Gospel, 
her good news, by filling the hungry with good things.  This we pray in the name 
of her child, Jesus, the one who waits to be born in our hearts.  Amen.

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