High and Mighty

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. Dr. David Williams; 12.20.2015

Scripture Lesson: Luke 1:39-55

Goals matter.  They really do.  

And we have our goals, so neatly laid out for us in our culture.  The task, as we see it, is success.  Material success and recognition, fame and fortune, being both excellent and recognized as excellent by all of those around us.

There are a variety of ways to assess those goals, and primary among those measures in our society is wealth.  Our screens must be large, our phones must be large, our cars must be big and shiny.   Everything about our culture celebrates the power that comes with wealth, the gleaming wonderment of having attained.

One place you’ll find that expressed is the Forbes 400, an index of the winners of the global wealth race, maintained by Forbes magazine, which tracks the rise and fall of our planet’s glitterati.  There are those who inhabit the pinnacle of that list, names we know because, well, they’re the ones at the top of the mountain.  There reside the like of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, who seem to have managed to remain human despite the rarified air they inhabit, turning their gobsmacking wealth into good for the world.  

There are others who just seem to enjoy having stuff, like the legendary founder of Oracle and #6 on the Forbes list Larry Ellison, who in 2012 bought a private island for himself.  And not just any island, but the Hawaiian Island of Lanai for $500 million. Why?  Because, among other things, he needed a place to park his 290 foot megayacht Musashi.  Musashi, as it turns out, was Ellison downsizing from his previous custom built megayacht, the Rising Sun, which at 453 feet in length and 86,000 square feet of living space, was getting just a little too big.  You know, he’s getting older, and when you get older, you just don’t need quite as much space.

One of the fascinating things about that list is that it’s updated in real time, every day, against the value of their holdings, you can check out just whose star is on the rise and who hasn’t had a good day.

This last week, for example, the greatest loss in net worth came from Prince Al’Waleed Bin Talal Al’Saud, the richest man in Saudi Arabia, whose net worth managed to drop by $685 million.  Something about oil prices, and some poor investments.  Somehow he’s going to have to try to scrape by on his remaining $23.5 billion.  It’ll be hard, but I’m sure with grit and determination, he’ll manage it.

Recognizing power and the fulfillment of purpose are at the heart of today’s reading from the opening chapter of Luke, but it takes on a really rather different form than Forbes’ churning megalisticle of billionaires.

It’s the story of a journey, one that does not involve a yacht.  Just dusty feet, as Mary travelled to see her cousin Elizabeth.

Mary and Elizabeth were certainly not in positions to feel like they were on anyone’s success list.  As women living in a rural area of Judah, they wouldn’t have been anyone.  Not anyone at all.  They would have had no wealth.  They would have had no right to study Torah, or to learn, or to study and debate the sacred alongside the men in the synagogue.  They would not have had the right to access the temple, or to amass worldly wealth.

They were just two women, one six months pregnant, one only recently realizing that something wonderful was happening inside her.  But what we get from them is not a lament about how little they have, or words of sorrow about how oppressed they are.  

Instead, Elizabeth shouts out with joy, sharing a blessing with Mary.  

And Mary then offers up her rejoicing, which Luke remembers for us in verses 46 through 55.  That passage is called the Magnificat.  Even though Mary’s just received a blessing from Elizabeth, the focus of the poetry we hear from Mary doesn’t show any signs of her ego being inflated by what she’s just heard.

What the Magnificat from Mary celebrates is not herself, or even her role.  Instead, what we get from Mary is an affirmation of her position.  She knows she is simply a servant, and a lowly one, at that.   What she rejoices in is not power, and not wealth, none of the things that stir human beings to feel they’re better one than the other.  She rejoices in the simple gift of life she has received from her Creator, and the promise of God’s setting-things-right for all of humanity.

The Magnificat reinforces a potent truth about the human encounter with the divine.  It takes apart the things that we think make us more significant or more important than any other creature.  Here a young no-one from nowhere bears within her the gift of the living promise of God.

And in her song, all of the things that we human beings have always valued above all else are declared meaningless.

The Rich?  Sent away empty.  The powerful?  Cast down from their thrones.  And the proud?  Scattered.

The sense one gets, hearing Mary sing it out, is that this downfall goes well beyond having to downsize from a 450 foot megayacht to a 280 foot megayacht.  It is more than just losing a small portion of a sprawling investment portfolio.

There is this strange theme, throughout the whole great story of the Bible, that reinforces the futility of wealth. No matter how much we gain, we remain mortal beings.  No matter how wildly we might succeed, it does not change either our ultimate destiny or the truth of God’s equal love for all of us.  For all the shine and sparkle of material gain, Larry Ellison is of no more value to the Creator of the Universe than a Syrian refugee child.

Seeking wealth, hungering for it?  That shatters us, because when we do that we are seeing only the image of ourselves that we’ve created, we can lose sight of the reality we inhabit.  We become lost in our own thoughts and our own story about how very perfect and right we are.  Then, well, reality does have a pesky tendency of catching up with us.  

If we allow ourselves to be closed off from real relationship to God’s work around us, it doesn’t matter how skilled we are or how much potential we have.  Those gifts will do nothing, nothing besides causing us to look like fools.

That does not mean God wants us to hate ourselves, or to despise the life and the gifts all of us have been given.  Right here on the cusp of Christmas, we are reminded that we are all called to use the lives that God has given us in ways not guided by pride.  

Though we aren’t much more than dust and ashes, God has placed within each of us the gift of God’s own love.   It’s that gift that we are called to share, fully and wholly, with the world around us.

Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.