"HANDLING THE HOT POTATO"

Malachi 3:1-4; Luke 1: 39-55

Warning!

You have just read and heard

one of the most dangerous,

and perhaps THE most subversive,

passage of scripture in the entire Bible.

Many of us encounter this passage

and, at first glance,

we find it to be a charming,

if not a little extravagant,

song of praise sung by a young woman

who accepts her destiny without complaint.

In other days and times, however,

this passage is seen as nothing less than explosive.

For many years in Central andLatin America,

you couldn't read these verses in public

without being seen as seditious or disloyal.

When I was in El Salvador in 1987,

I met people who had been arrested

for being rebellious dissidents

because they were carrying a Bible.

The first chapter of Luke

is a hot potato.

Even Martin Luther started a Reformation,

but he didn't know what to do with the Song of Mary.

One of Luther's greatest accomplishments

was translating almost the whole bible from Latin into German

so that not just the educated priests,

but everyone in Germany

would be able to read God's word.

Almost the whole Bible.

When it came to sixteen little verses

of the gospel of Luke,

Luther and his followers left them in Latin.

As much trouble

as Luther stirred up and withstood in his own life,

he was afraid of the havoc that might be wrought

if the average churchgoer

could read the song of Mary.

What is going on

when the story of a girl

who is poor and pregnant out of wedlock

is prohibited and covered up?

What's going on -is trouble!

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Mary's song is subversive,

and Malachi's prophecy is discomforting,

Both of them

take us places that we would rather not go.

Malachi reminds us

that the messenger we seek is coming,

and soon!

But he also infers

that if we really knew what we were saying

when we say "Come Lord Jesus,"

we'd never say it. 

God is like a refiner's fire, he says,

which purifies with high heat

and polishes and burns until it cleanses.

And fuller's soap is a cleaner as well -

but it does so through the power of abrasion:

kind of like taking a bath with Ajax or Comet.

Now there's something we would enjoy!

Mary used language in her song

that before this occasion

had been reserved only for Caesar.

Her song about bringing low the mighty

and scattering the proud

is just another way to talk about abrasion and fire.

Mary and Malachi both

are saying that when it comes to the God of Israel,

earthly power isn't worth the paper that it's printed on.

And whether you're in Reformation-era Germany

or the Fannin County Courthouse,

that isn't exactly welcome news to the powers that be.

That little blue book in the pew racks in front of you

is a loaded weapon,

especially to those who have a lot to lose

if its claims are true.

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We North Americans

are among the wealthiest people in the world,

no matter what size our paycheck might be.

And that's not always a good thing.

When things are going well in our lives,

and we have everything we could ever want

or at least everything that we need,

we're not so eager to open our Bibles

and read about that baby being born.

We may not live in an oppressive society.

But I believe that our relative wealth

and our high level of comfort

have caused us to tone this story down.

Or at the least,

it has been toned down for us,

and we have accepted that.

It's like those large, silent manger scenes

that we pass by in front yards

every day from Halloween to Christmas.

We want Mary to be a nice, manageable,

well-mannered young lady,

preferably fair-skinned and blue-eyed,

illuminated from the inside

who silently submits to God's will

and remains frozen in perpetual prayer

over the manger.

And we want to believe

that the same is true

for the baby over whom she prays.

Cindy Rigby, professor of theology at Austin Seminary,

says that her least favorite Christmas carol

is "Away in a Manger."

Verse Two is deceptive, she says.

If the fully divine Jesus was also a fully human baby,  

we should be singing,

"The cattle are lowing the poor baby wakes;

but little Lord Jesus, MUCH crying he makes!"

The fully human and fully divine Christ Child

isn't left inert in the manger for us to just admire.

Mary herself tells us //

that he is here

to raise the powerless

and overturn the powerful.

Friends, the news of Jesus' birth

is not some meaningless sidebar

or sweet little story

that we can just accept

without being totally changed ourselves.  

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Saying that we can handle the hot potato

that's given to us by Malachi and Mary

is to unleash the Pandora's Box

that can never again be contained.

"When we allow God to be born in us,

there is no telling at all what will come out." (Barbara Brown Taylor, Home by Another Way)

Our problem, then,

is not whether to accept the good news of the gospel.

Our problem becomes this:

where will we stand?

Will we find ourselves in the company of the power full,

or in the company of the power less?

Our society, as you well know,

 is based on the survival of the fittest.

The one who dies with the most toys wins,

so the joke goes,

but rarely does anyone laugh.

"Winners" in our day and time

are seen as those who have the better job,

the hotter looks,

the bigger house,

the flatter screen,

the newer car,

the most gigabytes,

the higher GPA.

But that's not who comes out on top in scripture.

According to Mary and Malachi,

the "winners," if they were even to use that word,

are the poor,

the downtrodden,

the empty,

the small.

In fact,

the whole of scripture

demonstrates that the people with real problems

are those who have concluded that they have no problems.

In the words of John Buchanan,

"You have to know how poor you are

before you can receive the gift of your redemption."

If we buy what Malachi and Mary have to tell us,

then we will become diametrically opposed

to our society as a whole.

And we will have to make some major changes

in the way that we live, think, act,

spend, and love. //

Don't you wish

that this were still in a language we didn't know?

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Friends, this is no sweet little baby

who is coming our way in two more weeks.

Believing what Mary has to say

means that we have to admit our own neediness,

so that we may be counted among those

who will not be sent empty away.

William Willimon tells the story

of a student who came to see him for counseling one day

when he was dean of the chapel at Duke University.  

The student told Willimon

he was upset

because he felt like he was losing his faith.

So Willimon asked him,

"And what faith would that be?"

The young man replied that he was having a hard time

believing in the notion of the virgin birth.

He said,

"Don't I have to believe in the miraculous birth of Jesus

in order to believe in Jesus?"

This is why I want to be William Willimon when I grow up.

Willimon said,

"We ask you to believe in the virginal conception of Jesus,

and if we can get you to swallow that without choking,

then there's no telling what someone can get you to believe.

Come back next week," he says,

"and we'll try to convince you

that the poor are royalty

and the rich are in big trouble,

that God and not nations rules the world,

and so on.

We start you out with something fairly small,

like the virgin birth,

then we work you up to [things that are] even more outrageous?"

Our story today

is about much more than childbirth out of wedlock.

It's about the countercultural hot potato

of our neediness:

yours, and mine,

and even the pitiful neediness

of those who think they have no needs at all.

Faith begins

with the blue flame of the refiner's fire.

Once we acknowledge our emptiness,

our poverty,

and our own deep need,

then God can take that deep need

and refine it

and polish it until it shines.

The writer Jane Austen once wrote,

"We came anticipating a surprise,

but what we experienced

far surpassed our expectations."

My hope and prayer for us

this second week of Advent

is that we can approach Christmas Day

anticipating a surprise,

but that we can do so with fearlessness -

willing to deal with the hot potato,

unwilling to domesticate the good news of the gospel

for our own comfort and safety.

As we acknowledge

how much we need this good news,

as we start the bathwater and go get the Ajax,

so then

will we be prepared

to welcome a living, breathing, crying surprise.

And even if the powers that be

refuse to translate it into our language,

it won't matter.

We will still understand exactly

what God has to say.

Amen.

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I heard Cindy Rigby make the comment about "Away in a Manger" at a lecture she gave while I lived in Austin.

John Buchanan's quote can be found in a sermon he prepared on this passage, Reversal of Fortune, preached on 12/10/2000 at Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago.

William Willimon tells the story of his student in a publication called Pulpit Resource, vol 31 #4.

The element Ag (silver):

            melting point = 1763.2°F

            boiling point = 3924°F