Scripture text: Luke 1:46-56
(The inspiration for this sermon comes from this commentary article by Roger Wolsey.)
In the mid 1970s, musicians tired of the glamour and fanfare of disco and other popular music of the day began an underground movement. They began to form bands and write songs based on simple melodies, stripped down instrumentation, and lyrics with a definite anti-establishment theme. These groups had a dark edge, filled with anger with little sentimentality or respect for tradition. Their names were the Ramones, the Clash, Joy Division, and (most infamously) the Sex Pistols. They were punks and their music, which remains popular today, is known as punk rock.
If you looked over the width and breadth of my music collection, you would find very few musicians who did not owe some debt to the punk rock scene of the late 70s. They were hugely influential, in large part because they recaptured what rock-n-roll music was supposed to be about: youthful rebellion, standing up for yourself, and refusing to take the world as it came.
Refusing to take the world as it came? Distaste or even hatred of the status quo? I’ve heard something like that somewhere else recently. Oh, yeah, right here in our lessons today. In fact, in the very psalmody we just read together. The Magnificat, the song of Mary, mother of Jesus.
“he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.”
My friends, that’s a song of revolution, of transformation, of defiance of the established order of things. That’s a punk rock song, written 2000 years before Malcolm MacLaren ever brought the Sex Pistols together. Mary was a punk.
In a lot of ways, that really shouldn’t surprise anyone. Think about it. She’s young, teenager. She’s pregnant, unmarried, and devoted to a God who seeks to change the system, to transform this world into something better. She is the epitome of what it means to be punk, again 2000 years before that movement sparked off.
I said last Sunday that hindsight is not always 20/20 after all and here is yet another example. We’ve always thought of the Pharisees as mustache-twirling villains when they were really like was just ordinary folk trying to do what they thought was right (and admittedly being wrong about it.) Here too, we’ve always seen Mary as this demure soft pretty little girl. Safe, kind, harmless but her song reveals that she is anything but. This is a person hungry for a new world, the one that God has promised to deliver. One where all the injustices of the past are made right. She is a revolutionary, a rebel, a devoted follower of a God who is likewise a revolutionary and a rebel.
We have all lived our lives seeing religion and the church as an intrinsic part of the establishment. Marx called religion the “opiate of the people” for precisely that reason; He saw it (as do we) as an institution dedicated to upholding the status quo. But the God Mary is speaking of, the one that is becoming incarnate in her very womb, is nothing like that.
No, this is a God who came to a herdsman of Ur named Abram and told him, “I am going to make of you a new nation, one that will change the world.” This is a God who, generations later, molded that man’s descendants into a chosen people by the leadership of Moses in the wilderness. This is a God who established with those people a just and good society, led by a kind named David. When those same people lost their way and gave in to injustice and oppression, this same God sent to them prophets to call them back to what they were meant to be. A new order, a new way of life, an example to the nations of what life could be. Of what life is supposed to be.
Life where none are left hungry. Life where no one is looked down upon or discriminated against for being different. Life where the sick are cared for. Life where everyone is valued and loved for who they are. That’s the world that God promised and that’s the world that Mary knows is coming through the birth of her son. A world that will be embodied in him, for those virtues, those hopes, those promises will be the core of his life.
And that we’ve seen. There is nothing about Jesus that fits in with the establishment, nothing about him that goes along with the status quo. He dares to heal the sick. He dares to welcome the outcast. He dares to love the unlovable. He too is a punk, a rebel with a cause, a revolutionary here bring about a new order.
Maybe we need to be punks ourselves. Maybe the Church needs to cease being part of the establishment and become an agent of change in our sick and twisted world. You see, I think that’s what Jesus is calling us to do. He’s calling us to join him in his revolution. Daring us to do as he does. To care for the sick, the hungry, the less fortunate. To love the unlovable. Challenging us to no longer be content with the world as it came, but to work to make something better of it.
Because that was what he did. That was Jesus’ whole life, even to the very end. In many ways, there are two dynamics to Jesus’ life and ministry, two elements to his revolution. One is the macro, where the whole world is changed, but there is also the micro where he comes into your life and mine to change us as individuals. You see, our establishment needs overthrown as well. We live in bondage to sin and death. We are prisoners of our own oppression. It is this twisted reality that we often foist onto others and that’s what makes the world what it is today. If Jesus’ revolution is to work, he can’t change one without the other.
And so to change us and to change the world, he allowed himself to be taken prisoner, tried as a rebel and insurrectionist, and then, as many of those guilty of those crimes often are, is put to death. But like everything else in his life, this death had purpose. It was the break the bondage we have found ourselves in and to bring about a new reality in each of us. Sin and death overthrown. The fulfillment of a promise God made long ago.
God’s punk revolution is at hand. A new world of justice, peace, and love awaits. And it is his Church, you and I, that he calls to be revolutionaries for the sake of others. A new world, a new order, life as it should be. The world that Mary sang of in the first punk rock song. The world that God has promised to all of us. Amen.
Postscript: Those who know a little about pop music and punk history might notice a few choice phrases ("new order," "not taking the world the way that it came"). That's completely intentional.
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