DOWNWARD MOBILITY John M. Buchanan

December 6, 1981 Broad Street Presbyterian Church

Luke 1:39-5 Columbus, Ohio

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The scene is tailor-made for an artist: the young Galilean peasant girl
paying a visit to her elderly relative. The teenager, perhaps fourteen years
old, bearing the awful and magnificent burden of pregnancy. She was nobody
to begin with. Engagement to a stalwart carpenter had been a ray of hope for
her, which was now perilously close to fading. Her shame could not be hidden
indefinitely. Yet, for some strange reason she didn't feel ashamed. As a
matter of fact, she was frequently giddy with joy. Instead of embarrassment,
she was smiling a lot, sometimes laughing. Perhaps it was the dream she
would never forget, could never, forget...The angel had said, "You will name
him Jesus and he will be the Son of the Most High..." Of course, she made
haste and hurried off to a town in the hill country of Judea. Who wouldn't
head for the hills under those circumstances?

She fled, I think. It was no polite social call. It was a frightened,
slightly overwhelmed teenager with nowhere else to turn. Luke gathers up all
the tenderness and intensity in the meeting between the two by telling us
that the child in Elizabeth's womb jumped for joy when Mary arrived on the
scene.) If there is anything more unlikely than a premature, adolescent preg-
nancy*® of course, it is that Elizabeth and Zechariah, seventy or eighty years
old, should become parents. Zechariah was struck dumb by the news that he was
about to become a father, and we can understand that too.

It was a favorite scene for artists in the great age of faith. Perhaps
you can recall seeing an interpretation: the room is properly and elaborately
appointed, like a 14th century Flemish library. The sky is brilliant blue
through a small window, and you can see angels gathered in a corner monitoring
the encounter. Elizabeth is matronly, striking; Mary, much too old for her
fourteen years, her face radiating peace, purity, serenity - all tie virtues
celebrated by the age of faith.

romanticism and unreality. I understand nfw that it's a way to preserve some
distance between us and this strange mee
comes next in Luke's account: what Mary says when Elizabeth greets her as
the Lord's mother: the marvelous poem we know by the title Magnificat - from
the first words in the Latin nie Perhaps it's a good idea to keep it as

It has taken me a lot of years to if that that art because of its
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innocuous and remote as possible.

What Mary said upon examination is more than a little disturbing. In
fact, it is positively revolutionary. I have been told that it is illegal,
and certainly unadviseable, to read the Magnificat in church in some countries
today. South American Christians have testified that the Government calls the
rectory and forbids the reading of the traditional Advent lection from Luke 1
on the grounds that it is subversive /~-A religious.radio-station-in-Ei-Salva-
dor was blown up recently, then shut down by the government.

The Bible illegal? The Virgin Mary subversive? Liberation theologians,
many from South America, are pleading with American Christians to try to break
out of our cultural milieux and hear Biblical texts from the point of view,
say, of an El Salvadorian peasant, a young man whose father has been murdered
by the Right Wing execution squads who are hired by the seven families who own
the country, whose family is hungry and now without hope, who knows that the
people who killed his father use American weapons and that those who pay them
now live permanently in condominiums in Florida. How do you think the
Magnificat sounds to him?

Perhaps the reason is what iS ¥

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\/Sé-) in the same way the Renaissance painters portrayed the meeting between Elizabeth

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"...My soul magnifies the Lord.

he has scattered the proud

he has put the mighty down

and exalted those of low degree

he has filled the hungry with good things
and the rich he has sent empty away ."" |

I submit that the Magnificat sounds different to most of the human race
than it does to us. I submit that one of the enduring tragedies of our day
is that we, who know more about human freedom, dignity and liberty than anyone
in the world, consistently end up supporting, giving money and guns to the
people who regard Mary's Magnificat as subversive. I submit that the enduring
tragedy in this time is that the people with the most to lose, the ones with
the heaviest investment in freedom have allowed Marxism a virtual monopoly on
human liberation.

, : Oo . ? ¥ re
Fite do-it by spiritualizing and romanticizing the Gospel of Jesus Christ \

and Mary. But it won't fly for long. New Testament Christianity is materialis- |:
tic. It doesn't begin spiritually, but with the most human event of all - a
birth. Beginning with Mary's speech it has to do with fullness - spiritual
fullness and physical fullnesse7 It has to do with captive people set free,
crippled people walking, and blind people seeing, hungry people eating, cold
people being sheltered. Those are not always metaphors. Jesus did not deal
with people metaphorically. He wanted to give them new life, life free from
all the shackles which inhibit it. Sometime it meant healing, sometimes feed-
ing, sometimes changing attitudes, beliefs; sometimes he comforted, sometimes
argued. It was not an ethereal, spiritual vocation. The vocation of American
Christians, punctuated during Advent, is to be permanently restless - not full
of guilt because of what we have — but more than a little uncomfortable with a
world that does not provide food, shelter, health care and dignity to the
majority of its inhabitants.

[sarvation, in the New Testament, personal salvation, has to do with the
defeat of death and the promise of eternal life. It also has to do with

fullness, peace, wholeness - now, in the present tense. And the way an indi-
vidual gets it, is given it and sustains it, in the New Testament - is surprising.
Dutch theologian Henri Nouwen described it imaginatively as "downward mobility".
Nouwen suggests that the great paradox of the New Testament is that it portrays
personal freedom as a product of "downward mobility". In a particularly good
paragraph he wrote:

"God not only chose an insignificant people...not only chose a humble
girl in an unknown town in Galilee...God also chose to manifest the fullness
of divine love in a man whose life led to a humiliating death outside the walls
of the city." (The Selfless Way of Christ, Sojourners, 6/14/81, p. 14) |

Salvation, or if you prefer words like peace, happiness, fulfillment, self-
realization, results from emptying, losing, going downward, according to Chris—
tian faith. Obviously there is honest tension that conflicts between that and
the philosophy of our culture. The road to salvation here is the "ladder" to
success. You get it by climbing up, struggling, battling, winning. "Upward
mobility" is a kind of enchanted mantra, conjuring up visions of the "fast
track" - power, prestige, promotion, celebrity, As an outsider, Nouwen, I have
come to learn, often sees us with a particular clarity. He writes: "Our whole
way of living is structured around climbing the ladder of success and making it

5:

to the top. Our very sense of vitality is dependent upon being part of the
upward pull and upon the joy provided by the rewards given on the way up."
(ibid.) "Who ever got elected to office in this country," he asks, "by. Py
promising anything other than more money and more power?" ped ie Cel
— j- a : errs ee

Social scientists are honing in on our obsession with power, our need. =e
to be biggest and best, forever number one, as the political and economic Nios
crisis of the age., It is fashionable to characterize American culture as rye ud
incurably acquisitive, selfish, grasping, greedy, narcissistic. And if all Cul!
you read about or /saw of us was the advertising in the Sunday Times Magazine,
that conclusion would be warranted.

- V/

I have a hunch, however, that we know better. I have a growing convic-
tion that the people who know better than anyone else that success is not
salvation are the successful. I have a hunch that the powerful know that
there is no such thing in this world as "saving power": not economic power,
not military power. We already know that the things we crave and are willing
to give our lives for are not going to produce for us what we need and want most. J
Walter Bauman, good friend and professor at Trinity Lutheran Seminary, said
recently that to be middle aged is to finally arrive and discover that you are
irrelevant: to have the experience to run the world, but no longer to know how.
It is to work very hard for 35 years, climb the ladder and to arrive at the
managerial position of the branch office and to be told at 59 that you are no
longer needed.

Csinose de Beauvoir, Jean Paul Sartre's companion, lived passionately,
fully, with existential abandon. In her later years she completed her memoirs
and wrote this very poignant reflection: "I think with sadness of all the
books I have read, all the places I've seen, all the knowledge I've amassed...
The promises have all been kept. And yet...I realize with stupor how much I
was gypped.'"' (see Hans Kung, Does God Exist?, p. 693)

The social scientists don't have to scold us. We know that [Fi deepest
hunger in us is for salvation. We know that nothing fills that nger but a
word from God, a crumb of bread from the creator.

The God of the Bible is not a powerful potentate who stage directs the
daily affiars of his world. The gods of ancient religions all look like that.
Nor is the God of the Bible the safe abstraction of the philosophers. While
others worshipped majestic power, Israel discovered a God who came down, lived
among them, called them into a future but promised to walk on the road beside
them. The God of the Bible personifies downward nee

Could it be another way? Can it be any other way? Someone sent me a
superb essay recently from a Journal for Teachers, written by a Jesuit priest,
"Breaking through the Cool". Father O'Malley laments the common plight of the

High School teacher. "How can you give gifts to people who are convinced that
they already have everything they need?" "What I am trying to sell is vulner-
ability," he says: "vulnerability to the truth, vulnerability to love." "But

cool is the very opposite of vulnerable. How does one sell vulnerability to
people who believe self-indulgence is the natural order of things?" I liked
that. The trouble with the proud and powerful in Mary's speech, in the whole
Bible for that matter, is not their pride and power, but the fact that they
think they have what they need. The challenge of parenting or teaching is
simply to impart the sense that there is something called truth which you don't
have yet.

wn lies

Father O'Malley's prescription caught my attention. "Intrude" he wrote.
"Intrude" on their time. Break into their lives. And then the cricital
nuance; once you have intruded, don't lecture or dehate, They have developed
a natural immunity to lectures. Become vulnerable.

"The one approach they are not used to, the one attitude against which
they have not had to develope a defense is, ironically, vulnerability. If
you are vulnerable to them, if you honestly and fearlessly confess your foibles,
failings, even your falls, they are thunder-struck. They feel awe. And they
are in danger of being humbled by your honest humility. They are in danger
of love."

| That's what Christmas is abou God becoming vulnerable. God taking ey
the road of downward vulnerability. Henri Nouwen wrote, "In the center of .,; \Y

our faith as Christians stands the mystery that God chose to reveal his 7
divinity to us by submitting himself unreservedly to the downward pull." “ +

Cie know, at Christmas, the immense power of honest humility, vulnerability.
We have felt, many times, the dynamism, the compelling authority of love in the
form of this newborn child. We know its truth, its relevance, its power.
Something of God's love for us and his will for us is communicated because it
became vulnerable.

What we may miss, is the fact that our salvation is in the same direction.
The invitation is downward. Let this frightened Galilean girl teach you some-
thing about yourself and God and life this year. Let her teach you to celebrate
the birth of Jesus Christ by loosening your grip a bit, relaxing, slowing down a
little, by reexamining your obsession to accomplish it all in the next few weeks.
Let her teach you that this pervasive obsession with getting ahead, succeeding,
winning, is a very poor substitute for wholeness.

You are invited, in Advent, to a conversion: to a personal revolution
which reveals meaning, joy, peace, fullness in a surprising new direction; a
direction intimated at by cow stalls, not royal palaces; a direction charac-
terized by a journey to the little town of Bethlehem and a baby born out back
in the manger. You are invited to become downwardly mobile this year, which
might be the beginning of your salvation. Amen.