GOD_OF THE OUTSIDERS

The Second in an Advent Series of Sermons
December 4, 1988, 8:30 and 11:00 a.m. Worship Services
John M. Buchanan
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Scripture
Malachi 3:1i-4
Luke 1:46~-56

"He has put down the mighty from their thrones, and
exalted those of low degree." ~Luke 1:52 (RSV)

; In Herman Wouk's novel, Inside, Outside, a young man tells the story
of trying to live in modern America as part of @ very traditional Orthodox
Jewish family. It is a funny story, often moving and wonderfully told. At
the very end Israel David Goodkind, Izzy, an official of the American |
government, has come to terms with who he is. He is leaving Tel Aviv, .
shortly after the Six-Day War. As the plane climbs and he sees the lights
of the city recede, he recalls the morning prayer from the Orthodox
liturgy:

“Lock down from Heaven and see that

we have become a scorn and a derision

among the nations. We are considered

as sheep bound for slaughter,

...for smiting and for

shame. Yet with all this we have not
forgotten Your name. Do not You forget.us."

And he thinks to himself -

“We spoke those words, I and my father and his father, and. their
fathers before them, for two thousand years — and even in my own time, alas
~ as a terrible statement of fact." [p. 641, 642]

it is a very different thing for gentiles to visit Dachau. than it is
for Jews. It is a fundamentally different experience for American G.I.'s
to visit places in Europe where they fought 44 years ago than it is for
Jews to visit communities where they and their families were persecuted.
And part of the vast difference, beneath the unspeakable pain is the
mystery, the almost laughable frony of it all - ;

"We have not forgotten You. Do not You forget us"

What kind of a God would select Israel to be a chosen people? Is it
some kind of a cosmic joke, a theological prank played out on the stage of
history? God had options, we have to assume. Why not Egypt — with the
grandeur of its monuments, its advanced civilization while the Jews are
wandering around the wilderness trying to get organized? Why not Babylon,
Assyria - sophisticated war machines? Why, for that matter not Greece or
Rome? The scholars of antiquity know that the basic irony of Western
civilization is this -

"How odd of God
To choose the Jews."

There have been moments of grandeur and power and pride. King David
provided a few, Solomon too; and a few others. But mostly God's chosen
have been on the outside looking in, deliberately and systematically
excluded from the inside ~ whether we're talking about international power,
politics 500 years before Christ, the trade halis in the Middle Ages,

Ivy League schools in the 1940s and 50s, or elite country clubs today,
God's chosen are outsiders.

Just this week Fourth Church hosted a group of Soviet clergy, as part
of a Rotary International project which brought 150 Soviets to Chicago to
meet with their professional counterparts - physicians, attorneys,
teachers, military people. The American clergy commission consisted of two
Protestants, a Ukranian Orthodox priest, Roman Catholic diocese official,
Musiim professor and the chairman of the Jewish Federation's committee on
Soviet Jews. Our Soviet counterparts included Orthodox priests, professors
and church officials - two Baptists, the Cantor from the Moscow Synagogue
and two men from the Government Ministry of Religious Affairs. The
American from the Jewish Federation asked, at the end of the meeting, about
the simple fact that Jewish citizens of the Soviet Union are singled out by
having their Jewish identity indicated on all official papers. Everybody
became defensive and nervous. The two men from the government said
something about it being racial, not religious. But there it was again.

In that repressive culture, slowly moving toward a bit of religious
freedom, Jews are treated differently from everybody else - outsiders...

The earliest objection to Christianity was that it sounded like an
outsider religion: . A God who is revealed in the short and tragic life of a
peasant Jewish carpenter? A God revealed in a dismal execution — at the
hand of Caesar? What kind of a religion is that?

The mystery and the irony are there from the beginning. God's
chosen people are outsiders, or, God sides with the outsiders. The mystery
is perhaps not so much a commentary on the people as it is a revelation of
something in the heart of God. Either you become an outsider when you get
involved with this God - or — God specifically chooses to throw in with the
outsiders — or - it is both of these.

The beginning of the Christian chapter of the story is so charming
that both mystery and irony are completely covered over. The cultural
captivity of Christmas is so absolute that we have long lost touch with the
fact that it's the story about outsiders. Mary, Joseph and the Baby have
achieved something in popular mythology that they never accomplished in

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life, namely social acceptance. In the warmth and loveliness of the season
and the authentic generosity and kindness it inspires we are inclined to
forget that the reality of the story is almost brutal. Riding on a donkey
when you are nine months pregnant, being refused a room, giving birth ina
cold, dark, damp, stinking stable is not a lovely experience. It's the
kind of thing that only happens to an outsider.

Mary is an outsider. Her people are outsiders in their own land.
The Romans run the place. The Jews are captives, essentially, oppressed,
burdened by occupying armies. But within her own community Mary is an
outsider. Her pregnancy is not a wonderful event. it's a scandal. She
isn't even married. Her fiance has every reason to walk away from her and
leave her to the sneers and scorn of her community.

And so, when her condition is apparent, she hurries off to visit a
kind, understanding, oider relative, Elizabeth, who is also surprisingly
pregnant. Mary is a frightened, confused teen-ager. But what she says —~
after Elizabeth acknowledges that Mary's son will be God's Son and Savior -
Mary's Christmas Carol is revolutionary. It is very much an outsider's
song. It is about a God of the outsiders.

“My Soul magnifies the Lord...

and my spirit rejoices in God my savior
for he has regarded the low estate of his
handmaiden..."

And then

"he has scattered the proud...

he has put down the mighty

from their thrones,

and exalted those of low degree:

he has filied the hungry with good things
and the rich he has sent empty away.'

G. B. Shaw once said that "The song of Mary is the most revolutionary
song ever written." .

The Magnificat has inspired some of the greatest music we have ever
produced. It has been set to music by Frescobaldi, Vivaldi, Mozart,
Palestrina, Berlioz, and of course, J. §. Bach. The Magnificat is mostly
heard in Latin and one of the reasons is that in English it can make us
squirm a bit, particularly those of us who are clearly. not poor and hungry:
. so therefore, within the perimeters of the Magnificat, the rich and the
proud ~— i.e. the insiders.

It is there from the beginning and it is there throughout. God's
people are the perennial outsiders of history and now Jesus has a special
affinity for the little people, the outsiders. It's not that he has
anything against rich people. It's just that the poor ones seem to
understand him, accept him, trust him, love him and need him and know that
they need him. Now middle class Christians don't particularly like to hear
about the Bible's preferential treatment for the poor — the outsiders -— the
weak. This minister would prefer to tip toe around the Magnificat! But

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it is hard to ignore it... "Blessed are you poor - for yours is the
Kingdom," he said. Catholic scholar, Raymond E. Brown helps by pointing
out that the issue is not simply economics - but how people see
themselves, that in Luke the poor are "the physically poor, but more
widely, those who could not trust in their own strength but had to rely in
utter confidence on God: the lonely, the poor, the sick, the downtrodden,
the widows and orphans..." The opposite of the poor —- are not simply the
rich but “the self-sufficient, who show no need of God or his help." [The
Birth of the Messiah, p. 351]

It is there from the beginning and it is there throughout the Bible -
and throughout subsequent history. God is a God of those who have no where
else to turn... There is probably no more eloquent example than the power
the Gospel of Christ had for a community of people who had every reason to
detest Christianity as a part of the oppressive system in which they were
victims, namely the American slaves. One of the miracles of grace within
our own story is that Black Religion in this country did not become
immediately and utterly vengeful, but instead reflected the Biblical
witness in ways utterly beyond the understanding and experience of the
white Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists and Episcopalians who were slave
owners. The slaves knew that God was not pleased with slavery. The slaves
read or heard the Old Testament stories of Israel in Egyptian slavery with
more accuracy than the plantation owners and overseers. "Go Down Moses"
they sang ~- the slaves did - "Go down and teli Pharoh - let my people
go." They knew who Pharoh was and they knew whose side God was on,

Their trust in God, their faith that God was for then, gave them hope
for a day of freedom. Their trust in God also gave them comfort and grace
which turned into strength, somehow, to survive systemic, institu-
tionalized, socially-accepted, religiously—approved brutality. When they
were beaten, when their families were torn apart and scattered, when they
died, they sang -

"Nobody knows de trouble I've seen,
Nobody knows but Jesus...

Sometimes I'm up, sometimes I'm down,
Nobody knows but Jesus..."

“Steal away, steal away, steal away to Jesus..."

God is the God of the outsiders, the ones who have no hope but God,
the weak who have no strength but God's.

You can't allow this young pregnant girl into our Advent observance
without getting around to our own outsiders, try as we might. Poverty in
our culture and our economy, is complex. Nobody intends it but try, for
instance, explaining Cabrini Green to a Soviet citizen. Donald Trump is
going to entertain Mikhail Gorbachev next week. Try to explain why there
are thousands of people living on the streets in New York and Chicago; that
our infant mortality rate is something like seventeenth in the world.
Poverty is complex and it is not fair to oversimplify its causes or its
proposed remedies or to engage in diatribes whose only effect is to make
those who are not poor feel guilty... But it is also very simple. The
poor are getting poorer while the rest of us are getting richer. With each

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generation of welfare dependency, unwanted children, unmarried mothers,
deteriorating schools, increasing crime, disintregrating families, poverty
grows by quantum leaps. At the level of cultural values it is very simple.
in the introduction to his new book, The Great Divide, Studs Terkel cites
two items which appeared in the newspaper last fall. The first is from the
Chicago Sun Times, November 11, 1987:

"The poorest one-tenth of Americans will pay 20 per cent more of

their earnings in federal taxes next year than they did (10 years ago) and
the richest will pay 20 per cent less."

And the second was in the Los Angeles Times, October 25, 1987:

"Just before the stock market crashed, Forbes Magazine announced that
the number of billionaires in America had doubled in the past year. Just
before the stock market crashed, Shasta County, California, closed its
entire iibrary system for lack of money. Is there any question that
something has gone wrong in America?" [ p. 9]

Young Mary believed that the birth of her baby was going to make a
difference in the way people lived and thought and set their priorities and
established their values. She actually believed that Christianity was
going to change things and that the outsiders would receive justice and
compassion and love from God - but also from the insiders. So who wiil
raise the value issues in the midst of all this cultural and economic
complexity, if it is not the community of faith which celebrates his
coming? It is, I believe, one of our Christian duties.

Mary trusted that the birth would make a difference. And may I
suggest that if the systemic dynamics of poverty seem beyond your grasp,
that each of us can encounter it, see it and deal with it personaliy.
There are hungry and homeless peopie around us. They need our help.

And the simple truth is this - we need them. We need nothing sco much
as to help; to begin to reflect this commitment our God has to the
outsiders. Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, standing
in her soup kitchen, said, "I'm tired of hearing myself called saintly...

I work in the soup line, serving others, in order to help myself a little.
We are here because we are in need. We are here because we are hungry. I
know in my heart that we are being fed all the time..." [Robert Coles,
Harvard Diary, p. 48]

Could it be that you and I are also the poor and needy? We must be
very careful with this because at one level the answer is clearly no and it
would be irresponsible even to try somehow to call most of us poor. On the
level of what we have and how the system works for us — we are insiders, we
are not poor. But on a deeper level - yes, most assuredly, yes.

In a speech to business leaders this week Senator Paul Simon told
about a group of U. S. Senators who meet weekly for prayer and to talk
about their lives and to share burdens... "We all have them," he said - no
matter: a daughter with a drug problem, a son mentally ill, a relationship
which is dissolving, a dream disappearing, a fear, an anxiety.

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The Gospel is, the word of the Magnificat is, that God hears the
cries of people who are oppressed in Third World shacks and in Lake Shore
Drive condominiums. God hears the cries of grief of wives, husbands,
parents, children - who have lost dear ones wherever they are. God knows
the pain and hears the cry of outsiders - hungry for bread and hungry for
love and acceptance and friendship. God hears cries of pain in South
African prisons and also in the Intensive Care Unit of Northwestern
Hospital. God hears the quiet crying of the lonely ~ the bitter - the
desperate. You and I are in there somewhere. You and I are poor - at the
point of our needs, which we may never have shared with anyone, may never
even have articulated, or even acknowledged - precisely because of our
pride, which the Bible calls our sin.

And to us come the words of the young woman, about to five birth,
about a Ged who will raise up the poor and the needy, who will feed our
hunger, who will come to us and nourish us with love and grace and joy.

And so I invite you, in this lovely season, to know your own need,
your own poverty, your hunger, in order better to receive the gift of an
infant born in Bethlehem... And I invite you to come to table, to eat and
drink and to be nourished and filled by the love of our God.

Amen.

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