Oak Chapel United Methodist Church

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Before he became a Christian, C. S. Lewis mocked church people who said they were striving to “hate the sin but love the sinner.” He called it “a ridiculous splitting of hairs.” But after he was converted (After, as he liked to say, he was dragged “kicking and screaming” in the Kingdom of God) he viewed that pious effort differently. He said he realized that, even though -- in the cold light of reason -- hating sins and loving sinners seemed ridiculous, he had in fact been applying that “ridiculous” standard to himself all his life. There were many things about him that he hated: his self-centeredness, his lack of discipline, his failure to establish priorities (things we all have about us), but somehow he had found a way to love himself in spite of it all. Now, as a Christian, he understood that God was applying that same ridiculous standard to him, hating his sin but loving him nevertheless. And God was asking him simply to apply that same ridiculousness to others. He saw what God had done for him, and his eyes were opened. Later he understood that what God had done for him he had also done for the whole world.

Charles Wesley’s famous remarks about his own conversion follow that same pattern. Wesley said he had always repeated, dutifully, the words: Jesus died for all the world. But he was converted when he realized that “if he and Jesus had been the only two people on earth, and it had become necessary for one to die that the other might live, Jesus would have died for him.” Not for the whole world, but for Charles Wesley. In his conversion, he saw first what God had done for him, and his eyes were opened. Soon he would understand that what God had done for him he had also done for the whole world. For in his own experience, he had seen the nature of God, and it was love. And then he wrote all those hymns.

We see that same pattern in Mary’s song. (Mary, the mother of our Lord, whose importance to the early church is so sadly overlooked in Protestantism). Mary begins by marveling over what God has done for her: “…he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on, all generations will call me blessed…the Mighty One has done great things for me.…” But then the bigger truth seems to strike her: if his mercy is so great to me, then the same great mercy must be – as we have always been told -- to all those who fear him “from generation to generation.” If he sends his Son to such a one as I, then, in this moment, everything is changing, this is the beginning of a new heaven and a new earth: the proud are scattered, the powerful are brought down, the lowly are lifted up…”He hath filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he hath sent empty away.”

The Magnificat is not merely the praise song of a young girl, Mary. The magnificat was remembered, and eventually written down, by the early church because it seemed a perfect summary of what the coming of Jesus meant. Nothing, not one thing, in heaven or on earth would ever be the same. We don’t usually remember the background music played at great events, but everyone who was there when General Cornwalice surrendered to General Washington at Yorktown, remembered that the little colonial band, which had been quickly assembled for the occasion, played a tune called, “The World Turned Upside Down.” So appropriate. Something amazing had happened! There had been some kind of flip-flop. Colonists could break away from their colonial masters. The titled and high-born would no longer rule by virtue of their bloodlines. The governed would decide who governed. It was a new world, one still coming into being in many places today. Nothing would ever be the same.

The birth of Jesus. We impute such immense importance to so ordinary an event! Parents poor as dirt. A hotel with no vacancies. A baby born in mean surroundings. “Infant lowly, infant holy, for his bed a cattle stall.” Not much to write home about. It happened all the time in the ancient world. But this is a Bethlehem moment – an ordinary moment in time, but one which God infuses with his presence. One of the messages of Christmas is that there is no place, no event so earthly (so common) that God can not be in it. There is no man or woman so lost that God cannot find. A pagan once asked a Rabbi why God spoke to Moses out of a burning bush. The pagan thought it would have been more appropriate if God had spoken in a clap of thunder, or an earthquake. The Rabbi said that God spoke to Moses as he did “to teach us there is no place on earth where God’s glory is not….even the lowly thorn bush.” Why was Jesus born in one-horse Bethlehem, in a stable. To teach us that there no place on earth where God’s glory is not.”

If you have traveled to the Holy Land, you know that the security on El Al Airlines is very serious, almost frightening. One tourist had purchased a ceramic nativity scene during his stay in Israel, and as he went through security for the return flight to America, he was asked to unwrap it. He did so, and then the guard announced that each cresch figure would have to be taken to another place and x-rayed. “But why,” the man asked? “Because they could contain explosives.” And, of course, he was right. They could. And they have. The story of Jesus’ birth can turn the world up side down. But we must make it so, or the cresch figures remain just harmless pottery.

We must magnify the Lord. (We magnify lots of things, by the way. We are able, in fact, by mental magnification, to turn quite ordinary, harmless things into obsessions. We magnify dangers, and it steals our courage. We magnify jealously until it eats us alive. We magnify personal offenses, until it seems the whole world is scheming against us.) But we can also magnify God. That is, like Mary, we can see him greater than we have ever seen him, so great that he is everywhere and in all things. In her belly. In a manger. In a toddler or a teen. In one who grew up to love his fellow man. In a cross. In an empty tomb. We determine what we magnify and what we diminish. And that makes our lives what they are. “My soul doth magnify the Lord,” Mary said, “and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my savior.”