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[Music] Glendale Presbyterian Church People Moving Power brings you Dr. Bruce W. Thielman with a message, "The Victory Song of the Human Spirit." [Music]

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This reading of the morning is taken from the Gospel according to Luke, the first chapter, beginning at the verse which is numbered 39. I will ask you please to be up standing for the reading of the Word of God. "About this time Mary set out and went straight to a town in the uplands of Judah.

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She went into Zachariah's house and greeted Elizabeth. And when Elizabeth heard Mary's greeting, the baby stirred in her womb. Then Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and cried aloud, 'God's blessing is on you above all women, and his blessing is on the fruit of your womb.

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Who am I that the mother of my Lord should visit me? I tell you, when your greeting sounded in my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy. How happy is she who has had faith that the Lord's promise would be fulfilled.' And Mary said, 'Tell out, my soul, the greatness of the Lord.

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Rejoice, rejoice, my spirit, in God my Savior.' So tenderly as he looked upon his servant, humble as she is. For from this day forth all generations will count me blessed. So wonderfully has he dealt with me, the Lord, the mighty one.

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His name is holy, his mercy sure, from generation to generation, toward those who fear him. His deeds his own right arm has done, it discloses mine. The arrogance of heart and mind he has put to rout. He has brought down monarchs from their thrones, but the humble he has lifted high.

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The hungry he has satisfied with good things, the rich sent empty away. He has raised himself at the side of Israel his servant, firm in his promise to our forefathers. He has not forgotten to show mercy to Abraham and his children's children forever. Mary stayed with her about three months and then returned home.

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May God bless to us and to our hearts this reading from his word. Let us pray. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen. When the sun rises, the whole world sings. The prospect of a new day brings with it flowers spreading their petals,

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birds throwing their hearts at the sky. The human spirit looks forward to a new start. Two thousand years ago the Son of God first spread the pure radiance of his light on the surface of the dark earth. And the rising of this sun too was accompanied with song.

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Elizabeth sang, the angels sang, Mary sang. Our Christian faith has always been a singing faith. Forty centuries ago one believer wrote, "The Lord is our strength and song." Twenty centuries after that and twenty centuries before today, another believer wrote,

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"Let us make melody to the Lord with all our hearts." And this morning we have praised God with the sound of singing. Now in all of the history of our faith there is no song more splendid than the song of Mary. Every nation has its national anthem, some melody with appropriate lyrics which stirs the hearts of its people.

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But the song of Mary is a hymn that crosses every national boundary. It is a song for all humanity. It bisects every demarcation that sets men apart. An American stands for "O say can you see," a Frenchman for the "Marseillaise," a Russian for the "Internationale."

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The Scotsman or the Englisher stands when "God Save the Queen" is played. Particular persons from particular countries feel their hearts lifted at the song which is the expression of their national patriotism. But the Magnificat, Mary's song, is older than all these national anthems. It is higher than all of them, inspired by the Holy Spirit of God himself.

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And it is broader than them all, than all the nations of the earth. It is nothing less than the victory song of the human spirit. It is the expression of the hopes and the dreams of every honest heart. It is Christianity in rough draft.

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Since Mary first uttered it, it has been sung 10,000 times, 10,000 times. Jesus sang it himself in the first sermon he ever preached. There in the synagogue at Nazareth he said to those assembled, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me. He has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.

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He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord." Years after that, when a mystic like Meister Eckhart wrote, "If one were in a rapture like St. Paul, and there was a sick man needing help,

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I think it would be best to throw off the rapture and show love by service to the needy." When Eckhart wrote those words, he was humming the hymn of humanity first heard from Mary's lips. When Zwingli brought great blessing to the suffering of Switzerland, when Cary went to India, and Judson to Burma, and Moffat to Korea,

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and Gilmore to Mongolia, and Livingston to Africa, when any pastor takes his pulpit to speak for God and man together, when any Christian recognizes both his oneness with God and with all men because of God, when he grasps that he cannot love God and fail to love his neighbor,

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then, in that moment, Mary's song is being sung again, the victory song of the human spirit. Recently there was put in my hands a bit of poetry written by one of the young people of our church. I want to share it with you. "Where is my home? Is it America, mass of pollution and corruption?

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Or Africa, land of innocence emerging in a sick world after centuries of oppression? Perhaps I belong in a castle on the Rhine, sipping the finest wine safe from the world on a hill. Or maybe I belong in the jungles of South America, in arms with my brothers following the footsteps of Guevara.

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No, I answer, my home is now. Not one spot, but right here, where I am among the people of the world. For I am a person, and a person belongs with people. My home is the world, my backyard the moon, my neighborhood the universe."

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Now there, stumbling but sincere, awkward but climbing, only beginning but beginning, is a cry of one human for all other humans. And to this degree, it is the song of the Virgin of long ago. It is a pleading for all men everywhere.

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It thrills me to think of it today. The words of a Nazareth maid, resounding down all the corridors of the years, how right she was when she heralded these words. "He has regarded the lowest state of his handmaiden.

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Behold, henceforth I shall be called blessed." And she has been called blessed by all generations. Now we delude ourselves if we believe that Mary's growing up in Nazareth was all sweetness. We must rid ourselves of the picture of a lovely girl living in a bower of roses.

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On the contrary, she was living in a first century town on a bloody piece of land called Palestine. I don't suppose there is anywhere on earth which has been soaked with as much bleeding as the soil of Palestine. Roman power meant injustice to Jews, and Mary was a Jew. The greed of tax gatherers meant poverty to others, and she was one of the others.

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Guerrilla bands fighting the Romans hid out in the hills, and some of her relatives might have been a part of those bands and paid with their lives for their love of freedom. Mary knew what it was to be at the bottom of the heap, to be abused and misused and belittled and trodden upon by relentless powers. And so there accumulated in her across her early years a burning indignation.

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"Now the chosen of God, the vessel of his son's nativity, at last gives vent to her feelings," she sings. "He hath shown strength in his arm. He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts." Now this was nothing less than the announcement of a moral revolution. "The proud and the powerful will be brought low, and those who suffer beneath their heel will be exalted."

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"Pride shall die and humility be lifted up." And that's a tremendous gift at Christmas. Thirty years before Jesus spoke on this subject, his mother had anticipated his words. Jesus echoed her when he said, "Whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased, and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted."

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That is, in the presence of the Son of God and the purity which he is, justice shall prevail. "Those who prosper unjustly shall be denied, and those who suffer unjustly shall be affirmed." There is a tendency in most men to rationalize their own conduct. That is, to form their rationalizations into a kind of personal moral code.

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They assert that what is right for them or benefits them must be right for all and benefit all. They never ask all, they never ask the others, they just assume it to be so. They come to believe that proper conduct is that which ensures their position in the power structure. They don't concern themselves with the hopes and the desires of those who stand beneath them.

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The spiritual descendants of Mary can never allow themselves to think this way. For Christmas is the announcement that God has come and in him there is no darkness. Therefore, in the light of his radiant purity, we, as his children, must renounce all impurity. And to profit at the expense and the suffering of others is impure.

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To exert power or to be supportive of a power which degrades men is a sin. And we must drive it out of our lives, for God in Christ will put down the powerful and exalt those of low degree. Recently we started a new endowment program here at the Glendale Presbyterian Church. And when the first draft of the program was presented, it was rejected by the session

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because there was no limitation placed upon the field in which we could make our investments. We wish to demonstrate by our investments our social concern and zeal. So a second draft was prepared and submitted, and it suggested that we not buy any securities that had anything to do with liquor or tobacco. The session rejected this suggestion also because in the catalog of national evils, liquor and tobacco are definitely minor league sins.

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Now our interest was much greater. We were concerned that we not be involved in the support of any industry that belittled a man because of the color of his skin or his national origin. We were determined that we would not give one dime to companies that discriminated against an employee because she was female. We do not care to support banks or other financial institutions that restrict the flow of capital to cultures and communities that are different from our own.

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We are not interested in trade unions that deny equal opportunity or in churches that do the same. We want none of our money to support injustice or to exalt the powerful and the proud at the expense of the humble and the poor. So we have amended our endowment resolution, and now there is nothing in it that will permit any investment that is in conflict with the principles which are basic to this church. It is clearly stated there that we will put our money where our hearts are, and we shall be constantly vigilant to see that this continues to be so.

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It is so easy for us, you see, to ignore those who only dream about the style of life which is ours, but they must not be ignored. They must be helped, and God would have it so, and we must not call our help generosity. It is not generosity, it is justice. One of the greatest glories of Christmas, one of its greatest joys is this.

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There will come a time when the hungry will look around to see who has too much food. There will come a time when the poor will discover who it is that has too much money. There will come a time when the sick will find out who it is that has too many doctors. There will come a time when the world's multitudes will announce that only those shall have more who give more,

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and only those shall have more who serve more, and only those shall lead who in their leadership hear the cry of the least. And when that day comes, no Christian should be afraid, for the Christian will have fed the hungry, he will have helped the poor, he will have cured the sick, and he will have stood for justice. The promise of Mary is that someday the hungry, the poor, and the sick will receive what is justly theirs,

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and that will be a moral revolution. Justice will be done, and in that day, only those who love and honor with all that they are and have our Lord Jesus Christ will stand. They will know the strength of the arm of God while the proud are scattered away. Mary's song continues with the announcement that not only does Christ bring moral revolution, but economic revolution as well. Her words are these, "He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent empty away."

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This seems to have been a cardinal truth to Mary and to her descendants as they are noted in Scripture. There are three relatives of Mary who are specifically designated in Scripture as being younger than she was. First, there was John the Baptist, who was the son of her kinswoman Elizabeth, probably a cousin of Mary's. His message had four key aspects, the universality of man, the voluntary distribution of wealth,

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the sharing of surplus food, and the eminence of the kingdom of God. All four of these aspects of his message have economic significance. The second personality who is mentioned is James, the brother of Jesus, one of Mary's other children. His epistle appears in the New Testament, and two selections from it will give indication of his thinking. He says at one point that faith without works is dead, implying that proclamation without demonstrating our faith in acts of charity is worthless.

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And at another point he writes, "Listen, my beloved brethren, has not God chosen those who are poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom which he has promised to those who love him? But you have dishonored the poor man. It is the rich who oppress you." So spoke James, another child of Mary's. And finally there is Jesus, the only begotten son of God, mothered by Mary.

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Jesus said things like this, "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Go sell all that you have to feed the poor, and then come and follow me." And Jesus did things like this, scripture notes, "He made a whip of thongs and drove the money changers from the temple." Now in none of these words or deeds is there the condemnation of wealth per se.

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Mary, John, James, Jesus are condemning the misuse of wealth, the idolization of it, glorying in it without any concern for others. This Christmas time, may we not pray that we will be delivered once and for all from any idea that we are self-made men. Has our health not had something to do with our making? Has our heredity, our ancestry not had something to do with our making?

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Has not the social system of which we are a part contributed in some way to our making? Would you have done as well as you have done if you had been born in China? Or would you be hoeing rice now? Suppose that we had been brought into the world as blacks in South Africa with its hellish doctrine of apartheid.

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In whose diamond mine would we be sweating now? One thing's for sure, it would be owned by a white man. How high would we have climbed if we had been born or raised on an Indian reservation? And let's not delude ourselves into believing that the poor can get along all right because of welfare, a benefit we don't receive.

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The fact of the matter is that we receive a great deal more welfare than the poor, at least if you are defining welfare as money which is taken from the public coffers and spent for the benefit of particular individuals. Many of us fly about the country in the pursuit of our business and the federal government spends millions of dollars on legislation and programs designed to aid our aeronautical travels. The poor aren't flying. All of that money that is spent benefits us. We drive on highways, great freeways built at the public expense.

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Those freeways don't come out of ghettos. They come from affluent suburbs like our own to take us back and forth from the cities where we work. That money is spent on us. Public money supports our junior and state colleges. But by and large, the children of the poor are not in those junior and state colleges. Our children are there. And the deductions which we take from our federal income tax forms are structured in such a way that they benefit the affluent and not the poor.

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The deck is stacked. Let's have the grace to admit that we see that. We fool no one, least of all God, when we deny it. The poor are not poor because they want to be poor.

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They are oft times accused of lack of zeal. But I worked for nine and a half years in a ghetto and I know how poverty debilitates and destroys zeal. I know how being without destroys your ambition and erodes your incentive. Now please notice, I'm not saying that to be rich is to be evil.

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I'm not saying that to have money is pernicious. I'm only asserting what Mary asserted, that to be rich and to fail to do all you can for the poor, to be rich and to see your riches as your due, as the result of your effort and your skills alone, that's evil. And Christmas is the promise that God is moving toward the time when the rich will be empty and the poor will be filled.

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And that is glorious news to Christians and to a hungry world. Hail Mary, you've set the gospel to music. To me, one of the most thrilling aspects of the life of the church today is the mood of our young people. Our young people, the sharpest amongst them, are interested in a faith which is meeting the world's needs.

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They're bored with people who all get excited about matters of minor ethical importance. Our brightest young people are focusing on priorities that are universal priorities. Racial inequity and poverty and family planning and ecology, matters of global significance. They see themselves, our young people do, as part of the world's rich.

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And remember that if your total earnings are over $300 a year, then you are in the top 40% of the world's wage earners. And our young people recognizing this are determining to use their wealth for the benefit of all men. Tragically, sometimes they are frustrated by the very church in which they're seeking to do this. When I go on campus, I don't find young people denying that God was in Christ.

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I find young people denying that Christ is in the church. They see the church as separated from men's needs. And I say to all of these kids, stay with the church. Help the church to be what she ought to be. Because the rich are going to be sent empty away. And this means that the church itself will be sent away.

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Unless she invests herself in the poor. Not only in her words, but in her works. So when a Christian employer in our congregation comes to me to discuss with me how to get the gospel to his employees, and to demonstrate his love for them by a greater sharing of the profits of that company, then both that man and myself, we're humming together the victory song of the human spirit.

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And I praise God for those moments. Because the rules are going to change. Christmas is the joyous promise that God is in charge and that his will will prevail. So think about it. When Zacchaeus was converted, he returned everything he had stolen four times over. And then he gave one half of all that he possessed to the poor.

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And it was only after this that Jesus said, "Today has salvation come to your house." One last thought. During the Middle Ages, there was a wandering scholar named Muretus. He was very poor, and he was taken ill in a small Italian town, and taken there to a hospital for the poverty-stricken.

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The doctors discussed his case in Latin, never thinking that anyone so poor would be able to understand that cultured language. It was suggested in the course of the discussion that since he was such a common man, that he be used for medical experimentation. Whereupon Muretus answered in Latin, even more perfect than the doctors,

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"Call no man common for whom Christ died." When he uttered those words, he was singing the victory song of the human spirit. Moral revolution, economic revolution, and social revolution. Mary put it this way, "He has put down the mighty from their thrones and exalted those of low degree."

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It isn't hard to imagine a poor Jewish girl in a conquered land singing such a song. And it isn't difficult to understand why Jesus echoed it. Have I ever told you the single most astonishing sentence that I've ever heard? I was talking with a woman, a church member, who was railing against the Jews.

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I hasten to add that she was not a member of this congregation. And in the midst of her tirade against the Jews, I reminded her that Jesus was a Jew. Whereupon she replied, and I quote her exactly, and this is the most astonishing sentence I have ever heard in my life, I reminded her that Jesus was a Jew, and she responded, "Yes, I know, and that is the only thing I hold against him."

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Well, Jesus was a Jew, and he knew how it felt to be discriminated against. He also was poor. When he was offered to God at eight days of age, two turtle duds constituted the offering. That was the traditional offering of the poor.

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And further, when he died, his total possessions amounted to practically nothing. He also was part of a conquered people. During his early years, a Galilean revolutionary named Judas tried to revolt against the Romans. He got weapons from the armory at Sephoroth, which was a small town not far from Nazareth.

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The Romans easily defeated Judas and crucified him and all of his followers, and then they burned Sephoroth to the ground. As a boy, Jesus probably saw the roads lined with the crosses of those revolutionaries. Over 1,000 of them were crucified. And maybe Joseph, Jesus' earthly father, went as one of the carpenters from nearby Nazareth, helping to rebuild the charred city.

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Yes, Jesus knew what it was to be ground beneath the heel of the mighty. He was racially despised, economically deprived, and socially defeated. This was the life of our Lord. Is it any wonder, then, that his mother's song was precious to him?

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You know, the field of psychology has taught us how much influence a mother has on her children. To a large degree, children reflect their mothers. The ancient Jewish Talmud puts that in an interesting way. It reads, "God could not be everywhere, so he made mothers."

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God, you see, knows all about psychology. After all, he invented it. He understood the influence that Jesus' earthly mother would have on him, and he chose Mary. And I think that was in part because he wanted Jesus to hear these words.

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"He has put down the mighty from their thrones and exalted those of low degree." And Jesus did hear them, and he remembered them. And they are the germ of later expressions of his that sounded like this, "Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and all these other things will then be added unto you."

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"Or inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these, my brethren, ye have done it unto me." Across the course of history, it has been a general rule that those who are subjugated or debased, conquered people, react in one of three ways. Some try to be very much like their conquerors.

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They try to eliminate any difference between themselves and those who have conquered them. In Jesus' day, the Sadducees did this. Then there are those who seek to reduce contact with their conquerors to an absolute minimum. They enter into a kind of cultural isolation.

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This you might call the ghetto complex, and it was practiced in the time of Jesus by the Pharisees. The third option is open revolt, the way of violence. The result of this is usually hopeless and tragic. It's a form of fanaticism, to die for freedom's sake.

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And in the first century, those who did this were zealots. They measured their significance by the amount of power that was needed to crush them. Now Jesus and Mary before him might have succumbed to any of these attitudes, but both Jesus and Mary refused.

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To them, the issue was God's. The promise of his power was their freedom. Therefore, the key was to keep your soul free in God, to wait upon him. They believed that no one can own you as long as you have given your soul to God.

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A man's greatness, they asserted, is only measured by one thing, his value to God. And this greatness rests not in how many serve him, but in how many he serves. Not in climbing higher, but in bending lower. And the happy promise of Christmas is nothing less than this,

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that God is bringing to pass a whole world that's going to live like that. And what a Christmas present that is. Can you imagine a society in which the aristocracy will be one of love, and the blue book will be the register of those who are most compassionate,

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and the 400 will be the greatest servants of men? Oh yes, there will always be some inequality. Any group of people needs leaders. One man's talents will be of greater worth to society than another's.

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But the Christian's hope is that in God's future, the first shall be last, and the last shall be first. To become first are those who serve. I was talking the other day with a member of our church who serves in a ghetto area. Highly talented, attractive, multilingual young lady.

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She teaches women there, very hard women. Some of them have actually killed. All of them have been in jail. Recently she was threatened by one of them. She was promised that she would be killed.

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Now this woman who made this promise appears to be psychotic. She has subsequently telephoned threats and issued other words of warning. She's bragged about almost killing one other person. This member of our church went to her superiors for assistance,

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and they, to use the parlance of our day, chickened out. They backed out of the whole situation and would not give her the encouragement that she needed. But she has stood fast, and she was in to be encouraged in that standing. And we did encourage her because Christians have the good news

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that in the end, she is the one who will be honored. That there will come a time when the world will most exalt those who serve. And those who are the leaders of society, those who stand highest in the order of priority,

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will not be those who are born high. Not be those who know great power. Not be those who have bulging bank accounts. These mighty will have fallen, Mary sings,

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while those with a passion for pity will be exalted. They are the forever family of God, the children of the Father, the kin of Christ Jesus, Christians, the chorus that sings the victory song of the human spirit. Mary was a remarkable woman.

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She was prepared by God. She yielded willingly to that preparation and she walked with God. She never hesitated to express her own need. She blessed others by demonstrating her need of them.

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She knew what it was to be one with others because of Jesus. And she sang a song which is the very essence of our faith. It is one of the most astonishing documents of history, this magnificat. It's too bad that more have not noted it and examined Christ's light and delight of it.

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We must not think of her as meek and mild. She was in reality very strong and assertive. And we must not think of Jesus as meek and mild. He was not a man with a pansy in one hand and a Bible in the other.

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He too was strong and assertive. And Christianity is a gutty religion. Make no mistake about that. It started in a cave and it ended on a cross.

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Only after that came Easter. I got a letter from a lady who said that she used to be so involved with concerns for the world that she sometimes wept herself to sleep at night. Then she says, "I found Jesus and now everything is peaceful.

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And I think only of him and forget all of the need in the world." Well, let's be very gentle with her. Perhaps she's just too young in the faith to know any better. But those words are immature and irresponsible.

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They're a cop-out, a cheap shot, and worthless. They don't radiate the Christmas spirit. The Christmas spirit is the spirit of a God down on his knees, plunging his arms into the mud of life, lifting and building the world

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until the promise of the angels becomes true that there is peace on earth. Christmas is Jesus here, Emmanuel, God with us. God with us as the proud are brought low and the humble are exalted. God with us as the rich are sent away empty and the poor are filled.

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God with us as the mighty are humbled and those who serve are lifted up. That's the grand good news. That those who are helping and serving and carrying crosses and sacrificing cannot lose. Their souls, like Mary's, magnify the Lord.

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They echo the carpenter's wife of long ago, and it's a glorious sound. The Magnificat, the song of Mary, is the secret to Christmas joy. It is the grand truth that it is more blessed to give than to receive. It is to help the poor and the humble and the ignorant and the unsaved,

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not only in Burma but in Burbank, not only in Mongolia but in Montrose, not only in Ghana but in Glendale. Anyone who will so give himself to the mission for which Christ lived, died, and rose again, that person becomes a part of the Bethlehem experience.

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The invading power of God into the world, the continuing power of God changing the world, the victorious power of God in the end winning the world. Christmas isn't principally carols. Christmas is the song of Mary. Christmas, my brothers and sisters, is the victory song of the human spirit.

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Let us pray. Our Father and our God, use us to the fulfillment of every promise of which Mary sang. And we will give thee the power and the glory forever and forever.

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Amen. It becomes my purpose tonight to extend to you, on behalf of all of your brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ, a very Merry Christmas. But I would have you carefully understand what I mean when I say those words.

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It has always seemed to me that life is perhaps better measured by the breaths we do not take than by the breaths we do take. That life takes its meaning from those moments when, quite literally, our breath is taken away. From those times which are so amazing and so surprising that we gasp with surprise. Those are the moments that make life meaningful.

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And Christmas Eve is one of those times. A fantastic time. When shepherds out on hillsides hear symphonies by angels, and the Son of God is put to bed in an animal speed box, and kings come across the hills.

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It's a night full of the things that cannot be and are. And it's not at all surprising that in the midst of such astonishing circumstances, Mary should find herself quite speechless. When the angel came and announced the coming of the Christ, she spoke with the angel.

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When she went to visit her kinswoman Elizabeth, she listened to her sing and then sang to her, and they sang together a song, the Magnificat, which still echoes down all the corridor of centuries. But when the moment of the birth came, no word of Mary's is recorded. It simply says that she pondered all of these things in her heart.

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She had, you see, no syllables to wrap around that kind of experience. That centering down on God. I think as she lay there on the straw, in that dark and dirty and damp place, that she must have thought about the lowliness of God's approach to man.

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Strange how when we want to get someone's attention, we make a lot of noise and clamor. But it is never so with God. There is no record in scripture of God ever knocking anyone's door down. Instead, he stands at the door and knocks and waits for us to open.

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Have you ever paused to ponder how the greatest power comes silently? Gravity, that awesome and tremendous force, almost unbelievable in its strength, which holds our great cities to the face of our planet so that they do not blow away like leaves in space. Yet gravity is absolutely silent.

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And what of the tides? The innocent moon pools all the great surgings of the earth. It cleanses our shores and launches our ships and does it all without a sound. And what about springtime?

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No fanfares, no rolls on trumpets, no sounds of trumpets. The only heralds are green leaves. Yet what a power is springtime! So it is with God.

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He is heard best in the moments that are quiet. He whispers to us in the woods. He preaches to us when we look at great mountains. And when we become very still in the center of ourselves,

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we hear the thin small voice which is his. How is it that you in your experience have been most sensitive to the word of God? Isn't it true that it came to you through the admonitions of your own life? Or perhaps through some gentle bit of common sense?

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Or some secret truth that was very subtly inserted into your thinking? Or maybe hearing a soft sob of some social need? What Wordsworth called the still sad cry of humanity. It was just so with Jesus.

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He heard things that way. In gentle voice from the lips of his mother when he played at her knee. From the lilies in the field that he spoke of as being arrayed more splendidly than Solomon. And then that inner voice he knew, that inner voice of imperious validity

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which so commanded him that he obeyed it all the way to a cross. This interior hearing of the highest. It happens best when we are most still. So tonight the whole world gets quiet and listens very carefully

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for nothing other than the sob of a tiny baby two thousand years ago. I think Mary pondered the lowliness of God's approach. And I think she thought too about the lowliness of his arrival. And in was not a very pretentious place in the first century.

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Just a paved courtyard with some stalls around it. They provided no food, only fodder for the animals and a fire at which you might cook your food, but you had to bring your own. There is no evidence that Joseph and Mary had any.

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And the swaddling clothes? A square cloth with a diagonal band going off from one side. The baby was laid in the midst of the square. It was folded over and then the band was wrapped round and round.

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Far from being royal robes. When down south of here they focused the great Mount Palomar mirror on some star eons away. And that mirror trained upon that star holds its image upon the photographic place

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for several hours because the light from the star is so dim that not only can we not see it with the naked eye, but it must be focused upon that place for hours to make any impression of light there at all.

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When Mount Palomar mirror focuses like that, we have but a very tiny image of what it meant for everything God is to focus on that little child in a manger. That little child whose mother looked into its red and wrinkled face

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and with her hair wiped all the birth blood away. If he had to come, why did he come in such a lowly way? Well, there was a European king who used to make his servants anxious because he would take off his royal robes and donning the garb of a commoner

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go out and live in the midst of the people. And they were afraid that something might happen to him, but he said he had to do it. How can I rule, he argued, if I do not know what my people are feeling?

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So we might assert that Christ came in this way to know what his people were feeling. But were there not other incognitos he could take? Did it have to be a baby in an animal's feed box? There was a Hindu who rejected everything that Christianity is

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because he said God would not so humble himself. And then one day this Hindu was out in the field and came upon an anthill. And as he bent low to examine it, his shadow fell upon the hill and all the ants scurried away.

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And no matter how carefully he approached the hill, the ants were frightened and moved where he could not see them. Until finally he thought to himself, "The only way in which I could approach that place and understand them as they are

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would be if I were to become an ant." And as he thought that thought, suddenly it all became very clear to him, and he was not a Hindu much longer. I wonder if, as the Son of God stood on the razor's edge between infinity and finitude,

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between heaven and earth, this night two thousand years ago, ready to focus himself into this situation of poverty and need, I wonder if he hesitated. As he stood on the very balcony of glory and looked down, about to empty himself,

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that's the way Paul describes it, like pouring everything there is out of a pitcher. If we had been there, just pale shadows in the brilliance of all the light that he is, if we had been there, would we have seen him pause and hold back for a moment? As he stood and looked at the place where he had once seen Lucifer stand,

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Lucifer who was called the Angel of Light, and who fell, cursing God as he fell, and leaving a great starry, sparking train behind him, carrying with him only one last fire to light hell, and leaving behind an awesome ache in the heart of God.

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As the Prince thought of that, and of how his mission would soothe that ache, and bring peace to the heart of his Father, and peace to the hearts of men, I wonder if he held back. I do not think so.

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For he told us that the Father came running to meet the Prodigal. So he came running all the way to a wooden tower on Calvary, despising the shame. And for us, tiny bits of humanity thrown into the scale of the infinite, but of sufficient importance to topple the Son of God from heaven

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and send him tumbling to the earth. I think that night Mary pondered the lowliness of his arrival. And one other thing, I think she also thought about the lowliness of his audience. The shepherds, you know, were the first ones to hear.

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Mary would have missed music that night. You see, it was the custom in that day, when a new child was born, for all the neighbors to gather round and play upon musical instruments. And that's what would have happened in her hometown of Nazareth.

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But she wasn't at home. She was in Bethlehem, and no one knew of them there, and so there was no one to play. And then the word came from shepherds that there had been a serenade out on the hills.

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The shepherds hearing first. They were considered, you know, to be beneath the rules and regulations of religion. The kind of things which they had to do in the fulfillment of their tasks made it impossible for them to go into the temple or the holy places,

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for they were considered to be ritually and religiously unclean. And they were the first audience. Of course, they didn't understand what they saw there in that manger. They couldn't grasp Niagara in a coffee cup,

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or the whole ocean sucked into a single straw. But it wasn't necessary that they do that. Celsus, a bitter antagonist of the Christian faith, wrote about 1500 years ago,

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"If you would be a Christian, then be ignorant. If you would be a Christian, then be stupid. If you would be a Christian, then be uninformed. If you would be a Christian, then be one of those

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not worthy of the attention of your betters." That's one time that Celsus wrote more wisely than he knew. For to his word, I would say, "Amen." You don't have to be a Ph.D. to come to the manger.

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You just have to be like a shepherd, or like Mary, or like--well, like the way I feel tonight, very much without self-confidence. Men hurtle through space, and I walk slowly on the earth.

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Light takes a hundred thousand years to cross the Milky Way, and I turn off lights because we have an energy crisis. Politically, I'm not at all important. Vocationally, I am altogether undistinguished.

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And within, why, I would not have the courage to tell you everything that is within. But the miracle is, as Paul put it, that God chose the foolish in the world to shame the wise,

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that God chose the weak to shame the strong, that God chose the low, indeed what is not, to make nothing that which is. So no matter how worthless we might feel,

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Christmas and that first audience of shepherds says that we are of infinite value to God, made in his image and the object of his love. And when you confront that, all you can do is be quiet.

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You welcome Jesus tonight with singing and clapping and the snapping of fingers. And it was beautiful. And we all were touched by it and by you.

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But that is not my way. And we sang the carols, old with so many memories, and with lyrics that had been loved for centuries. And our faces were all alight as we sang those songs.

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But that is not my way. It seems to me that in the end, all we can do is be very quiet and to ponder these things.

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If I could give you a gift for Christmas, it would be the pondering heart of Mary. As she rested there in the damp straw and suckled her man-child,

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she thought to herself, "Glory to God that his approach would be so lowly. Glory to God that his arrival would be so lowly. Glory to God that his audience would be so lowly."

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Maybe she even whispered so silently that no one heard to write it down, "Glory to God in the lowest." I wanted you to understand that,

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because you see, that's what I mean when I say, "I hope you have a very, very merry

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Christmas." Let us pray. Father, let the pondering spirit of the Virgin claim our hearts,

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as in silence, Jesus, the infant King, is born again in our hearts. For we pray it in his name. Amen.

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[silence]