My friends,

I hope you are all having a wonderful week. This time of the year can be especially busy and bring with it so many different expectations from family and friends. It can also be a time where the things and the people we have lost throughout the year can feel especially raw. Please be gentle to yourself. If you're able, find time to slow down. It is okay to prioritize your state of mind and your wellbeing. In fact, it's not just okay, it is vital. Please take care of yourself. Find that joy.

This week, I want to think with you about Mary's song. The one she sings after telling her cousin Elizabeth that she is pregnant with her son. It is a song of hope, a song of joy, and a song of resistance. One that is especially important to reflect on in our world today.

But before we get to that, here are some resources that have me thinking this week:

-I have just finished reading the book, "Saving Jesus From the Church," by Robin R. Meyers. The marriage of bad theology and hypocritical behavior by the church has eroded our spiritual lives. Taking the best of biblical scholarship, Meyers recasts core Christian concepts in an effort to save Christianity from its obsession with personal salvation. Not a plea to try something brand new, but rather the recovery of something very old: the imitation of Jesus. It is an insightful, encouraging, and a challenging read.

-Preston Sprinkle, who also lives here in Boise, runs a thoughtful podcast called "Theology In the Raw." Recently, he had an episode called, "Politics, the Bible, Christian Nationalism, and Hauerwas vs. O'Donovan" where he had a conversation with scholar, Kaitlyn Schiess. I found her insights to be really thoughtful and challenging in this important conversation. I'd encourage you to check it out as well.

-Lastly, I feel it is really important to try to stay informed and part of that is to listen to the people who are doing difficult work on difficult topics. So there's two things I want to recommend on that score. The first is David French's article in the New York times about his former colleague and now speaker of the house, Mike Johnson. It is called "MAGA Mike Johnson’ and Our Broken Christian Politics." Secondly, Charlie Savage, an investigative journalist for the New York Times was recently on Fresh Air, talking about what a potential second term with Donald Trump as president may look like based on his research. It is a difficult but informative listen.

Okay, onto today's content.

Mary's Song of Resistance and Joy

“He has brought down rulers from their thrones

but has lifted up the humble.

He has filled the hungry with good things

but has sent the rich away empty.”

-Mary, the mother of Jesus

In the late 1850s, the United States saw a new Christian song surging in popularity, especially around Christmas time. Yet depending on where you were worshiping in the country, you may or may not sing the whole song in church. If you were worshiping in the North, you’d most likely sing the third verse, which said, “Chains shall He break, for the slave is our brother, And in his name all oppression shall cease.” If you worshiped in the South though, it was most likely forbidden. This song of course is the hymn “O Holy Night.”

Songs and poetry of resistance that speak truth to power are often minimized and suppressed by those who benefit the most from the power being spoken against. Much like the horrible legacy of slavery and racism in our country, if someone benefited from these realities, such songs, poetry, books, and the people who created them might just strike fear and anger in their hearts. They would then work ruthlessly to suppress such ideas being spread and even work to silence the people producing them for good. Yet, as much as they would try, the oppressed kept singing, kept speaking, kept writing, kept persisting, and kept hoping for the joy of freedom.

This is similar to the song we hear from Mary, the mother of Jesus, who sings in Luke 1:46-55. It is a prophetic psalm of both resistance and joy, singing about what God has and will do for the oppressed, especially through her soon to be born child. She sings about the world radically changing and the current structures of power being upended, which will be the result of God's work through Jesus. In her world, those on thrones abused their power and exploited the powerless and the vulnerable. In her world, the poor just kept getting poorer and the rich kept getting richer. It is in this world that she, a peasant teenage girl, joyfully sings in the streets that God is coming to change everything for the better, especially for people just like her. God would turn the current ways of oppression upside down and bring about justice, peace, and abundance.

Matthew 2:3 tells us that when king Herod heard the news of Christ's birth, "he was disturbed, and all Jerusalem with him." Being the fragile, egotistical king he was, he immediately saw this helpless infant as a threat to his power. Having already killed one of his wives and three of his sons under suspicions that they were seeking to take his throne, he then issued a decree to have all of the Hebrew baby boys between infancy and 2 years old to be killed. This is why "all Jerusalem" was disturbed with him. The whims of a tyrant always throws the people they callously rule over into turmoil.

Yet, in the face of this kind of brutal abuse of power, Mary sings, “the mighty would be pulled from their thrones and the rich would be sent away empty!” You can't get much more subversive than that.

This isn’t a rare theme that is just here in the first chapter of Luke either. No, it spans the entire Bible. In Exodus 15:1-13, Mary’s namesake Miriam sings a similar prophetic song as the seas collapsed on the oncoming Egyptian army, who once enslaved them. In judges 5, Deborah, who ruled as a judge over Israel, also sang prophetically about justice for the weak in the face of exploitation by the mighty. 1 Samuel 1: 2:4-7, Hannah sings a prophetic song against barrenness and violence. These songs from brave women throughout the Bible reflect God’s intention for the poor, the marginalized, and the oppressed.

We can find their reflection in reading from prophets like Isaiah, as in our reading from him today, which begins by saying, “The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me, because the Lord has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” The observant reader will notice that this is what Jesus quotes in his first public sermon in Luke 4. Like mother, like son, like the prophets. They all point to the radical reordering work of God to bring about justice for the poor, the vulnerable, and the marginalized. Not just the spiritual poor mind you, but justice for those caught in actual bondage.

Yet, if you grew up in similar churches as I did, these prophetic songs seemed to be minimized or even totally suppressed. I would hear countless sermons about personal sin, personal responsibility, personal repentance, and personal salvation. It was told to me that Jesus came to bring good news to the spiritually poor, all while also being told that the literal poor need to learn how to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, because "God only helps those who help themselves." I would have to wait until seminary to learn that God also cared about the actual current social and economic conditions of the poor, the powerless, and the oppressed. I learned that God’s salvation also included dismantling actual social injustice as well. I learned a far bigger picture of God than I had learned. What kind of God doesn't want to help the poor here and now? Again, the message I was hearing in the churches of my youth were yet another example of using the Bible to maintain the status quo rather than critique it prophetically. If we benefit from the current status quo, like enforcing rugged individualism and predatory capitalism, we don’t want to hear and consider songs or scriptures that might critique how it harms others. Even in places where we claim to want to hear from God. God isn't even allowed to speak against these things.

What I have discovered is that white Evangelicalism, the religion of my past, sees itself as the oppressed and marginalized people group. When it reads the Bible, it sees itself as the oppressed Israelites, when in reality, it has much more in common with the Egyptians or the Romans. White Evangelicals are the people group in one of the wealthiest and most powerful countries the world has ever seen. They are the people group who holds a lot of that wealth and that power for themselves. Whenever that wealth or power seems threatened, that is then labeled as “Christian persecution” or “oppression,” all while openly denying the ways it is actually participating in persecution and oppression of others itself. A movement like this has little to no patience for songs, or poems, or books of resistance from others that critique its structures of power. Sadly, this is why you might hear prominent Evangelicals demonizing any critique of capitalism as “Marxist,” or any call to elevate marginalized groups as “woke,” or hear them advocating the dismantling of public education, or banning books that reveal America's original sin of slavery and racism. The irony here cannot be overstated. Many Christians see themselves as the oppressed minority group while synonymously supporting efforts that oppress actual minority groups.

The reality is, if songs of liberation like the one we hear Mary sing fill us with fear rather than joy, that is when we can be certain that we have more in common with the Herod than with Mary. That is when we know we are personally benefiting from the current status quo and can't imagine why anyone would critique it let alone say it is causing them harm. I say this because I was once a person who was deeply offended by those in my country who called for a reordering of how we collectively use wealth and power like Mary did. When I would hear women, people of color, refugees, or other marginalized groups call for change, I saw these calls as a threat to what I believed as a Christian. I refused to allow my lenses to be challenged. Then upon reading Miriam, Hannah, Deborah, Mary, and others in the scriptures like the prophets, I realized I was against people just like them in my own culture, rather than for them. These ancient voices softened my heart and gave me a new perspective on the voices I was hearing in my own time. Then I read Luke 4, where Jesus preached that he had come to “bring good news to the poor” and “liberate the oppressed” and it convicted me to my core. I have moved from hearing these prophetic songs as a threat to seeing an opportunity to listen to the pain of others, allow them to teach me about our shared world from their perspective, and even join in the joyful course of solidarity with my fellow human beings and sing, “Chains shall He break, for the slave is our brother, And in his name all oppression shall cease.” There is great joy to be had when God reorders our world and sets the captives free. May we be the ones who hear this as good news rather than bad news.

Now I'd like to hear from you.

If you haven’t already, read Mary’s full song in Luke 1:46-55. Then reflect on Isaiah 61:1-4, 9-11. What picture of God’s heart do you feel these words paint for you? When you look at the world around us right now, what “prophetic songs” are you hearing? Who is raising their voices for the poor, the marginalized, and even creation itself? How do these voices make you feel? What areas in your own life are you singing for God to come, bring order to chaos, justice to harm, and bring an arrival of joy? Send me a response and let me know.

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I truly appreciate all of you,

Ben

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