Revolution is the reason for the season
{ thoughts on Mary & songs of sedition }
On a wintry afternoon five years ago I sat in the cozy kitchen of a dear friend and recorded a very amateur acoustic version of a Christmas carol that had just become my favorite of all time, complete with percussion by two small boys toppling block towers in the background: a compelling Catholic tune called Canticle of the Turning. The carol is a riff on the Biblical song that Mary, the mother of Christ, sings in reply to her cousin Elizabeth just after Elizabeth intuits that Mary’s unborn child is the promised Prince of Peace — the Chosen One who would usher in the total restoration of the Jewish people (Luke 1).
I’m sharing the raw recording here, along with the lyrics (and please be generous as you listen, we are not professionals by any stretch):
My soul cries out with a joyful shout
That the God of my heart is great
And my spirit sings of the wondrous things that
You bring to the ones who wait
You fixed your sight on your servant’s plight
And my weakness you did not spurn
So from East to West shall my name be blessed;
Could the world be about to turn?
My heart shall sing of the day you bring
Let the fires of your justice burn
Wipe away all the tears for the dawn draws near
And the world is about to turn!Though I am small, my God, my all, you
Work great things in me
And your mercy will last from the depths
Of the past to the end of the age to be
Your very name puts the proud to shame
And to those who would for you yearn
You will show your might, put the strong to flight
For the world is about to turn
My heart shall sing of the day you bring
Let the fires of your justice burn
Wipe away all the tears
For the dawn draws near
And the world is about to turn!From the halls of power to the fortress tower
Not a stone will be left on stone
Let the king beware for your
Justice tears ev'ry tyrant from his throne
The hungry poor shall weep no more
For the food they can never earn
There are tables spread, ev'ry mouth be fed
For the world is about to turn
My heart shall sing of the day you bring
Let the fires of your justice burn
Wipe away all the tears
For the dawn draws near
And the world is about to turn!Though the nations rage from age to age
We remember who holds us fast
God's mercy must deliver us from the conqueror's crushing grasp
This saving word that out forebears heard
Is the promise which holds us bound
'Til the spear and rod can be crushed by God
Who is turning the world around
My heart shall sing of the day you bring
Let the fires of your justice burn
Wipe away all the tears
For the dawn draws near
And the world is about to turn!My heart shall sing of the day you bring
Let the fires of your justice burn
Wipe away all the tears
For the dawn draws near
And the world is about to turn…
I have wrestled for years with our Western celebration of Christmas: privileged people buying gifts they don’t need, people in poverty going deeper into debt for gifts they can’t afford, and meanwhile other folks are starving and freezing in the streets and most families are one medical emergency away from being homeless. Sure, Christmas has been packaged and sold to us as a joyful, satisfying, holy holiday, and we’re doing our best to keep up appearances — but in honest conversations with thoughtful people, I hear deep discomfort with the frantic pace and conspicuous consumption of Christmas.
If Jesus is the reason for the season, they ask, what the hell are we doing?
Today I will spend several hours paying rent for families who are on the verge of eviction. These households are being ground in the teeth of organizations and systems that are purported to serve them but instead — whether by design or by neglect — keep families teetering on the razor’s edge of ruin. They are harassed by bosses, landlords, and debt collectors, struggling to survive, stressed beyond belief, and doing everything in their power to find a way out from under their circumstances. For many, the prospects of permanent escape are bleak.
It is against this backdrop that I believe — I must believe — that Mary got it right: revolution is the reason for the season.
The Roman Empire had colonized Palestine by the time of Mary’s pregnancy and installed a puppet government loyal to Rome, which viciously suppressed any alternate claims of Jewish kingship or signs of rebellion. Moreover, the Roman emperor was to be worshipped as a god himself, and his crony autocrats had the power to levy crushing taxes for personal gain and violently punish dissenters. The system was rigged, and the people’s prospects for freedom and flourishing were nil.
In this context, Mary’s song — which some Christians call the Magnificat — is more than a hymn of praise. It is a song of sedition: a God greater than the Emperor has scattered the proud and brought down the mighty from their thrones, uplifted the lowly, filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty. This God is present IN me, Mary sings, and this God is inverting the established, extractive structures of power and wealth —whether you like it or not.
This is the kind of song that got you killed, and Mary sang it anyway.
A revolution is both a political turning and an economic reckoning, and this Christmas I wonder if — or when — white Christians in America will ever be ready to reckon with the colonization of our faith and our active, thoughtless participation in ways of being that keep our neighbors flattened by engineered poverty.
I wonder if — or when — the fires of justice will finally burn through our apathy, illuminate the uncomfortable truths about the way we’ve built and benefited from an inequitable society, and consume us with zeal for the flourishing of ALL of our neighbors.
I wonder if — or when — we will give Mary her due as the woman who shaped the radically compelling life of Christ. Certainly we hear echoes of his mother’s sedition song in the Sermon on the Mount, in his rebukes of the unholy alliance between religion and empire, and in his universal concern for the poor and marginalized.
I wonder if we will ever collectively recognize that revolution is the reason for the season — a revolution animated by Love — and then commit ourselves to the year-round work of drying tears and dethroning tyrants in whatever forms we find them.
I am forever chasing defiant hope, and at Christmastime I find it here: in the song of a poor brown peasant girl with the audacity to shake her small fist in the face of power, violence, and poverty, claiming that the Divine has acted and will continue to act decisively on behalf of the oppressed and the suffering, gestating a revolution of Love.
Sing sedition with me and Mary, dear friends. Let’s turn the world around.
If you’d like to join in the revolutionary work of keeping people warm & housed
in Anchorage, Alaska, please click the following link.