The Reverend Mike Riggins 12/11/22

Mary's Wisdom

Psalm 146:5-10
Luke 1:46b-55

Bob and Meg Turnbull served as agricultural missionaries during the 70's and

80's in the Golden Triangle area of northern Thailand. The Golden Triangle is the

region where Thailand, Burma and Laos converge. For many years it has supplied

more than half of the opium produced world-wide. Since the Chinese revolution in

1947 gangs operating out of Sichuan and Yunnan China have controlled illicit drug

rings in the Golden Triangle. Chinese oligarchs have grown fabulously wealthy off of

these drugs, while the farmers who do the work have remained stuck in poverty. Linda

and I met Bob and Meg in 1980 at Ghost Ranch, where we worked as part of the

college staff with their children, Lee and Nancy Turnbull. Bob told me that unless I had

seen a shanty town in Central or South America, I could not possibly imagine the

wretched conditions in which those farmers lived and worked.

The Presbyterian Church (USA) sent the Turnbulls to Thailand to teach the

farmers how to grow sorghum and mullet, grains that would thrive in that climate. An

already-existing market would buy their produce, shipping it south to Bangkok, where

a distribution network would fan it across Southeast Asia. Their crops could not fetch

nearly the same price as opium poppies, but they could keep the profit. The Chinese

overlords forced the farmers to keep just 10%. Of course, the overlords did not like to
lose their workers, so Bob and Meg faced intimidation and threats. It was worth it,

Meg said, to watch the farmers “walk straighter”. They worked harder and with pride.

She called their work “God's reward”.

We tend to overlook the revolutionary nature of the Gospel. It makes us

uncomfortable because we know that we belong to the “first” part of Jesus' frequent

prediction that, “the first shall be last, and the last shall be first.” But we must take

seriously this topsy-turvy aspect of the New Testament. We just read the Magnificat,

Mary's song of praise to the Lord after the revelation that she would give birth to the

Messiah. The word Magnificat comes from the Latin; it is the first word in Mary's song

in the Vulgate translation of the Bible. A literal translation of this verse would read,

“Magnifies my soul the Lord.” Scholars debate the life Jesus would have had growing

up in Mary and Joseph's home. N.T. Wright probably has the best take on this with,

“We can at least say with certainty that no one could possibly have predicted the

Savior would come from such a trivial place. Nazareth, a small town in Galilee, the

scorned rural district of Judea, a backwater Roman province. But these last produced

a first: God's Son, who would astound the learned with his knowledge of the Scriptures

and would die to atone for the world's sins.”

Whether it is missionaries teaching Thai farmers how to rise from the bottom or

a humble girl from the sticks to birth the Messiah, the last do often become first in

God's economy. In his commentary on the Gospel of Luke Howard Marshall writes, “It

would be easy to over-spiritualize the meaning of these verses and ignore their literal
interpretation...the coming kingdom of God should bring about a political and social

revolution, bringing the ordinary life of humanity in line with the will of God.” I would

submit the Magnificat has both a spiritual, and a literal meaning. We find numerous

biblical instances of people growing spiritually. Moses would serve as an example of

this, as would Jonah, and Paul, the preeminent case. We need to emphasize Mary's

total trust in God, her immediate acceptance of what was, on its face, a preposterous

announcement. Whether she had little or great faith, her soul magnified the Lord. She

believed. Without that faith how could she possibly have endured everything that her

son's birth would bring—up to and including his crucifixion?

Yet the literal meaning of the last shall be first also finds voice in Mary's

Magnificat. From the very start the church has worked to meet the worldly needs of

the poor. The Book of Acts tells us as much. And Christianity has always grown the

fastest among the poorest. Other faiths teach that poverty is either an irrevocable

feature of life and must be endured (so Buddhism), or a sign of wickedness (so some

forms of Judaism). Christianity teaches that believers must work to lift themselves and

others out of poverty. We may have our doubts about the greatness of the U.S.A. but

millions stream here every year because they know better. They know we offer them

their best chance at climbing out of the suffering they experience wherever they now

live. And Christianity played a key role in creating the culture that makes this possible.

This is not triumphalism; while I am proud of my nation I am painfully aware of its

failings—among them doing a better job of helping more people to climb out of the

hole of poverty. But it is a fact that upward mobility happens more often here than any
place else of which I am aware.