Mary, Parades and Dos Commands

Sermon from Sunday, December 14, 2025

The Rev. Megan Collins

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I am the child of two computer programmers.

My dad used to use his skills at home to write these elaborate computer games for my sister and I to play. This was before Xbox and Nintendo and . . . graphics, really. 

Our computers looked like this:

Some of my favorite games to play were written adventure games, which were entirely text based. The computer would give you a situation and you would make choices and try to work your way to victory with a series of commands. It looked something like this:

My dad actually programmed a game for us called “Lost in the Altamonte Mall.” It involved typing things like “let’s try turning left at Auntie Ann’s Pretzels and walk toward Burdines.” 

Around that same time my dad went to graduate school and eventually went on to write his PHD on artificial intelligence. This was way before ChatGPT was something we could even imagine. 

Sometimes he would try to explain what he was learning to me. I know kids now grow up taking coding classes, but back then, this wasn’t something any of us kids had any framework to understand. But my dad, who is even more of a teacher than a programmer, would try to simplify it so I could get it. He would talk to me about computer coding languages and how he could “talk” to the computer with them. I would watch over his shoulder as he coded. 

Anyone here remember DOS? Before apps and colorful interfaces, you would turn on your computer and there was just a little blinking prompt on a black screen, waiting for you to tell the computer what to do. Somewhere along the line I had seen my dad type in a command followed by *.* so I thought I’d try it out. With all my hours playing text games, I had an unearned confidence at telling the computer what to do. 

So I tried out this command, and I prefaced it with the word “erase .”  because I wanted to erase the previous thing I had typed. But it turns out *.*  in DOS is a powerful little combination that means “everything.”  So ERASE star dot star meant erase, everything. On the entire drive. 

Oops. 

My dad was a brilliant teacher, but what he was doing was complicated, and I only understood the tiniest sliver of it. I definitely didn’t know how much I didn’t know. I saw a few lines of code and thought I knew the whole story, but I had no idea of its depth, or its power. I’m not sure any of us knew how much it would all develop to where we are now. 

I think that’s what happens when we read the Christmas story in the Bible. 

In the story of Jesus’ birth, God is trying to explain something massive and new and mysterious to us, something that will continue to unfold over the course of human history. The Incarnation is the theological concept that God came near. God became one of us. God came to do this very new thing in the world through it, to turn the world completely upside down, and that it was only the beginning. 

The depth of this story is hard for us to fully grasp, so we look over God’s shoulder, and see a bunch of things we don’t fully understand but think we know enough, and then we reduce it down to a few lines of simple code, something we can work with.  In last week’s passage we read the story of when the angel announced that Mary would become pregnant with Jesus, the Son of God. We read it and think:

“Yep. We understand about babies and conception. So Mary was the mom and the holy spirit was the dad.” 

(That's wrong). But the closest thing we have to imagine Jesus’ conception to isn’t our framework, it’s God’s. We have this moment in the creation narratives in Genesis, when God spoke things into being out of nothing. It wasn’t about reproduction, but creating something entirely new. That’s our best comparison to getting our heads around it. But we want Jesus to work the way we work.

We make Jesus smaller, more like us, in our attempt to understand. 

It becomes this sweet, spiritual story we take out of a box once a year like a nativity set.  We sing a few carols, then put it away in January. It becomes something we can understand, something we can contain.  Jesus becomes a warm feeling, a Christmas season mascot, astory that goes well with hot cocoa and twinkly lights. He’s just a harmless little baby, in a manger, on Christmas Eve. 

But the incarnation was more than that.

The incarnation had physical geography. Jesus was born in Palestine. 

The incarnation had economics. Jesus was poor, born in a barn.

The incarnation had politics. Jesus was born during a census, under an empire, when there were rumors of revolt. He was born into a people who were scapegoated and persecuted, and marginalized. Jesus entered on the side of the oppressed. He came into a world where people were taxed into poverty, where soldiers patrolled the streets, where justice was tilted toward the powerful.

God entered into a real, human world.

These are not just historical details, they are theological. Mary saw that.

Mary saw that he didn’t just come to endure this world. He came to upend it. 

In Luke chapter 1, Luke records a famous song Mary sings. The God she talks about is not just a little baby, contained to a stable.

Luke 1:46-56

And Mary said,

“My soul magnifies the Lord,

and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,

for he has looked with favor on the lowly state of his servant.

Surely from now on all generations will call me blessed,

for the Mighty One has done great things for me,

and holy is his name;

indeed, his mercy is for those who fear him

from generation to generation.

He has shown strength with his arm;

he has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.

He has brought down the powerful from their thrones

and lifted up the lowly;

he has filled the hungry with good things

and sent the rich away empty.

He has come to the aid of his child Israel,

in remembrance of his mercy,

according to the promise he made to our ancestors,

to Abraham and to his descendants forever.”

And Mary remained with her about three months and then returned to her home.

Look again at what Mary says.

God filled the hungry, lifted the lowly, scattered the proud. These all sound wonderful, but they also sound like things that have happened in the past, that God has already done these things. But look at our world. There are still people who are hungry. There were certainly hungry people in Mary’s world too. If this song is about things God has already done, it is certainly in a strange place in the context of the gospel story. The angel has appeared to Mary, and now she has traveled to be with Elizabeth. Then Mary breaks out into a song about what God has already done? So why is it in the past tense? It’s not.

If you’ll indulge me for a minute, let’s talk about what is happening in the Biblical Greek. In the Greek, these words - scattered, filled, lifted - are not in the past tense. They are in the aorist tense. We don’t have a really direct way to do this in English, so it complicates translations like this one. To help us get our heads around what the aorist tense means, imagine you are watching a parade. As it goes by, the time passes, you see the beginning, middle and end of the parade in a sequence. Now imagine you look at the parade from 10000 feet above it. You see the whole parade at once, without a beginning, middle and end that unfolds over time. It’s a snapshot of the whole thing, unfolding in time, but you can see it all at once. That’s the aorist tense, 10,000 feet above. 

That’s what’s happening here in this song. Mary is, in a sense, singing here about what God has already done. But it is also very much about Jesus, who has not yet been born. The child she was carrying would be both fully human and fully God. He would do all of these things. What God had promised was as good as done before Jesus took his first breath. 

Mary is in fact one of the very first to put theology around what the incarnation will mean in the history of humanity. This is no small detail in the story. In a human story that has been overwhelmingly told as the story of powerful men and kings and warriors, at the most important moment in history, a young woman becomes the agent of God’s work. She is not just as the one who will carry him into the world, but a prophet for what it will mean. 

The story of Jesus’ birth isn’t simple. It’s not just a precious image of a baby in a manger. 

Jesus didn’t come to fit into our world. He came to turn it upside down.

That’s a big and world changing story. It’s complicated and messy and, if we’re honest, seems a bit far fetched. If Jesus really did come to do these things, why are there still people who are hungry, still powerful people on thrones causing harm? Seems easier to keep Jesus as a cute baby in a manger and not expect much to actually change here. We don’t want to believe something and be disappointed. Or look foolish. How can we hold onto a passage like this one and really believe it? 

You wouldn’t think the answer to this would be found in the Greek verb tense, but let’s go back to it for a minute. Remember our parade analogy, for the aorist tense in Mary’s song. In that analogy, right now, we aren’t at the end of the parade. We are sitting, still watching the parade, and it’s somewhere in the middle. There was this big fanfare at the beginning, a big announcement that God was coming into the world. The float went by, the son of God in a stable, coming to turn the world upside down. we cheer and celebrate. God has come near! But then the world is still a mess. When you go up to that 10,000 foot view, you can see not the beginning, when Mary sang, the middle, where we are now, and the end, where not only did Jesus come but he comes back and sets all things right. The powerful really are taken off their thrones. The hungry are fed. The low really are lifted up. 

So what do we do until then?That’s another place where we can take a lesson from Mary.

With her tremendous faith, Mary knew that if God had promised it, it was as good as done. So, until that day when it all came to pass, she would do her part in partnering with God in that work in the world.

We can do that too. We may not be able to see things the way Mary did, but we can borrow a bit of her faith. We can try to believe that the story really isn’t as simple as a vulnerable baby born in a manger. We can insist that the God who started the work of fixing the brokenness in our world will keep working until it’s done.  Until the day when it all is made right, we can be a part of that work too. 

Jesus really did come to change the world. 

He also came to change you, and the change your life. 

When we simplify the story of the incarnation to a sweet little Christmas tale that we pack up in January with our decorations, we not only miss what God is doing in the world. We miss what God is doing in us, in you, too.  At the beginning of her song, Mary says 

“My soul magnifies the Lord,

and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,

for he has looked with favor on the lowly state of his servant.

Surely from now on all generations will call me blessed,

for the Mighty One has done great things for me,

and holy is his name;

Mary saw what God was doing in the world.

She also saw that the God of heavens and earth knew her. God knew her name. Knew her story. She was seen.  

God sees you too. In the incarnation, God has also come close to you. 

Jesus’ human experience didn’t stop in a cradle in a barn. Jesus lived in our world. He experienced limitations. He felt grief. He loved. He knew what it was to be exhausted. He knew what it meant to feel alone. He felt the limits of a human body. He faced fear. He died. 

There is nothing in your life that Jesus doesn’t understand. 

Jesus not only came to change the world.

He came to change you. 

Jesus is not some warm feeling or orb of light, but the God who knows what it means to live in this world and experience the things you are experiencing too. Jesus is all at once the one who came to teach justice and lift up the marginalized and take on the thrones of power in our world, and also to love and to save you.

Jesus knows your story. Jesus knows your name. Jesus knows you. 

Instead of leaving him in the manger, safe, silent, and small, you can welcome Jesus as he truly is: God with us. 

You can embrace the incarnation in all its complexity.

You can let go of the need to understand everything and cling to what you do know: that Jesus came near.

You can trust that this birth was not the end of the story, it was the beginning of ours.