A Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly

On November 18, on a clear, bright morning sky, the Starship, one of SpaceX’s efforts to launch humans towards Mars, hurtled into space from the Texas Boca Chica launchpad.  Within minutes of launch, failure of the main booster to separate led to the termination of the flight.

In the cold, clinical terms of science, the dispassionate control announcer informed us of the explosion – “It was a rapid unscheduled disassembly.”[1]  Talk about jargon!  This was a classic.

Isn’t that what this third Sunday, Mary’s Sunday, is about?  Here comes a most troubling revelation to any girl, an unexpected, unplanned pregnancy.  Her world is shattered, dissembled.  What sort of message might this be?

Through Mary we are now given a message, the Word from On High, of incredible “rapid unscheduled disassembly” – her world, our world,  will be turned upside down.  Grace and Hesed (loving kindness) rent the time continuum — God breaking through!

When told she will be pregnant without her consent, Mary is no shrinking violet.  She takes one step back and says to this intruder messenger, “Hold my beer and watch this.”

Whereupon she cuts loose with one of the most radical statements of Torah righteousness in all of scripture.”  Rapid unscheduled disassembly of the Principalities and Powers.  Total ruination of the haughty.

“He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.  He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble and meek.  He hath filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he hath sent empty away.”

“Sent empty away;” and in that wilderness perhaps they might be prepared to receive this message as one of joy and liberation for themselves as well.

The Advent landscape is wilderness.  Astronomical calamity with stars falling from the sky.  Mary’s shock at an uninvited change in her circumstances.  John the Baptist announcing to the surrounding cities both judgement and promise of one to come. 

A Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly of the current order.

It is more often out of the of desperation that we are prepared to perceive the new that is being born.  One who will reign with equity and justice awaits at the manger.  As one line of my favorite spiritual beckons to the weak and wounded, “If you tarry till you’re better, you will never come at all.”

Mary’s revelation is the inbreaking of God into history.  Soon and very soon is the time of the release of those imprisoned.  Addiction, violence, racism, impoverishment, sexism.  These chains are being cast aside.

To replace the ashes of despair, we are given a garland and the oil of gladness to run down our foreheads in rivulets.  This is on the doing of the Spirit of the Lord.  This is Mary’s promise.

Today is Mary’s Sunday.  Let us rejoice and be glad.  Light the pink candle.

As in times of old, God continues to raise up strong women on a mission.  Agents and harbingers of Rapid Unscheduled Dissembly.  Good news to the oppressed and a salve to the brokenhearted.  A couple I wish to celebrate this morning.  All blessings of God.

Yesterday, I saw the clip of two of those women who in the face of lies and defamation have stood up to the powerful.  And did the powerful ever look so pathetic.

Georgia election workers, Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman, have had the courage in the national forum of public opinion and in the courtroom to challenge the lies and vituperation of Rudy Giuliani.  And how this powerful man has been cast down from his throne!  How about a $150 MILLION hit to the pocketbook to knock this duplicitous miscreant off his high horse!  That’s what the jury awarded last Friday.

These two courageous women did absolutely nothing to warrant the death threats and harassment at all hours of the night.  Despite all, these two patriotic women stand tall – beacons of democracy.  Ladies, you’re what this republic is all about.

If there is any salvation for our nation it will be due to this sort of lowly election workers who put in long hours for little pay and a lot of grief.  For us all.  They are God’s blessing to America!

I want to lift up a fearless labor organizer, Mother Jones.  She comes directly out of Roman Catholic spirituality.  Her family in Ireland was steeped in the teachings of the church.

Mother Jones grew up in an impoverished family, threatened with the fate of starvation during the time of the Irish Potato Famine in the 1850s.  Death was all about, forcing her father to migrate to America along with several million others.[2] 

One English writer, William Cobbett described the domestic conditions of those living in that Irish rural poverty.

“I went to a sort of hamlet near to the town of Midleton.  It contained 40 or 50 hovels.  I went into several of them…They all consisted of mud-walls, with a covering of rafters and straw…I took particular account of the first that I went into.  It was 21 feet long and 9 feet wide.  The floor, the bare ground…No table, no chair…Some stones for seats.  No goods but a pot, and a shallow tub, for the pig and the family both to eat out of…Some dirty straw and a bundle of rags were all the bedding…Five small children; the mother, about thirty…worn into half-ugliness by hunger and filth…”[3]

This destitution was not far from that which Mother Jones encountered in the hills and hollers of Appalachia.

When congressional stuffed shirts demanded to know her address, she responded, “My address is like my shoes – It’s wherever I am.”

What was that line about the Son of Man?  “The foxes have their holes and the birds of the air their nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”  Because, if born in our time, he would have been out there in the coal fields with Mother Jones causing “Necessary Trouble.”

It was out of this heritage of destitution – virtually nothing – that God raised up Mother Jones to become one of the most fearless labor leaders in West Virginia.  It wasn’t for nothing that she was labeled “The most dangerous woman in America.” 

Her model was the great humility and compassion of the Blessed Virgin.  In her persistence, showing up on most any picket line, speaking words of encouragement, suffering arrest and imprisonment for her activism, she was indeed an instrument of the Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly of the economic power of the coal oligarchs.

We celebrate today God’s gift of strong, prophetic women who persist.  They are our Christmas blessing.  They are redemption incarnate.

With these women of our Christian heritage, let us magnify the Lord that all might rejoice in a Savior to be born.

With these Fearless Ones, we, too, announce, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon US.  To proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Today we celebrate God’s gift of strong women who have looked oppression in the eye, taken one step back and said, “Hold my beer and watch this!  And light that PINK CANDLE!  Amen.

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[1] “Starship Takes to the Skies Again,” New Scientist, December 1, 2023.  The launch can be watched on UTube.

[2] Elliott J. Gorn, Mother Jones: the Most Dangerous Woman in America (New York: Hill and Wang, 201).

[3] Op cit., 10, 11.

December 17, 2023
Advent 3

The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney
Isaiah 61:1-4; 8-11; Canticle 3, PCP;
1Thessalonians 5:16-24; John 1:6-8, 19-28 “A Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly”