Tinsel: The World Upside Down
Salvation is by Grace Alone
Luke 1:46b-55
Rev. Tim Callow
Preached Sun. Dec. 22nd, 2024
These past few weeks I’ve talked about the way Christ may deliver us from our own illusions and sentimentalities. That there can be something fake about this season, and that fakeness can be spiritually deadening. The more we indulge in our own illusions the more we give room for sin. Sin thrives on unreality. As I was working on this series there was an old short story by Flannery O’Connor called Revelation that I just couldn't get out of my head. And I want to tell it to you. Because like all Flannery O’Connor stories it says something loud about grace. It may shock us into some recognition about the strange story of the Gospel.
Revelation concerns a proper southern land owner named Ruby Turpin (what a great name). The story opens with Mrs. Turpin sitting in a doctor’s office waiting for the doctor to check on her husband’s leg ulcer. As she sits down she immediately casts judgment on everyone in the office. Though let’s be honest, we’ve all probably done this. She sees a little boy who is too inconsiderate to move so she can sit down. There’s the boy’s mother who’s hair is unkempt and is clearly white trash. There’s an 18 year old college student who is fat, acne ridden, and ugly.
The only respectable individual (other than her husband and herself) in the room is the student’s mother. So they strike up a conversation about the farm Mrs. Turpin works on and how it is hard to find good black migrant workers these days.
As the conversation goes on, and we are allowed into Mrs. Turpin’s head we learn more and more about the seemingly proper farm lady. We learn how she stays up at night trying to classify people from low to high. Obviously black people are the lowest, but poor white trash are just as bad, just off to the side. Though she doesn’t know what to do with people who have more money than her, but are not as respectable as her. She wonders how she would have decided if Jesus had told her that she were going to be made white trash or black. She decides she would have rather been made black, as long as she could keep her good and sunny disposition.
As she is talking the student glares into her. The narrator tells us that it seemed like the student had hated Mrs. Turpin her whole life. Not the student’s whole life, but Mrs. Turpin’s. That she could see deep inside her, and was disgusted by every bit. Finally the student, who we learn is named Mary Grace (another great name), has enough of Mrs. Turpin’s pretensions and respectability and throws her textbook in Mrs. Turpin’s face, and lunges at her. The textbook, ironically, is titled “Human Development.” She wraps her hands around Mrs. Turpin’s throat and tries to choke her out. The doctor jumps out of his office and tranquilizes Mary Grace. The two lock eyes one more time, and we’re told Mrs. Turpin waits on expecting some sort of revelation. But Mary Grace says, “go back to Hell you old wart hog.”
Mrs. Turpin is deeply troubled by this revelation. She can’t do anything the rest of the day but stare off into space, wondering what it might mean. How could she be an old wart hog? She’s always done good by others. She even showed kindness to the black people who worked for her. She’d always worked hard. She’d always gone to church.
That night as the sun goes down she heads to the pig parlor to spray the hogs. And that’s when she receives her final revelation. And here I need to quote Ms. O’Connor’s words directly, “Then like a monumental statue coming to life, she bent her head slowly and gazed, as if through the very heart of mystery, down into the pig parlor at the hogs. They had settled all in one corner around the old sow who was grunting softly. A red glow suffused them. They appeared to pant with a secret life.” So first she sees that even the hogs are worth something. But then she looks out onto the tree line.
Until the sun slipped finally behind the tree line, Mrs. Turpin remained there with her gaze bent to them as if she were absorbing some abysmal life-giving knowledge. At last she lifted her head. There was only a purple streak in the sky, cutting through a field of crimson and leading, like an extension of the highway, into the descending dusk. She raised her hands from the side of the pen in a gesture hieratic and profound. A visionary light settled in her eyes. She saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of blacks in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked an altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away. She lowered her hands and gripped the rail of the hog pen, her eyes small but fixed unblinkingly on what lay ahead. In a moment the vision faded but she remained where she was, immobile.
At length she got down and turned off the faucet and made her slow way on the darkening path to the house. In the woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah.
It is something like this that Mary intuits and she sings her song. Mrs. Turpin is obsessed with her own goodness, her breeding, her sunny disposition. She is thankful to God not for his grace, but for the way God made her. She is certain that the world is exactly as God had intended. That God has set everything and everyone into a beautiful hierarchy. But it took the mad fits of lunatic to break through her false self and reveal that truly, “prostitutes and tax collectors are entering the Kingdom of Heaven ahead of you!” It took the vision of the pigs to show her a world turned upside down. She sees the blacks and white trash making their way into the Kingdom ahead of her and all her virtues, all her properness and respectability and common sense being melted away by the fires of grace. Because they were false before the God who elects the despised and saves the condemned. And she could only be saved, in the words of Paul, “as through fire.”
Mary, in her song, depicts a world that is being turned upside down. A world that has been turned upside down in the incarnation of Jesus Christ. “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.” The last illusion that needs to be cast aside is the illusion of our own goodness and merit of God’s blessing. God does not look on our strength, or sunny disposition, or our “a little bit of everything and the God-given wit to use it right.” God looks on our faith alone. Which is why it’s the people at the bottom of the rung that Ms. Turpin sees making it first. The people who thought they had it made having their illusions burned away as if through fire. The world literally being turned upside down. The last first. The first last.
This all may seem harsh. But this is in fact good news. The good news is that our salvation is accomplished by Christ, not by us. And we worship a God who lifts up the lowly. We worship a God who took a little girl and made it so all generations would call her blessed. Why? Because of her innate charm? Her beauty? Her breeding? No. Because she said yes.
Say yes to Christ, and he will show you his mercy and his love. And this Christmas you may know his joy.