All You Fascists Bound to Lose
Preached at Blue Ocean Faith Columbus on Sunday, December 21, 2025
Reminder: I never stick completely to my written sermon. This isn’t a transcript, but the written sermon I was using when I preached.
All You Fascists Bound to Lose: A Sermon on Luke 1:39-55
Listen for a word from God in the Gospel according to Luke, the first chapter, verses 39-55:
In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.”
And Mary said, “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord; my spirit rejoices in God my Savior; * for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant. From this day all generations will call me blessed: * the Almighty has done great things for me, and holy is his Name. He has mercy on those who fear him * in every generation. He has shown the strength of his arm, * he has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, * and has lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things, * and the rich he has sent away empty. He has come to the help of his servant Israel, * for he has remembered his promise of mercy, The promise he made to our fathers, * to Abraham and his children forever.”
[This is the word of God for the people of God.]
Friends, think about what you know about Mary. Think about the ways you see her portrayed, particularly during Advent and Christmas. We’ve wrapped her in blue robes and placed her in nativity scenes with a placid smile. We’ve turned her into porcelain figurines and stained-glass windows where she gazes demurely at the ground. We’ve made her safe. Quiet. Compliant. We’ve stripped her of her power, her voice, and her audacity.
But the Mary of Scripture, the Mary who speaks these words we just heard, isn’t nice. She’s not a push over. She’s not afraid. She’s a resister, a dissenter, and a provocateur. Her words are dangerous. Her very existence and the circumstances of her pregnancy are scandalous in both first century Palestine and twenty-first century America.
She is, after all, a teenage girl. Probably thirteen, maybe fifteen years old. Unmarried and pregnant in a society that could stone her for it. Living under Roman military occupation in a backwater town in an oppressed nation. She has every reason to be silent, to make herself small, to survive by keeping her head down.
Instead, she proclaims the greatness of a God who doesn’t exalt the powerful, but lifts up the disinherited, the forgotten, and the marginalized.
And what a proclamation it is. It’s not a lullaby. This isn’t “Silent Night” or, God forbid, “Away in a Manger” or “Mary, Did You Know?” This is a battle cry. This is a declaration of war against every empire, every tyrant, every system built on the backs of the vulnerable. This is the Magnificat. If we really hear it, if we let it land, it should make the powerful very, very nervous.
Listen again to what this teenager proclaims:
“My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord; my spirit rejoices in God my Savior; * for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant. From this day all generations will call me blessed: * the Almighty has done great things for me, and holy is his Name. He has mercy on those who fear him * in every generation. He has shown the strength of his arm, * he has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, * and has lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things, * and the rich he has sent away empty. He has come to the help of his servant Israel, * for he has remembered his promise of mercy, The promise he made to our fathers, * to Abraham and his children forever.”
Mary is announcing that God is in the business of overthrowing empires. Of toppling the powerful. Of completely reversing the social order. The hungry will feast. The rich will go away with nothing. The proud will be scattered. The powerful will be yanked from their thrones.
And who is making this proclamation? Not a general. Not a scholar. Not a priest or a king. A teenage girl from Nazareth who is carrying God’s very self in her womb.
God looked at the Roman Empire with all its legions and its brutal enforcement of the Pax Romana and chose a teenage girl to announce its undoing. God looked at the temple authorities, at the wealth and power concentrated in Jerusalem, and gave the most radical manifesto in Scripture to a girl from the wrong side of the tracks.
This should tell us something. God delights in choosing the people the world overlooks. The people the powerful dismiss. The people who aren’t supposed to matter.
We need to hear this right now. We need to hear it because we are living in a time when the powerful are once again showing us exactly who they are. When immigrants—children of God, every one—are being terrorized in our own neighborhoods, ripped from their families, hunted in the very places that should be sanctuary. When ICE raids have violated churches, schools, and hospitals, sacred spaces where people should be safe. And now when ICE deployments have arrived here in Central Ohio.
We need to hear this because Transgender people, our siblings, our friends, children and adults alike, are being targeted with legislative and presidential cruelty designed to erase them from public life, to deny them healthcare, to proclaim that they do not deserve to exist as themselves. The message from those in power is clear: you are too dangerous to use a bathroom, too corrupt to receive care, and too wrong to be seen.
We need to hear this because people of faith who dare to proclaim a progressive, life-affirming gospel, who insist that God’s love is wider and wilder than the gatekeepers want to allow, are being painted as enemies, as groomers, as threats to children, as terrorists, and as a collective danger to society itself.
The regime is doing what regimes have always done. It’s targeting the vulnerable. It’s scapegoating the marginalized. It’s creating lists and categories of people who dare oppose its power. It’s using fear and cruelty as tools of control. It’s criminalizing the people who speak out against it.
And into this moment, we hear Mary.
We hear her announce that God sees what is happening. That God knows who the powerful are and what they’re doing. That God is not neutral. That God does not stand at a distance, wringing divine hands and hoping things work out.
God acts. God scatters the proud. God brings down the mighty. God lifts up the lowly.
The empires of this world want us to believe they’re permanent. They want us to believe they’re inevitable. They construct monuments to their own power and tell us this is just how things are. This is the natural order. The strong rule. The weak submit. The outsider is always a threat.
But Mary knows better. Mary knows the story of her people. She knows that Pharaoh’s army drowned in the sea. She knows that Babylon fell. She knows that every empire that has ever declared itself eternal has crumbled into dust. She knows that God keeps promises, even when it takes generations. Even when it looks impossible.
So, she sings of a God who remembers. A God who acts. A God who will not allow the powerful to have the final word.
Do you see why they made her nice? Do you see why they had to tame her, to domesticate her, to turn her into something sweet and safe? If we really listen to Mary, if we let her words shape us, we become dangerous too.
If we believe that God truly “brings down the powerful from their thrones,” then we can’t bow to them. We can’t pledge allegiance to their version of order. We can’t accept their cruelty as inevitable. We can’t consent to their rule.
If we believe that God “lifts up the lowly,” then we have to stand with the people empire crushes. Immigrants. Refugees. Asylum seekers. Transgender people. Queer people. Women. BIPOC communities.
If we believe that God “fills the hungry with good things and sends the rich away empty,” then we can’t worship at the altar of wealth and power. We can’t pretend that the systems that enrich some while starving others are somehow ordained by God.
Mary won’t let us. This teenage girl from Nazareth won’t let us make faith into something polite and powerless. She insists, she proclaims, that the God we worship is a God of revolution. A God who takes sides. A God who doesn’t accept the world as it is but promises to remake it into what it should be.
Now, you might be thinking that this just another of my liberation-focused, social gospel forward sermons with hopefully equal parts truth-telling, fire, and hope. But the Magnificat, Mary’s song in Luke 1:46-55, has been considered so revolutionary that it’s been banned by more than one authoritarian regime. The British banned its public reading in India during colonial rule. During the 1980s, the government of Guatemala banned it from being read or printed because of its demonstrated ability to encourage the poor. And the military junta of Argentina, particularly during the late 1970s, banned all use of the Magnificat after it was used to great effect by the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, an activist group of mothers who protested the disappearances of their children.
And here’s the thing: Mary’s not wrong. Every fascist regime that declared itself invincible has fallen. Every empire that built itself on the suffering of others has collapsed. Every tyrant who proclaimed their eternal reign has died or been driven from power and either has been forgotten or remembered only as a warning.
They are bound to lose. All of them. Because God’s in the business of liberation. Because God lifts up the lowly. Because God fills the hungry with good things.
The empires rise and rage and declare their power and then they fall. Always. Every time. We have no reason to doubt that pattern will ever change.
Yet, here is what we must understand: God does not do this alone. God works through people. Through ordinary, unlikely, overlooked people who dare to say yes to the revolutionary work of the kin-dom.
God chose Mary. A teenage girl. And Mary said yes. She let God work through her, even though it was dangerous. Even though it would cost her everything. Even though the empire would try several times to kill the child she carried.
She said “yes” because she believed the promise. She believed that God was making all things new. She believed that the powerful would fall and the lowly would rise. She believed that her people would be set free.
And she was right.
The baby she carried grew up to preach liberation and salvation. He challenged every religious and political authority that used God’s name to justify their power. He embodied everything Mary sang about.
Rome and the religious right of his day killed him for it. They crucified him because he was too dangerous, too revolutionary, too much of a threat to the established order.
But the empire didn’t win. Death didn’t win. Three days later, the tomb was empty. The One they killed came back. And everything Mary sang about began to unfold in ways even she couldn’t have imagined.
The revolution she announced didn’t end. It spread. Through a ragtag group of people who refused to be silent. Through communities that shared everything they had. Through people who loved their enemies.
So here is what I want you to hear today, in the weariness and the fear and the exhaustion: All the fascists are bound to lose.
The ones terrorizing immigrant communities; they will lose.
The ones trying to legislate Transgender people out of existence; they will lose.
The ones weaponizing faith to consolidate power and crush dissent; they will lose.
They always do. Because they are building on sand. They are building on fear and hatred and the illusion of control. And those foundations cannot hold.
But God is building something else. Something that cannot be shaken. A kin-dom where the last are first and the first are last. Where the powerful are scattered and the lowly are lifted up. Where the hungry are filled and the rich are sent away empty.
And God is building it through people like Mary. People like you.
You might not feel powerful. You might feel small and overwhelmed by everything happening around you. You might wonder what difference one person can possibly make against the machinery of empire.
But so was Mary. Just a girl. Just one person saying yes.
And look what God did. Look what God can do through anyone who believes the promise. Anyone who refuses to bow to the empire. Anyone who dares to sing the song of revolution even when the powerful are raging: “God has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. God has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly; God has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.”
Amen.