When I quoted what a friend of mine had said to me a few several weeks ago, several people came back to that statement. It was memorable for them. The statement was "Thou shall not be offensive" seems to be one of the great laws of Christian behaviour. I've been thinking a great deal about that. Where all that comes from is interesting, this kind of domestication of the Christian thing, blunting the sharp teeth of the Gospel. So I have some proposals to make in terms of this feast.

I don't know which comes first. Whether we made of Christianity, a position wherein nobody gets disturbed by anything. Whether that came first or whether we've domesticated Jesus. Jesus, as my great "bud" in the sky. There is so much evidence of this. The 19th century portraiture of Jesus showed this nice, benign, quiet, sweet looking fellow you couldn't help but like once you saw him.

So have we made Jesus inoffensive? Because if we made Jesus inoffensive then everything else follows logically. There is a real pattern here. It's the priority I'm uncertain of, but the pattern is well in place. Then I started thinking, because we have all these passages from Matthew's sermon on the kingdom and the ministry, that we have made the ministry inoffensive. I mean, when you think of a priest, how far is Bing Crosby from your head? You are all close enough to me in age... Well a few of you are close to me in age to remember.... "Oh. Good old Father. Solves all the problems. " Just this sweet fellow who is kind of hanging around all the time. Fr. Mulcahy in M.A.S.H. is another good example, I think. And that's a recent incarnation. We have the same image of the priest as this kind of nice, inoffensive character who won't bother anybody. So you see where the pattern plays out.

Then, of course, we're celebrating Mary today. Mary is assumption as a reunion with her son and with God. And then I think the pattern certainly stretches to her too. Mary, as the absolute archetype of inoffensiveness. You want something from God? The sisters told me when I was a little kid, God's kind of tough you know. The old man. The thing to do is get a hold of Mary and then she could sort of bribe her way. Mary is just a sweetheart. You think of all these nice pictures of Mary. " Just lay it on me. I'm just here. Hanging out. Waiting for you and then I'm just going to be all nice and pleasant."

And I don't think this is an exaggeration. This is certainly the Marian picture that I grew up with. It is very much a part of Catholic sensibility. In fact, as I said last year, Rosemary Reuther got into big trouble in the Vatican when she tried to propose a different idea of who Mary was. A talk she was to give at one of the Vatican universities was cancelled because they didn't like that kind of alternate version.

Okay. So that is all by way of context for this hymn, the "Magnificat". We know it through Vivaldi. Bach. There are all kinds of settings of the Magnificat. All those wonderful Bachian trumpets coming out with "My soul magnifies the Lord." But then you go further in the text and you hear stuff like this: " He has shown the strength with his arms by scattering the proud in the thoughts 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."

Now, how do we read that? Do we read that in the context of Bachian glory? Or is this something profoundly disruptive? Is she celebrating something that is anything but inoffensive? Is she celebrating, or in line with the Hebrew scriptures, what God is about? This disruptive, upsetting, non-accommodational God who will not take the status quo as normative. Who rather reverses it. "The last shall be first and the first last." The very thing we see over and over and over in the parables of Jesus and in Jesus' own life.

As I said last week, the great problem for some of the Jews was the idea that they were going to have a leader, a Messiah who would suffer. And why does he suffer? Because he was interested in God's program, which is precisely to bring down the powerful from their thrones and lift up the lowly and fill the hungry with good things and send the rich away,- empty.

This is extraordinarily disruptive. I remember, several years ago travelling around the island of St. Kitts with a Canadian Grey sister and she said: "Oh, look at that. That house belongs to the biggest drug dealer in St. Kitts. His son is a student in our school. He's an angel." And she left it at that! I mean, how do you put all this stuff together?

So we need to be very careful about a number of things, above all about our inherent desire to make the Gospel harmless. This is yet another reason why we must pay attention to the Saints, all these people whose images surround us in this chapel, In one way or another, they were in big trouble. Francis of Assisi who married Lady Poverty. His friend Clare whose feast we had just a couple of days ago. These are not pacifying types. They are basically disruptive.

The mother of Jesus, judging her by the words of the Magnificat, was fundamentally disruptive, fundamentally offensive. Again God has shown the strength of his arm by doing what? By scattering the proud in the thoughts of their hearts and by bringing down the powerful from their thrones and by lifting up the lowly. Filling the hungry with good things and sending the rich away - empty. That's anything but inoffensive as a program.

And of course we are celebrating what? Mary's entry into heaven. what is heaven? Heaven is a place where we don't have these divisions. Where the rich and the powerful cannot throw their weight around as they always do. Where the poor really do get justice. Why? So that there can be a human community. That's what it's about. Not the restoration of some kind of economic or social or political or economic justice but, rather, that we people can face each other without all the regular boundaries which separate us: the boundaries of power and above all, of wealth. That's why God's interested in destroying those. We are to retain the figure of this heroic woman. This offensive woman. This woman who acted as God's agent who we believe is bringing us all together.