That is right. Don't turn me off before you have a chance to hear what I am going to say. I am very aware that there is an ongoing debate between liberals and conservatives. I am not unaware that this is Orange County, which has historically been known as a bastion of conservatism. I, myself, am proud of living in that dynamic tension between being conservative in some ways and liberal in other ways.

God's Word calls on us to be conservative, persons who conserve the very best from the past. Yet God's Word calls us to keep pushing forward. How pathetic it is to be a person who lives basking in nostalgia, living in the past, dreaming of a better day which is gone and will never return.

And God calls us to be liberal. We are to move into the future with a sense of expectancy as part of Christ's mission. Unfortunately, there are some liberals whose notion of that word means that they are prepared to destroy the heritage of the past so as to bring in a new order. Unfortunately, often the new order has some of the same deficiencies as the old order. Human nature doesn't change.

Events around the world have certainly proved that to be revolutionary for the sake of being revolutionary accomplishes very little but the tearing down of old structures and replacing them with new structures which are similarly dysfunctional and corrupt.

The word I am trying to share with you at this moment zeros in on that ultra-conservatism in which some of us will uphold the virgin birth of Jesus because the Bible says it but will not take seriously the content of Mary's great "Magnificat" which declares God's social agenda for humankind. Not only does she declare glory to the Lord, making a humble statement of how blessed she has been by Him. Not only does she declare the mercy of the Lord from one generation to another. Not only does she declare the mighty deeds of God. She talks about how this God is sovereign and has a social and political agenda of justice and righteousness. This God brings down rulers and lifts up the humble. Listen as Mary speaks.

"He has performed mighty deeds with his arm; he has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts. He has brought down rulers from their thrones but has lifted up the humble. He has filled the hungry with good things but has sent the rich away empty. He has helped his servant Israel, remembering to be merciful to Abraham and his descendants forever, even as he said to our fathers" (Luke 1:51-55).

God hates injustice whatever its form may be, and He wants to radicalize you and me to not have our heads in the sand, enjoying all that we have without a sense of conscience for a world where there is hurt. God would not have us close our eyes to injustice.

On the other hand, I can be so attuned to the injustices out there that I forget my own participation in injustice close to home. I was told a story this week of an affluent church in Chicago. Because of the holiday season, that church wanted to help someone who was poor. So one year in the Thanksgiving-Christmas Season they genuinely searched through their rolls to find someone in poverty, and they couldn't find anyone. Yet our seasonal guilt tends to be so great that we cannot go through Thanksgiving and Christmas without doing something for someone.