Luke 1:46-55
46 And Mary said:
“My soul glorifies the Lord
47 and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
48 for he has been mindful
of the humble state of his servant.
From now on all generations will call me blessed,
49 for the Mighty One has done great things for me—
holy is his name.
50 His mercy extends to those who fear him,
from generation to generation.
51 He has performed mighty deeds with his arm;
he has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts.
52 He has brought down rulers from their thrones
but has lifted up the humble.
53 He has filled the hungry with good things
but has sent the rich away empty.
54 He has helped his servant Israel,
remembering to be merciful
55 to Abraham and his descendants forever,
just as he promised our ancestors." (TNIV)
The Advent Conspiracy: Spending Less, Giving More, Worshiping Fully, Loving All, Week Four
It’s an old church camp song, one that I’ve known since I was a little kid, that begins with the lyrics, “My soul magnifies the Lord, my soul magnifies the Lord, who is worthy to be praised.” Like any church song, its roots could of course be found in Scripture, but it was not for many years that I realized this camp song came from this passage, from Mary’s Magnificat. Which was probably just as well—as a little kid, if I had been told that song came from Mary, I would have just assumed it meant the song had cooties. And while I have often been asked about the rhyme and reason behind the Roman Catholic Church’s veneration of Mary (because that makes perfect sense—ask the Protestant pastor about Roman Catholicism!) the truth is that we, too, glorify Mary in many, many ways in Protestant tradition too—even we are not well-known for it like Catholicism is. And the thing is, Mary absolutely is worthy of our reverence, and not simply because she bore the Christ child, for that reduces her to a means to an end, a woman who, like any other in the Ancient Near East, had no worth beyond her womb. No, Mary is worthy of our reverence because of the lyrics of her song, her Magnificat, that she is willing to glorify God out of her own lowliness and loneliness in the world, her first thoughts are never of herself. They are of God, and of believers everywhere who would otherwise be lost to the world.
This is the fourth and final Sunday of our current sermon series, as well as the fourth and final Sunday of Advent, the season the church traditionally dedicates to preparing the way for the birth of Jesus on Christmas Day. And…well, we do prepare for Christmas Day, but these days, it feels like it is more for the arrival of Santa Claus than the arrival of Jesus—the arrival of presents and stocking stuffers, rather than the arrival of our salvation. And so in response to this, three pastors across America started this project a few years ago called “The Advent Conspiracy: Can Christmas Still Change the World?” as a means to preach preparing for Christ’s coming by giving differently. This project promoting charity revolves around four main themes—spending less, giving more, worshiping fully, and loving all. Via the major prophets who preceded Christ—Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel—plus Jesus’s mother, Mary, we’ll explore a different theme in each of the 4 Sundays of Advent, and this Sunday’s theme is “Loving All” coming on the heels of the three earlier sermons that revolved around the themes of spending less, giving more, and worshiping fully.
Loving all might be the most clichéd of the themes, but if it is, it is for a reason—it is also far and away the toughest one to actually follow. Love requires effort, love requires follow-through, love requires your whole self, or nothing at all. If ever there was anything in Christianity that must, absolutely must, be preached upon in terms of black and white, it is not heaven and hell, it is not sin and righteousness, it is not saved and unsaved, it is being loved…and unloved. The love we give at Christmas, the generosity we are called exhibit as Christians, it does not come in the form of the glitzy gifts that denote the value of love and the worth of the recipient by the dollar amount on the price tag. The love we are called to give, the love that the archangel Gabriel has called upon Mary to give for the world, cannot be given with anything less than your whole self. And if you worry that your whole self is in a spiritual draught, suffering from a poverty of faith, that is fine—what matters is that you offer it all in how you love. The widow’s gift of the two coins was worth more than all the vast sums donated by the wealthy, because she gave entirely, she gave out of everything, she gave everything.
And Mary is being called to do nothing less here—consider that childbirth in Biblical days was at best a coin flip, and at worst a death sentence. Consider that an unwed mother was shunned in the society of the Ancient Near East so badly that even if she survived childbirth, she was likely to die from lack of shelter. Gabriel has not inspired Mary with a divine charge so much as he has assigned her upon a suicide mission, and her response is not to curl up in fear, or to react in anger to God’s messenger, but instead to praise God over, and over, and over.
And in the midst of this praise, she utters this often misinterpreted line—“for He has looked in favor upon the lowliness of His servant.” It would be a mistake to simply believe that Mary is referring to humbleness, or modesty, or meekness when she is speaking of being lowly, for the Greek is fairly clear—she is talking about societal lowliness, about cultural lowliness. In other words—she knows. She knows that in carrying God’s only Son, she will, on the surface, at least for a time, fail to outwardly live up to the demands of respectability and honor that her world demands of her. She knows what is at stake, and she sings anyways. She sings of God’s promises and blessings for those as lowly as her, and in doing so, she gives words and voice to anyone and everyone who longs for a better world, for their deepest desires, their most heartfelt wants and needs, are being sung in the voice of a teenaged girl.
One of my favorite Christmas songs ever is the song “Mary Did You Know?” And at our last Saturday night jam session when I pipe up and start jabbering away about how much I love this song, and then Wendy’s wedding assistant Arminda just plucks up one of the guitars there and starts singing—“Mary did you know that your baby boy would one day walk on water? Mary did you know that your baby boy would save our sons and daughters?” It really is a beautiful song, but one that, over the course of writing this sermon, I realized was asking the wrong question. Because just as Mary knows the risks of what she is about to do, she also knows the great joys that will come from what she is called to. It’s right there, in her Magnificat—blessed be the Lord who has done mighty deeds, who lifts up the humble, who feeds the hungry. She knows! So…yes, Mary knows that her son will save all humanity, because she knows that there is no redemption without grace, no arrival without the journey, and no love, no true love, without risk. Because it is a simple matter to love your family, and your friends, and your neighbors. It is an entirely different calling to actually love the rest. But this song, when you think about it coming from a young, young girl, is a song not simply of tribute for past deeds, but of anticipation of even greater works to come. Even in the days of the Bible, God did His wonders through men and women, through Moses, and Elijah, and Mary. Now, God relies upon us to do His wonders, He calls upon us to love the rest, to love all.
And so loving all, then, is in some ways an offshoot of giving more, the theme of this series two weeks ago. As I preached then, only when we empty ourselves completely can we finally begin to give of ourselves fully. And only when we give of ourselves fully can we truly love all, everything and everyone, as God commands us to. I preached two weeks ago of giving more of your own resources, your time, your energy, your labor. But now…now it’s different. I’m asking you to do something that I ordinarily would have no right to ask you to do, to risk everything to try to love as Christ loved, even when we know we will fail at doing so. Loving that much, really, truly loving that much, it is not easy. But the Gospel of Jesus Christ does not call us to do what is easy, or convenient. It calls us to righteousness, to do what is right. And when you answer that calling, may it be with that same singing voice the mother of God offered as a prayer, written down by an ancient doctor named Luke and sung to this day by children her age around campfires across the world…my soul magnifies the Lord! By the grace of God, may it be so. Amen.
Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington
December 18, 2011
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