Scripture: Luke 1:39-55
As I mentioned last week, I’ve decided to take a break from sermons on the “teachings of Jesus” for the remainder of the Christmas season, turn to something more seasonal. At a worship committee meeting in November, Beverly mentioned that the choir would be doing several pieces, such as the one they did this morning, that were based on the stories involving Mary, the visitation to Mary, or the annunciation, and her response, known as the magnificat. I said impulsively at the time that maybe I would preach on Mary, and particularly her words in the magnificat, for my sermons during Advent. And I still have that idea for at least this Sunday and next. I’m thinking of the next few sermons as sermons on the theme of the “teachings of Mary”.
That is not just sort of an off-handed choice of words, a phrase I came up with to fit in with the “teachings of Jesus” theme. I have a point I want to make with that phrase. In one sense it’s an inappropriate phrase. Jesus, of course, was seen as a teacher. People addressed him as “teacher” or “rabbi”, which really means teacher. Some of what he said clearly would be understood as teachings. Just about everything he said could be interpreted that way. It was just part of who he was, a major part of who he was. Mary, on the other hand, was a teenager who just found out she was pregnant. No one called her teacher or rabbi—not part of the culture. No one sat at her feet to learn any moral lessons or gain any spiritual insight. And when she spoke, here in this passage from Luke, what she said is usually referred to as a song of praise, and is often translated as something along the lines of: “My soul gives glory to God”, as in the hymn we’ll be singing in a few minutes, or “My spirit overflows with praise to God.” The spontaneous expression of a thankful spirit, not exactly a teaching.
But here’s the point I want to make by referring to the “teachings of Mary”. I think you would have to say that for Christians, Mary is the central, certainly a central, female figure in the Bible. For some Christians she has taken on a life outside the Bible and is part of the devotional life of the church. At the very least, she has this pivotal role in the story of the birth of Jesus, and the readings about her are likely to appear at some point in the Christmas season. Yet although she utters these rather famous words that are read every year and memorialized in song and verse, she is essentially most often treated as a passive figure. She is not the actor but the acted upon. She receives the news that she is to be the mother of the promised one, and she praises God for what is happening to her and what God has done for her. She does not initiate. She only accepts and gives thanks. And her words are often read and understood in just that way, as a song of praise for what someone else—in this case God—has done for her.
I admit that that is the way the story seems to read. But I don’t have to settle for seeing this central female figure, one of the few important female figures in the Bible, as fundamentally passive. I want to protest the passivity of Mary. And at least in my own mind I can do that by treating her not only as the grateful recipient of the gifts that someone else has bestowed upon her but also as someone who has something to say to us, a teaching if you will. If we think of Mary as having something to say to us and we having something to learn from her, then maybe we can remove her from this aura of sweetness and holiness and from being a symbol of female passivity and make of her more of a human being. And human beings don’t have to be officially teachers in order to have teachings and certainly don’t need to be called teacher in order for others to gain by listening to what they have to say. This is my first point for the morning, which I meant to get at by referring to the “teachings of Mary”.
Now, as to what she has to say, I’ll just reflect on the first part of it for today. Her words are referred to as the Magnificat because of the way they begin. As I said, they are often translated as saying, “My soul gives glory to God” or something along those lines. However “magnificat”, which is the way the Latin versions begin, (I’m talking like I know Latin here, which I don’t) Magnificat is the source of our word magnify, and the New Revised Standard Version, which we often read from, has Mary saying, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my savior.” That was more suggestive to me. I paused over the words, even though I have read them countless times before. What does it mean to magnify God? Praising is clear enough in its meaning. Magnifying God is not a normal expression for me, and I have to think about that one for a bit.
I guess one way of approaching this would be to think of those words as an urging, an encouragement to all of us to make God a bigger reality in our lives. God ought to take up a larger place in our inner lives than God does. We magnify God in that sense. We magnify God by making God larger and other things smaller inside us. That actually fits in well with the Christmas season. It’s the kind of thing we often tell ourselves at this time of year. Make God larger. Make everything else, not just the crass materialism and bad taste, but also the relatively harmless and even the enjoyable trappings of the season, make it all smaller and God larger. Let your soul magnify God, we might hear Mary saying to us. Shrink down the rest of it to some manageable, seemly size, and let your heart be set on God, or on the things of the spirit, or at least on the questions that our spirits may bring to the story of Christmas. Like, why is the dream of peace on earth still such a distant dream, and is that dream even still alive, and where is it alive, and where do we modern magi, we modern travelers, go to look for the life of God in our world today. Questions like that, or scores of others that you may have that would have the effect of magnifying God, if those were the questions we asked instead of all the others that take up our spirits. That’s one approach to appreciating what Mary has to say to us learners, when she says, “My soul magnifies the Lord.”
And it’s not a bad message to get from Mary. I confess that it’s the first direction my thoughts went in as I reflect on the concept of magnifying God. And it’s not just a matter of the Christmas season. Isn’t it part of being people of faith at any time of year to try to make God less of that “still small voice” and more of a major presence in our lives? Aren’t we obliged as people of faith to not keep God out at the margins of our lives and bring her into the center as best we know how, even if it’s just in the form of the questions we ask about God? De-marginalizing God (if that’s a word) is not so much a matter of loudly proclaiming our belief and more a matter of persisting in prayer and persisting in the asking of our questions. So magnifying God in that sense is not a bad message, certainly not a wrong message.
But as I thought a little more about it, my thoughts went off in a different direction as well. It seems to me the sense of what Mary is saying when she says “My soul magnifies the Lord”, the sense of that is that Mary not only is giving praise to God but that she feels overwhelmed by God, taken over by God, inhabited by God. She is talking after all about being pregnant. But in a metaphorical sense as well, I feel like her words come from that sense of having God present in her, body and soul.
And here is how I hear the teaching that might come from that. Mary is saying that she bears within her—body, soul, spirit, her whole being—she bears within her the life of God. “God has looked on the lowliness of his servant,” she says. Lowly, unlikely Mary bears within her the life of God. And…now I realize I’m making a jump here and this is not explicitly expressed in what Mary says, but I hear her saying: If I—little, lowly me—bear the life of God within me, then it is surely true that you—readers of my words, listeners and learners—you bear the life of God within you.
I’m doing an end run around the idea of Mary’s specialness, how God chose her and only her out of all the women on earth to be the Mother of God, and the idea of the virgin birth and later Mary’s immaculate conception—I’m doing an end run around all of that this morning, all those things that get mixed up with doctrinal affirmations. I’m choosing instead to hear Mary as having a message for all of us, and especially for those who feel their lowliness, their emptiness, their unworthiness, their loneliness, their distance from God. I am a bearer of the life of God. Mary says. I hope you are able to believe that you are too.
This is a teaching for all of us, but especially for those of us who may have trouble seeing God in ourselves. This is a teaching that is more about what is than what ought to be or what we are obliged to do. It is not so much that we should magnify God, make God somehow a larger part of our inner world. It is not so much that we ought to focus more on the things of God, or that we are obliged as people of faith to do our best to bring God in from the margins of our lives more to the center. This is a matter of seeing that we are, we already are, without striving to be better people, more faith-filled people, more God-centered people, we already are bearers of the life of God, body and soul. Quakers have a saying: “There is something of God in everyone.” I doubt that they did, but they could have received that teaching from Mary. Sometimes we need to be reminded of the truth of that teaching with regard to ourselves. There are times for all of us when we don’t feel very godlike, and God seems a remote reality. For some people that is an everyday feeling. Other times we need to be reminded of the truth of that teaching with regard to others, that every person, each and every person, carries within them something that is of God. It is true in both ways. We are, we all are, bearers of the life of God. May we know ourselves blessed, as Mary did. Amen.
Jim Bundy
December 7, 2008