Do you like to sing?
Some of us have beautiful voices and some of us are convinced that we are tone-deaf (although an old choir mistress of mine, who was also a music teacher, held very firmly to the belief that everyone could sing).
For many of us the only place that we sing is in church –
and it seems bizarre now to think back and remember that we had a couple of years where we weren’t allowed to do that.
Some of us are embarrassed to sing in public and save our singing for the privacy of the car or the shower.
When I hear really good singers, it’s like their song is a response to something that wells up inside them and can’t do anything but come out.
For others of us that response might take the form of art or dance or some other form of expression.
“My soul magnifies the Lord,
47 and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour,
48 for You have looked with favour on the lowliness of Your servant.
Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
49 for the Mighty One has done great things for me,
and holy is Your name.
I love preaching on this passage!
The Magnificat or Mary’s Song is a song of joy and praise and thanksgiving to God by Mary.
We are used to celebrating Mary, the Virgin Mother, and certainly some of our Catholic sisters and brothers have a very unique and reverential relationship with her.
Us protestants grew up reciting the Apostles Creed, that Jesus was “born of the Virgin Mary.” But practically speaking, Mary played no role in our Christian identity.
And we protestants feel quite confronted by beliefs in Mary’s perpetual virginity and her freedom from actual and original sin and any use of exalted language in relation to Mary.
In our aversion to some of these excesses, we may well throw the baby out with the bath water (excuse the pun!).
And we can miss so much in terms of how historically women have been expected to emulate her and criticised, punished and even killed for not doing so.
So, today I invite us to re-open our minds and hearts to the contribution Mary makes to the life-changing, world-changing story of Jesus.
In Luke’s gospel, women speak only fifteen times, and only Mary is given this full speech.
You may be like me – and in my long history of attending church, I haven’t heard many sermons on Mary Song;
this song that comprises the longest set of words spoken by a woman in the whole of the New Testament.
We may not have appreciated that Mary sang her prophetic song on her cousin Elizabeth’s doorstep, while John’s father, Zechariah, the “official” spokesperson of God, was silent.
We may not have appreciated that this song is soaked in Jewish women’s history, echoing the words and stories of Miriam and Hannah and Judith, and Deborah.
In her song, Mary declares: “God has brought down rulers from their thrones and raised up the humble. God has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away with nothing”.
Over past centuries, these words have been seen as so provocative and their socioeconomic and political implications so subversive, that at least 3 countries, India, Guatemala and Argentina, banned them from being said in public!
Mary’s version of hope, they decided, was way too dangerous.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor and theologian, executed by the Nazis, called the Magnificat “the most passionate, the wildest, one might even say the most revolutionary, hymn ever sung.”
Mary’s song, one of the Church’s oldest Advent hymns, that countless composers have set to breathtaking music over the centuries, is not then a passive submission but a radical voice!
On this fourth Sunday in Advent, it’s tempting for us to jump ahead. We’ve been waiting for four weeks now for the arrival of the Christ-child and we want him to come.
However, this Sunday we are encouraged to linger here a little while longer.
To linger here on this threshold, in this liminal space, at this ancient doorway and watch two pregnant women caress each other’s bellies and laugh, and marvel, and dance, and sing.
This is a beautiful and happy image however, we know that the reality of Mary’s story was anything but.
For Mary this news was not at all something she was expecting and it did indeed turn her and Joseph’s world upside down.
Tradition tells us that Mary is only twelve to fourteen years old when the angel appears to her – still then herself a child to our way of thinking.
In her cultural and religious context, her pregnancy – unlike Elizabeth’s – is not a gift; it’s a disaster.
At best, it makes her the object of gossip, scorn, and ostracism in her village. At worst, it places her at risk of death by stoning.
When we read the biblical sanitised version of the story of Mary, we miss so much of this and the embodied complexities of pregnancy in the ancient world are ignored;
The physical reality of swollen breasts, aching backs, waves of nausea, and wild foetal gymnastics.
Luke’s Gospel tells us that when the angel Gabriel leaves Mary, she sets out “With haste,” .
The newly pregnant teenager makes for the hills which lie eighty miles away, not slowing down until she reaches the home of Elizabeth.
Luke doesn’t elaborate on Mary’s reasons for leaving Nazareth, but we can easily imagine why a girl in her circumstances would make such an urgent journey.
The social and physical strain that would have come to her as a poor pregnant girl in ancient Palestine is enormous.
And yet she sings!
This is the amazing thing – right in this situation of fear and exclusion and shame, Mary sings!
This song, sung on Elizabeth’s doorstep doesn’t take place at some heavenly, utopia, removed from the fear, and the pain, and the loss.
This song is sung right in the centre of it.
This song is a haven, sung as healing, as an expression of trust, hope, and surrender, right there, in the middle of the chaos.
As Mary falls into Elizabeth’s arms, as the two women exchange stories with loving acceptance – genuine praise and wonder simply erupt between them.
As Mary and Elizabeth share the very tangible, physical evidence of God’s presence in their lives, their song emerges in shared communion, shared fear, shared consolation, and shared hope.
Their song, we imagine, also sits right alongside their hardest questions: Will Joseph stick around? Will Mary’s parents disown her?
Will both women survive the dangers of childbirth? Will the elderly Elizabeth live long enough to see her son reach adulthood?
What will become of these mysterious babies?
Standing together on the precarious threshold of their own unknowing, Mary and Elizabeth find a way to sing God’s praises right from the heart of their fear and burning questions.
We sit in this moment of history. In another year where we have witnessed continuing violence and death on a scale that shocks and appals us.
We sit here with all that pain weighing on our hearts; the pain of our own struggles and fears as well as the pain for the struggles and fears of our world-wide human family.
Mary was faced with an amazingly unprecedented situation, and we can imagine felt great confusion, fear and foreboding –
and she responds in song with hope, knowing that she is not alone because God is with her.
These two women are able to sing because they are together. They are not alone. They sing in companionship and they sing in community.
Henri Nouwen says: The visit of Mary to Elizabeth is one of the Bible’s most beautiful expressions of what it means to form community, to be together, gathered around a promise, affirming what is happening among us.
We too sing in community and when we are unable to sing as individuals (and there are definitely times when it is just impossible), we allow others to sing for us and to carry us in the song of divine love and presence.
Emmanuel – God is with us.
May we too be able to sing with Mary:
“My soul magnifies the Lord,
47 and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour,
48 for you have looked with favour on your lowly servant.
and from this day forward all generations will call me blessed.
49 For you, the Mighty One has done great things for me,
and holy is your name;
[The Inclusive Bible]
Amen.
First broadcast on The Sunday Eucharist on December 22nd, 2024
