What Mary Knows--December 14, 2022

What Mary Knows--December 14, 2022

"And Mary said, 'My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call be blessed; for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name...'." [Luke 1:46-49]

Mary has a few surprises up her sleeve.  Or rather, Mary has the faithful vision to recognize the surprises hidden up God's sleeve. And before we relegate her to the non-speaking role she gets in the Nativity story on Christmas Eve [go check--Mary doesn't get any lines in the classic story from Luke 2], it's worth listening to her here, in these words we often call the Magnificat, as she points those surprises out for us to hear.

If you've heard this song of Mary's before, as we often do in worship at this time of year, you might well know that Mary recognizes how God's action in the world will turn the tables on things.  Mary sings, echoing another surprising mother from Israel's story named Hannah, about how God is pulling down the powerful from their thrones, filling the hungry with good things, and sending the rich away empty.  That by itself is shocking to a lot of Respectable Religious folks in our culture, especially given how many "inspirational" books, tv shows, radio programs, and televangelists out there have made a fortune selling people on the idea that God wants you to be rich and that poverty is a sign of laziness more than anything else.  In a culture where a lot of folks thinking that God's job is to make us comfortable and that religion's job is to reinforce the order of things that keeps us in positions of comfort, Mary's song sounds downright subversive.  That's because it is, of course. And just that fact by itself is one of the divine surprises revealed in her song.  

Mary points out that God is committed to a rearranging of the whole world--including our economies, our way of building ladders of success to climb, and our way of putting our trust in our piles of stuff and money.  Mary knows that God is more interested in everybody getting to eat than in anybody having a hoarded supply of manna, and that God is willing to take the air out of the over-inflated arrogant and proud in order to do it.  That means changing, dramatically, "The Way Things Are."  And if we have come to the Christmas season looking for someone to just reinforce the patterns, routines, and systems we all live in that keep some people hungry and homeless while others are insulated in apathy, Mary removes those illusions.  She praises God for doing things that are utterly revolutionary.

So, inspired by a vision of nothing less than a total upheaval of "The Way Things Are" in terms of money, power, and resources, Mary's course of action is... pregnancy.  This is the second grand surprise up God's sleeve for us to consider.  Mary's response to the promise of the coming Savior who will rearrange everything... is to carry the baby growing within her own body.  Mary is convinced that this act of nurture, played out at first over months of expectation and morning sickness, and then over years of motherhood with all its sacrifices and sorrows, is her part of God's in-breaking Reign.  And given how grand and radical her song is, that's surprising.  

You might expect someone who sings a song like Mary's to go rile up a mob with whatever weapons they can find and then incite a riot to take political power by violence and force.  You could imagine, as plenty of agitators and insurgents have done in history, a firebrand like Mary organizing a militia, arming her recruits, and sending them off to attack the halls of power in the name of "taking back their country" and saying it was all in the name of God.  There were, after all, plenty in the first century in Palestine who were organizing to do just that--we remember them now as the Zealots [and again, whether one thinks of those groups as "freedom fighters" or "terrorists" depends in large part on your social situation].  Mary very clearly is not stirring up political violence, and she is not looking to cast herself as a new Deborah the Judge commanding fighters to repel a foreign enemy or occupying force.  For as much change as Mary's song calls for--and it does indeed envision a turning of the world's tables--Mary knows that God's movement is not built on killing your enemies or starting an insurrection just because you don't like the way things are being run.

On the other hand, you could imagine just the opposite happening, too--you could imagine someone like Mary pouring all of her wildest wishes and most outlandish dreams into a song, and then leaving it all as mere talk.  You could imagine her pushing all of those hopes for the hungry to be filled with good things off into the distance, for some day in another world, in the afterlife, where there will be, as the old line goes, "pie in the sky by and by."  You could imagine Mary singing her heart out about what she hoped would happen, and then with a sigh, shrugging it all off as foolishness and then getting back to a life that fit right back into the machinery of "The Way Things Are."  Like old slavemasters teaching the enslaved people in their clutches about heaven after they died in the hopes of discouraging the need for them to hope for justice or freedom in this life, you could imagine someone like Mary giving up hope that her song was meant to be grounded in reality at all.   But again, that's not what happens.  Mary certainly doesn't use her song's vision to kindle a violent riot, but neither does she let it numb her into paralysis, either.

Mary's response is to bear the child growing in her body, to love him into being [as Mr. Rogers would put it], and to raise him with the same vision of a table-turning God who feeds the hungry and disarms the bullies as she has sung about.  It isn't nothing--my goodness, it will be her life's work.  And yet it isn't at all what the world usually expects for how to bring about change.  Mary is willing to play the long game.  She is willing to do small, imperceptible acts that seem insignificant to the rest of the world--she will teach her son the ways of God, the courage of the prophets, the passion of the Torah for justice and mercy.  She will teach young Jesus about God bringing down Pharaoh and setting captives free.  She will sing her song as a lullaby to him.  She will light a spark that will start a fire, even if it doesn't look "effective" or "efficient" by the empire's standards.  She is willing to be patient as she does her revolutionary work, because she is convinced that God, too, is willing to be patient in such work.

And if the same God who was able to create a universe in an instant merely with the words, "Let there be..." chooses to work through the natural process of a nine-month pregnancy and the years of raising a child into adulthood before we get to the public ministry of Jesus, then Mary is willing to trust that God knows what God is doing.  Mary knows that God's ways will not look like the playbook the world uses--it is both too radical and too peaceable at the same time.  But she is convinced that God's ways are the right ones for her to walk in, so she commits to the revolutionary--but slow--work of loving her boy into being, to raise Jesus of Nazareth to learn how to be who he is called to be as well.  

Perhaps our work is much the same.  We are not sent out, we followers of Mary's son, to "take back our country for God," any more than Mary was, and certainly not with weapons or partisan power-grabs.  But neither are we given permission to push Mary's vision off into afterthought of the afterlife.  We are called, like Mary, to do the slow but subversive work of bearing Christ forth into the world even in small and overlookable actions that embody God's Reign in love.

Mary knew how... perhaps we can learn from her today.

O God who turns the world upside-down and who waits in the fragility of a human life, teach us your ways and let us embody your Reign here and now.