The Fourth Sunday of Advent
December 21, 2008
The Rev. Steve Smith

Amidst all the doom and gloom of the holiday season this year, when light and grace appear it comes like a bolt in the dark. So it was a week ago as thirty people from our younger families gathered at our home in Mashpee to sing carols and share a little Christmas cheer. As parents huddled in twos and threes contemplating the more serious matters of the day, their children cavorted and played and danced as if there was no tomorrow. Young at heart Babs Walters tickled the ivories of our badly out of tune piano. Even the most introverted in the group bellowed out the timeworn songs of yesteryear. And trying out her new violin, Eva Fahey valiantly played along.

There was something about the big spirit in that gathering that touched many of us. But for me, the moment came as my eye went from the figure of Mary in the stable of the crèche on our piano back to Eva. Although it has been said a million times already, Mary was not much older that Eva when she began her spiritual odyssey of pregnancy and motherhood.

And it cracked open the story a little wider for me. Especially the events recounted today in our Gospel, and the song that flowed from Mary’s heart as she pondered all these things..

Here was a peasant girl from Nazareth, barely a woman, being asked to shoulder the weight of a thousand generations of expectation. Here was a young woman being asked to bear the ignominy of being pregnant and unwed. Here was a cast-off on the farthest margins of time and space being invited to be the mother of the Only Begotten Son of the Almighty God.

Any one of these things would have crushed a lesser being, or driven her to madness. Any of these vicissitudes would have been enough to throw any other soul into the outer darkness, to join the other names who have been blotted out in time.

For Mary, the maiden of Nazareth, however, it was the occasion to respond with a manifesto, her ageless song we know as the Magnificat.

And, friends, do not be misled. Her Magnificat is anything but a gentle and meek expression of piety. It is not a sweet prayer to whisper quietly to ourselves.

It is, instead, a proclamation, to rival any the world has ever known. “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my savior,” Mary cries, and in her cry the hopes and aspirations of the ages take voice. All the prophets, all the seers and sages, every soul aching for truth and liberation are drawn into Mary’s pure delight in the will of God.

And this is the will of God, Mary proclaims, God seeks out the lowly, to raise them up and make them blessed. It is God’s purpose to show mercy to those who fear God from generation to generation. God’s strength moves to scatter the proud in the imagination of their hearts.. God brings down the powerful from their thrones, and lift up the downtrodden. God fills the hungry with good things, and sends the rich away empty.

In truth, Mary’s Magnificat is the most radical manifesto the world has ever known. No one, not Karl Marx, not our Founding Fathers, not any of the revolutionaries in this or any age has had the audacity to say such things. Mary’s song, one writer put it, “kindles anger at the status quo and hope for the world to come. Although the Magnificat has been beautifully arranged for choral voices and sung repeatedly in the daily offices, it remains a stark to inequity and a call to faith for the dispossessed.”

In this, Mary, the peasant girl from Galilee, can be seen as great as any prophet the world has ever known. And ironically, this tradition of understanding Mary as a prophet, while often lost on Christians, has been preserved in Islam. In the Koran, Mary is mentioned more often that she is in the entirety of the New Testament, and an entire section of the Koran is named for her.

And on this, the last Sunday of Advent, as we anticipate the wonder of the Nativity, and the mystery of the Incarnation, we do well I believe to reflect on the prophetic legacy Mary has given us in her great Magnificat. For it stands in a long line of prophecy that began in Israel’s past and prefigures the very identity her son, Jesus, would choose to embody. For it was Jesus who echoed the words of Isaiah when he said that he the Spirit of the Lord was upon him, to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captive, recovery of sight to the blind, freedom to the oppressed, to proclaim the year of God’s favor. In this, Jesus was simply choosing the path his mother had already chosen as a prophet.

Five centuries ago, Martin Luther wrote that Mary sang her Magnificat “not for herself alone, but for all of us, to sing it after her.” And in singing Magnificat, we too reclaim the prophetic tradition that shapes who we are and what we called to do: to do mercy, to love justice, and to walk humbly with our God.