Wisdom from St. Mary

Luke 1:46-56

46 Mary said:

 “My soul proclaims your greatness, O God, 47 and my spirit rejoices in you, my Savior. 48 For you have looked with favor

upon your lowly servant,

and from this day forward

all generations will call me blessed. 49 For you, the Almighty, have done great things for

 me,

and holy is your Name. 50 Your mercy reaches from age to age

for those who fear you. 51 You have shown strength with your arm;

you have scattered the proud in their conceit; 52 you have deposed the mighty from their thrones

and raised the lowly to high places. 53 You have filled the hungry with good things,

while you have sent the rich away empty. 54 You have come to the aid of Israel your servant,

mindful of your mercy— 55 the promise you made to our ancestors—

to Sarah and Abraham

and their descendants forever.”

56 Mary stayed with Elizabeth about three months and then returned home.

Priests for Equality. The Inclusive Bible (pp. 2220-2221). Sheed & Ward. Kindle Edition.

I love feast days that honor a saint. I love being part of a tradition of hearing the stories of the faithful who have gone before us. Do you remember Mary’s story? In case you haven’t heard it for a while, this seems like as good a day as any to remind you. Here’s what happened in the few verses of Luke leading up to today’s gospel text:

Mary is a young, teenage girl from a humble town in the sticks of Israel. Like many of the young women her age, she’s engaged to be married. Presumably her wedding to Joseph is within months.

One day during their engagement, Mary received a visitor—an angel by the name of Gabriel is sent to her to tell her she’s blessed among women—and totally God’s favorite!!

Among other things, she’s confused by this unusual way to greet a person, and doesn’t think of herself as favored by God.

So the angel says, “Don’t be afraid, seriously, you’re God’s favorite, and God has a gift for you. You’re going to have a son, and give him the name which means ‘Deliverance.’ He will be the supreme judge and ruler over the house of Israel forever.”

And I like to think he threw in a “congratulations” but who knows.

And Mary’s like, “Right, ok, but I’m not married yet, and I haven’t ever been with a man so…how?”

So the angel responds “The breath of God will supervene, and the miraculous power of the heavens will surround you in light, so that everyone will say this is God’s child.”

The angel then says, “Oh also, your 100-year-old cousin, Elizabeth? She’s pregnant, too. God can make anything happen.”

With this, Mary says yes, ok, I will do it. I will be God’s favorite 

A couple days later, she’s trying to wrap her mind around what happened, and she hurries over to the hill country where her cousin Elizabeth lives,

And as soon as Elizabeth sees Mary, she says the same things the angel did—all of it!

Blessed are you among women, mother of the Messiah, her 100-year-old self is also pregnant,

And she blesses Mary:

“Blessed is she who believed what our God said to her would be accomplished!”

And then, then, Mary bursts into song:

My soul, my spirit, all I can see is your greatness, O God!

God chose me! God chose me to be known forever as blessed!

How amazing you are, God!

Casting down the mighty,

You are faithful and good

To those who humble themselves.

You remembered your promise from so long ago,

And you will keep your promises forever.

Mary’s beautiful song, called the Magnificat for how she magnifies God,

Reflects praise songs throughout our Scriptures—

Our readings from Isaiah and the psalms today have much of the same praise written by different authors—

total side note: I noticed when I read the psalm from a physical bible, the historical context printed at the top of this psalm is “Of David, when he pretended to be insane before Abimelech so that the king drove him away.”

So maybe a little less remarkable context, but the words still praise the same God who is not bound by our linear thinking.

This God who is not subject to the laws of cause and effect,

does not and could not dismiss a challenge or circumstance as “hopeless” or “impossible.”

This God who lives outside of our timelines

who is not limited by our limitations,

who creates life, who is life in our bodies and in our planet,

who brings justice,

who turns the tables,

who levels the field;

Magnifying this God who would choose to start a spiritual awakening through a humble birth into a working-class family,

Rather than through one of earth’s kings.

Mary is not a noble woman. Mary will not raise a prince, a diplomat, or a politician.

Mary will do her best to love this child and raise him to love and serve God.

And it’s growing up as Mary’s child that grants the human Jesus the perspective and social position to critique systems of power in the way that he will grow up to do.

But let’s be clear for a moment about Mary’s “blessing.” Yes, all generations will call her blessed, but as for “her life?” The blessing she agrees to is mostly suffering.

She can do this willingly because she sees that she’s a part of God’sstory.

She doesn’t say yes because she believes that becoming pregnant before she’s married will get her closer to a goal, or even that it will improve her life!

She sees it—she’s got perspective—God’s perspective

She sees that the pain of telling her fiancé she’s pregnant,
of her family’s response,

The pain of child birth,

The pressure of raising a child who comes with a heavy prophecy,

The agony she could have never anticipated that Jesus would bring into her life—

all of this suffering that loomed in the future for her individual linear life,
was completely eclipsed by the magnitude of what God would do through all of it.

She sees what it means that God has chosen her—that her life is bigger than just her self.

She sees it so clearly that she sings about God’s justice and mercy as though everything is already right!

Was her world healed in the instant her cousin confirmed her pregnancy?

Of course not. There are still hungry without food, still conceited rulers in power, still injustice, still suffering.

But you know those moments when you can see it—
when you can connect the dots, and the scenes of your life stack up in front of you like images on slides and you can suddenly see the same red thread weaving through each one,

And for a moment, everything is right.

Every wrong turn, every heartbreak,
It all led you here to this moment where you can see that everything is perfect.

That’s trust. That’s faith. That’s the place where anything is possible. That’s the place where Mary’s song comes from.

When I recognize that my broken life and all my mistakes and heartbreaks and failures

are all perfect parts of the perfect whole,
that’s grace.

THEN I find that same grace for other people!

That same grace for the broken world I inherited!

Grace for all the heartbreak, the anger, the injustice, the fear, the violence, the angst of climate chaos,
grace for what I cannot accept, and grace for my resistance,

The grace of surrender, of entrusting it to God,
of not understanding how it could possibly work out,

But falling back into the arms of what I know to be true—

that if the icky and hard and unphotographable parts of my life turn out to be beautiful, necessary parts of this experience of having a body,
that they are all parts of fully knowing and experiencing God’s love,

then maybe that’s true for the world, too. Maybe even these hard times belong.

Mary’s prayer is that trust.

God’s mercy and justice are coming
and have started now—

Because God chose her.

Mary’s God is not limited by conventional paths from A to B

In fact, Mary’s God is not about getting anywhere at all, because—it’s all already here, already perfect.

She can taste it.

God is already operating outside the bounds just by choosing her as Jesus’s mother!

This is a God of not just what is, but what could be.

This is a God with whom all things are possible!

This is a God who snaps us out of the trance of linear thinking

and frees us to see the cyclical nature of life and our part in it,

To see the Indwelling of the Holy and Sacred in ourselves and in our hurting world.

A God who slices through our despair and fear,

and shines her luminous, redemptive presence onto it all.

At my ordination as a deacon back in February, Cn. Allisyn Thomas preached that we are all Mothers of God.

“Each of us who follows Jesus is called to be a Mother of God—to make Jesus real,” she said.

How do we give birth to God’s hope in a dying world?

Our culture tells us we are individual people with individual lives on our own personal trajectory,

That the timeline of our lives is heading somewhere, that we are heroes on a journey, that we have a legacy to leave behind.

Mary invites us to step away from this linear thinking—away from finding our place on a timeline, or trying to get anywhere at all—

The Mother of God says, “it is all here, right now. Yes to God. Yes to this moment.”

The motherhood of God challenges us to surrender the linear narrative that keeps us getting someplace, becoming something, attached to our sense of a separate self—

Mother God awakens us to the fact that our entire 8 billion person species makes up just .01% of life on Earth!; that we are swallowed up in the great organism of Earth, and we are even further enveloped in the Greatness of God, of Life itself.

To be freed from our sense of a separate self, we must see instead the concentric circles of life—that I am a part of God’s dance and God flows through me and all beings.

The motherhood of God transports us from a single, linear timeline to the enormous perspective of eternity.

As God enters completely into Mary’s life and Mary’s womb, so is God contained completely within each of us. In all your mistakes and limitations and imperfections, in all your longings and fears, in your laughter and joy and accomplishments and failures, and in how they all dance together—look around! It’s not so different from the world around you.

And it’s all sacred, holy, perfect in God. Every part of it.

Yes to God in this perfect moment.