Transcript
And Mary said, my soul magnifies the Lord. Please be seated.
I did this at the earlier service, too. I used this mic instead of that one. Do you have a favorite song or one of those songs that gets stuck in your head a lot? Music, or specifically songs and singing has come up a number of times for me in these past couple of weeks, not least as I prepare to chant the Eucharist at the later service on Christmas Eve. I don’t know why I signed up to do that. Also with the Taize class, when we sing some of the songs acapella- they did great today, we wrote our own song.
Another time is with the bulletins. I always try to check hymn numbers for each service, especially for our big services, just to make sure everything lines up right. And here’s a quick little plug for serving at Saint John’s. This past week we’ve had a number of people serve in the office, with Patrick being off this past week, we worked hard to make sure the office could remain open in a safe way, as in safe church safe way. So if you’re interested in being part of that team, let me know.
Anyway, at one point I was going through the Christmas Eve bulletins and had to warn one of our office angels. I’m borrowing that term from another church. I had to warn her that I might arbitrarily break out into song. I was afraid in the quiet of a church office on a random Tuesday. O Come, all ye fai- might definitely startle her, especially if she’s not expecting the sound.
Luckily, she wasn’t surprised, and I’m pretty sure she may have joined in the singing. This song, The Magnificat, is one of those songs that gets stuck in my head, specifically the Cathedral of the Isles tune by Betty Carr Pulkingham. I made Deborah call me yesterday as I sung that to her so she could tell me what tune it was. The song sounds like this. My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord. My spirit rejoices in God my Savior.
Something about the words and the tune. It just sits with me. Much like I suspect Mary’s words sit with all of us. After all this passage from Luke’s gospel, it is offered during Advent every year. It doesn’t matter if we’re in the year of Luke, when most of our gospel readings are from Luke, or the year of Matthew or the year of Mark.
Every year during Advent, we get Mary’s song, the Magnificat, meaning magnify as in “magnificat anima mea domino,” my soul magnifies the Lord. A song of praise, this is Mary’s response to God, or specifically Mary’s response to Elizabeth, who in today’s gospel reading becomes God’s messenger, another messenger, a closer to and more personal than Gabriel, someone perhaps more likely to get Mary’s true response. Not that Mary would have lied to an angel or archangel, but perhaps Mary’s knee jerk reaction was to simply say yes.
And then after thinking about it, discerning around it, and pondering it, she gives her real yes, the yes that is the true and absolute acknowledgment of who she is, what she is doing, the significance of it all. The yes that brings about this glorious song. Mary’s song. It’s almost like an aria in an opera, or a duet between the two leads of a musical. It seems to stop the action of the gospel so that Mary and Elizabeth and all of us can celebrate the greatness and promised faithfulness of God, the goodness that is God’s grace and mercy.
Also the all ready and not yet of God’s coming into the world. I kind of hinted at this last week. God is already among us. Working God’s goodness and power and love in our lives and in the world, and God is coming among us.
And the form of Jesus Christ, who not only came among us some 2000 years ago, and whose arrival we celebrate every year, who specifically came among us as one of us, born of a woman. An interesting part of this gospel reading today is the fact that the Magnificat is optional. We could have just read the beginning part from in those days too. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord, ending then with Elizabeth’s blessing and skipping Mary’s sung response altogether.
Although the lectionary, the prescribed readings for each Sunday, is quite adamant that if we had skipped that part of today’s gospel reading, then we should have offered it instead of the psalm today, so that no matter what, we would get Mary’s reaction, Mary’s response, Mary’s song. A piece of art that not only breaks all assumptions about salvation and God’s power, a piece of literature that also breaks grammar rules. Because you see, in the common English translation, we get verbs in past perfect tense, a slight shift from past simple tense.
In Greek, without translation, they are aorist. So in English we imply that these actions started already and are continuing to happen in the here and the now. In Greek, the action started in the past, but the duration is yet unknown. And yet, even with that twist, Mary and all of us know that the God who is to come, the Savior, is not here yet. Hence the whole pregnancy thing.
And thus the Magnificat, Mary’s song, not only defies societal expectations of who God is and how God works, it also defies grammatical expectations of how action happens. I could keep going, but rather than continuing to go down a rabbit hole of Greek verb parsing, I want to go back to the idea that the gospel reading could have ended with Elizabeth’s blessing. Instead of continuing with Mary’s Magnificat. And if it had, we would have gotten this beautiful interaction of Mary arriving at Elizabeth’s home.
John the Baptist, because that’s Elizabeth’s unborn son leaping in her womb, and Elizabeth asking, why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? Or in modern terms, why am I so blessed to have Jesus’s mom come visit? Why am I so blessed to have Jesus come visit? Why am I so blessed?
I think this time of year, we sometimes get caught up in all the need to do’s and the half to do’s and sometimes forget the few things that we don’t need to do and we don’t have to do. But if we do, do wow. Like sitting in silence. Like praying with God. Like honoring Jesus. Like calling upon the name of the very person who is to come and yet has already been, and also will continue to be.
Christmas is almost here. Just ask Mary. She certainly knows. According to our calendar, she’s three days shy of her due date, and yet we’re still not quite there yet. We still must wait.
Even in the waiting, though, we can be certain that Jesus is coming. Christmas will come and we will be the blessed ones. We will be the honored ones. We will be the ones who so rightly and justly sing praises as our souls magnify the Lord. The Lord who is already, and also not yet.
Jesus is coming. Let our souls magnify the Lord. Amen.