Mary's Fight Song

December 20, 2015

Luke 1:39-55

Over the years stopping by the magnificently lit house on Collingwood Road has become a staple of the season for my family.  We join the line of cars in front of Manor Care and turn our radio to 88.1 as we edge slowly forward to watch the colored lights burst and grow to the beat of the music.  We, and all the others sitting in their cars, are just casual surveyors, not particularly invested.  And then a few minutes later we each drive away and don’t think much more about it.   We don’t consider what goes into the creation of the majestic show - the cost, the effort, the intentions of the owner.  And it doesn’t affect us much once the lights are gone from our rearview mirrors.  Until this week, that is, when I saw on my Facebook feed that something had gone wrong with the owner’s electrical system requiring some expensive part.  The local community was encouraged to step in, to help with small donations that might get the lights going again, to take some ownership of the spectacle.

Later on tonight we’ll be back in this room singing carols in the candlelight and watching the pageant the kids have been working so hard on.  Glittering angels, gift-bearing magi, shepherds corralling their stray sheep, stoic doll baby Jesus.  And we’ll see sweet, beautiful Perrin in her role as Mary.  She’ll seem calm and demure and happy and at ease.  We’ll be full of joy and hot cider and cookies and head home feeling content.

But let’s not be casual, uninvested surveyors of the Christmas story.  When we see and hear the pageant tonight, let’s remember what comes before and take ownership of what comes after.  

In our pre-pageant scene this morning, newly pregnant Mary is fleeing her hometown of Nazareth and setting out alone on a long and hasty journey to the Judean countryside to visit her cousin Elizabeth.  

It seems like a happy family reunion, but I’m guessing the motivation for Mary’s travel has a lot more to do with terror, confusion, and loneliness than relaxing downtime.  She might even be escaping to hide the evidence of her new condition so as to avoid wagging tongues and give Joseph some time to process the news.

When Mary talks about her lowliness, she isn’t exaggerating.  Mary is a young, unmarried woman.  A nobody from a small town.  She is poor and powerless.  And that’s all true before she becomes pregnant.  With this growing addition, she isn’t only on the margins of society.  Now she’s an unwed mother too.  She could have been stoned as an adulteress, or at the very least, deserted by family and friends and all of decent society and left with nothing, forced into who knows what kind of life to support herself and her child.  Her vulnerability is almost unfathomable in our society. 

And yet she sings.  Mary who has nothing - no money, no power, no safety, no assurance of future - finds the courage to sing about how blessed she is by God.  She has no idea what will become of this baby or herself.  All she knows is that God has chosen her to be part of “the Glorious Impossible”, as Madeleine L’Engle calls Christmas.  And somehow that will be enough to get her through the rest.

And so she sings the second half of our Gospel reading, commonly known as the Magnificat.  

She doesn’t sing sweetly, demurely, calmly.  At least I doubt it.  I’m betting Mary sings with her jaws clenched and her nails digging into her palms.  To quote popular culture, this is Mary’s fight song.  Her take back her life song.  Prove she’s alright song.  And it is stunning.

What may not be obvious later on tonight at our beautiful pageant is that Mary is a revolutionary figure.  The Magnificat has been banned by oppressive governments over the last century because of it’s dangerous and subversive lyrics.  Because Mary sings not just for herself, but for all people everywhere who need to hear that our God will make a way where there is no way.  The oppressed and the powerless, the enslaved and the imprisoned, the dying and those who mourn, the homeless and the hopeless.  Mary gives a voice to the voiceless, shines a light in all of the dark places of our hearts, our lives, our communities, our world.  Mary sings about the proud being scattered, the powerful brought down from their thrones, the rich sent away empty.  This is a song about God showing up in the margins and turning the world upside down.  

Now, granted, it wouldn’t seem like there was a lot of evidence of this for someone like Mary to be comforted by.  Her people lived under the brute force of Rome, too fearful to challenge their heavy oppressors.  And her local religious culture was dominated by rules of status and hierarchy that excluded someone like her.  It’s hard to believe she could even imagine the kind of hope and promise that she sings about.

And yet, Mary’s fight song is sung in the past tense.  She speaks about God’s promised reversals as if they have already happened.  Even though everything around her screams to the contrary, somehow in this moment, Mary is able to see the world as God dreams it, all creation reconciled, the paths made straight, no more crying, no more fear.  In this moment Mary knows that the Dream of God is a certain reality that has already begun unfolding, and that the world is rife with hope and possibility.  The revolution has already begun.  And Mary is confident that she is part of it, as inconsequential as the world might consider her.  And so Mary belts out her fight song, knowing that she is even at this moment already included in God’s long and continuing story of redemption. 

So what about us?  What does any of this have to do with us?  

Well, what if Mary’s song is our song too?

How can we claim Mary’s hope, imagining a world different from the one that confronts us each morning in the news?  Assured that we are not alone and that God’s promise is trustworthy and true.

How can we know ourselves to be God-bearers like Mary, vessels for the light and love of God in the world, infinitely precious in our ordinariness?  Intimately involved in bringing about the Dream of God by giving voice to the voiceless, valuing the lowly, and resisting oppression in all its mesmerizing forms.

We too are cast in the Christmas story.  Part of the Glorious Impossible.  It’s time to start singing.