Generational Blessings: Luke 1:39-55
Fourth Sunday of Advent
In those days Mary set out and
went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, 40 where
she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. 41 When
Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth
was filled with the Holy Spirit 42 and exclaimed
with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your
womb. 43 And why has this happened to me, that the
mother of my Lord comes to me? 44 For as soon as I
heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy. 45 And
blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was
spoken to her by the Lord.”
46 And Mary said,
“My soul magnifies the Lord,
47 and my spirit rejoices in God
my Savior,
48 for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his
servant.
Surely, from now on all generations will call me
blessed;
49 for the Mighty One has done great things for me,
and holy is his name.
50 His mercy is for those who fear him
from generation to generation.
51 He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their
hearts.
52 He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;
53 he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.
54 He has helped his servant Israel,
in remembrance of his mercy,
55 according to the promise he made to our ancestors,
to Abraham and to his descendants forever.” (NRSV)
I have
mentioned before that a part of my family, and therefore a part of my
upbringing, is Catholic. I still carry
my grandfather’s rosary, a reminder of what has been and what is not now. Perhaps one of the most recognizable pieces
of being Catholic, the rosary is a series of beads that guides a prayer
meditation on the life of Christ. Each
decade, or series of ten beads, is a focal point for one event, called a
mystery. And each mystery is considered
while saying, on each bead of the decade, the prayer called the “Hail Mary.”
Unlike the
desperate football play that also bears this name, the “Hail Mary”—or “Ave
Maria” in Latin—is a short prayer to the mother Mary for intercession on our
behalf: “Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is
the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary,
Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our
death. Amen.”
“Hail Mary,
full of grace.” Nancy Rockwell writes
that, “It is Mary’s grace that has attracted God’s attention. And what is this
grace? It is what Luke shows us in her conversation and her actions – courage,
boldness, grit, ringing convictions about justice. Not submissive
meekness. Grace is not submission. And the power of God is never
meek.”[1]
“My soul
magnifies the Lord!” Let’s set this
scene a bit: Mary, who is a betrothed
young woman in the nowhere town of Nazareth, has had the chief angel of God’s
realm come and ask her to bear the incarnate God. Understandably a bit unnerved by this
proposition, Mary goes through what Rev. Dr. Alyce McKenzie calls “all the
classic steps of the call of prophets familiar to us from the Old Testament:
God's initial call, God's task, prophet's objection, God's reassurance,
prophet's acceptance of call.”[2] Having accepted, Mary walks the nearly one
hundred miles to her elder relative Elizabeth.
Remember, this
is way before cars. She walked,
or rode some form of donkey, all the way to her cousin’s. Why?
When we have incredible news that is both beautiful and terrifying, what
do we do first? We find the people we
trust, the people who can help us understand and bear this news. Elizabeth may have been like a second mother
to Mary—she was certainly old enough. Or
it may have been that Mary had heard that Elizabeth, too, was going through
some pretty intense news of her own with her very-late-in-life pregnancy that
had silenced her husband, Zechariah.
Whatever the reason, Elizabeth is the one Mary trusts—trusts not
to shame her, trusts to understand her, trusts to help her figure out what to
do next, and trusts to hear her joy.
“My spirit rejoices in God my Savior!” Mary cries to Elizabeth, and
Elizabeth says yes, I get that, I am here for that; “blessed are you among
women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.”
We come back
to the Hail Mary with Elizabeth’s words on our lips. Here in the house of the high priest
Zechariah, two women gather to support each other in the wild and incredible
happenings of their lives—Mary, full of grace, and Elizabeth, full of blessings;
both powerful in their joy and their reception of God’s miracles happening
through them.
Mary, accepted
and supported and happy, does not go sit in the living room and tell stories of
her travels over that hundred miles, at least not at first, because Mary has
both a child and a message within her.
As Rev. Dr. McKenzie continues, “The prophet's job description is not to
speak out of his (or her) own wisdom or eloquence, but to be a messenger for
God, to do and speak what is commanded. In fulfilling this task, God promises
to be with the prophet as deliverer. In Mary's prophetic call, the angel
Gabriel is the mouthpiece for this divine reassurance: ‘Nothing will be
impossible with God’ (1:37).[3]
This prophetic
deliverance of Mary’s is called the Magnificat, from the Latin translation that
begins Magnificat anima mea Dominum, “my soul magnifies the Lord.” It is a song, a celebration, and a complete
disavowal of all the ways we understand the world to work. The Catholic bishop Robert Barron said, “I
don’t think we will understand Advent correctly until we understand it as a
preparation for a revolution.”[4]
Everything
about this takes the existing power structures and expectations and hierarchies
and says a poetically beautiful “no.”
Mary begins with her own story: “He has looked with favor on His lowly
servant…[and] all generations will call me blessed,” she says to the woman who
just called her blessed, because Mary gets that this is going to be a rather
big deal long after she’s gone. But this
is far more than Mary and Elizabeth being excited together about their involvement
in the changing of the world. Professor
O. Wesley Allen, Jr., writes that, “Mary will not allow us to think of
individual salvation apart from Jesus turning the power structures of the world
on its head. As the beginning of the Magnificat that focused on the reversal of
Mary’s situation cannot be separated from the latter portion that focused on
systems of power being reversed, our salvation is part and parcel of the saving
of the world.
“Following Luke, the Christian faith
is concerned at the ultimate level with the reversal of the systems of
oppression that keep some on top by putting others on the bottom. This,
says the first prophet in Luke-Acts, is why Jesus came/is coming. This,
suggests Mary, is what we are to preach, celebrate, and for which we hope in
Advent with Christmas just around the corner.”[5]
“All generations will call me blessed”
not only because Mary is the Theotokos, the God-bearer who was swept up
in one of the most incredible miracles in human history, but also because Mary
is setting out a blueprint for the world that God has built, is building, will
build in which no one is left hungry for food, or love, or health, or comfort,
or dignity. “All generations will call
me blessed” because Mary is the one who saw the power of God’s framework
for the world, saw and said, “Yes, I want in on that.”
“He has shown strength with his arm;
/ he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. / He has brought
down the powerful from their thrones, / and lifted up the lowly; / he has
filled the hungry with good things, / and sent the rich away empty.” We Protestants may not be much for the “Hail
Mary” prayer—except, of course, at football games—but we can certainly get
behind the Magnificat. This is a vision
of a God Who never walks away from the poor, the weary, the downtrodden, the
left out, the broken. This is a vision
of a God Who is up close and personal with pain and grief and Who cares enough
to break the systems that cause such things.
This is a vision of a God Who would be born a child in a world where
children meant nothing, would be born poor and unnoticed when He could have
been the son of an earthly king. This is
a vision of a God Who invites two women to be the first ones to speak of the
new thing God is doing in the world—and, later, would be the God Who greets
another woman in a garden and tells her to be the first preacher of the Good
News that death itself no longer has the ultimate power.
And this vision does so with
unshakeable faith. Mary’s song is not
“this is what will happen” but “this is what has already happened.” As poet and artist Jan Richardson points out,
“Strangely, wonderfully, Mary sings of a God who not only will do these things,
but who has done these things. She sings as if God has already accomplished the
redemption and restoration of the world.”[6]
Here on this fourth Sunday of Advent
in which we light a candle for love but mark yet another week of gun violence,
of uncertainty around COVID, of economic fluctuations, of headline after headline
of brutality against women and people of color, of dishonest preachers and
politicians alike, of war and rumors of war, we may think that it is a bit
foolish to call Mary blessed when she clearly got it wrong. The world is not, it would seem, either
redeemed or restored; the powerful are still on their thrones and the rich have
built spaceships to fill themselves with greed.
How can we read the Magnificat and say with Elizabeth that “blessed are
you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb”?
Some days, we cannot. Some days are days in which the candles of
love and joy and peace and hope simply do not light, their wicks stuttering fruitlessly
as we stand before God and ask only, “Where are You?” Some days we look at the approaching birth of
the Christ child and wonder whether it actually changed anything at all. These, too, are holy days in which God
extends mercy because doubt is always part of this thing called faith.
But every day, we must remind
ourselves that we do not have the whole picture. Just as Mary went to Elizabeth to speak of
her joy and have it mirrored back to her, we also gather with each other—whether
in church or in phone conversations or over cups of tea or however—to remind
each other that there is so much more going on in the world than death and
destruction. Blessed is the God of new
life as children continue to be born; blessed is the God at work in the world
through the people helping the survivors of the tornadoes in Kentucky and in
the kindness of those survivors to the ones helping; blessed is the God Who
calls us to the work of fulfilling Mary’s vision by donating blankets or
delivering meals or standing up for the ones whose voices are ignored or being
present with someone in pain or simply waking each day with the faith that just
because there is still injustice present does not mean that God’s grace is
absent.
How are you working out the means of
such grace, Church? How are you
answering the invitation in which people will call you blessed because
you are part of the redemption and restoration of the world, the remaking that
has already happened with a pair of women rejoicing together and will continue
happening through the ages as we break every single system of oppression that falsely
claims any human is of more value than another?
How are you waiting in this season of Advent full of grace, knowing that
the Lord is with you?
May we be made aware of God’s work
around us in this last week of this holy season of waiting. May we accept the invitation to the work of restoration
and redemption. May we have blessings in
our mouths for those who speak hope, peace, joy, and love into the world. Amen.
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