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This coming Sunday I will not be preaching (our choir will share their Cantata this week!). So, since I will not be preaching, I don’t have a text to write about. So instead, I want to poke around a bit at the text that we will be using in our Call to Worship. It comes from Luke 1:47-55 (I’ll let you look it up). It’s been called “Mary’s Magnificat” by the Church, (Magnificat being the Latin for “magnifies”); it is the song Mary sings as she continues to comprehend that she will be the mother of the Messiah. We read this during the Advent season, but I wonder if we really read this during any season of our lives.
As we read this song of Mary, we read with great sentiment the humility that Mary exudes, that God has looked with favor upon her the lowly servant. We read this with great sentiment because it helps us to remember the surprising way that God came among us in Jesus Christ. That God came not in royal palaces or even in important religious centers, and that God came not through blue-blooded parentage. Instead, God came through this lowly servant, born in a feed trough in a one-horse town. Yes, we might read this part of Mary’s Song with great sentiment. But then let’s continue to read. For as we read, we read of the strength of God, which not only lifts up the lowly (such as the servant Mary) and fills the hungry with good things, but also scatters the proud and brings down the powerful and sends the rich away empty. I don’t know about you, but my sentimental connection with Mary loses its feel-good as I read this part of Mary’s Song. Because I know which side of the tracks I live on, and what place in life I hold. I might not be “powerful” and “rich” to some, but I am all this and more to most people in our world. And if you are reading this from a computer, at your leisure, then I am betting that you are among the powerful and rich as well. It kinda makes me wish that Mary hadn’t said this last part, and left me alone in my feel-good sentiment. What do you think?
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Yes – I smell what you are stepping in. It is always a challenging message because i am complicit too. thanks for writing this.
Comment by Audrey Connor December 6, 2010 @ 12:12 pmthanks for commenting
Comment by scottrollins December 6, 2010 @ 8:14 pmI ran across a quote from Invitation to Holiness by James C. Fenhagen—”The holiness we look for will not be seen in who can shout the loudest, or make the more coercive claim for the principles they will defend to the death; but, rather, holiness will appear in those people who can take us beyond where we are now and allow us to see in them something new. The holy might appear in people we least expect.”—Mary, John the Baptist, Mary Magdalene, a tax collector or two, and on it goes!
Comment by Joyce Honaker December 6, 2010 @ 8:09 pmJoyce, I think of small kids, people at the mission, elderly shut-ins, etc
Comment by scottrollins December 6, 2010 @ 8:16 pmAnd perhaps it can even be a non-Christian who reflects back our “faith” practices. When I was in Capetown, South Africa in 1996, following the downfall of apartheid, there (and in Namibia where I’d been to help with a parliamentary staff workshop), and on Bishop Tutu’s appointment to head the Truth and Rconciliation Commission, I visited an exhibition about the San, or “bushmen” as we westerners call them. They lived peacefully in the South African wilderness, dressed in animal skins and eating insects, until our European ancestors arrived and turned them into the hunted, the enslaved, the exhibited in carnivals. And in the exhibition, one San was quoted as asking “Why do Christians hate the San? You admire and revere a man who lived in the wilderness, who dressed in animal skins, who ate wild honey and insects. Why, then, do Christians hate the San?” That’s an occasion when I found the holy in the unexpected.
Comment by Joyce Honaker December 6, 2010 @ 8:37 pmYou should have started with verse 46…And Mary said, “my soul doth magnify the lord.” There is a neat hymn that we sing all the time about that, indeed there are anthems and classical pieces that have been written over the centuries using those nine words. But, nooooo, you have to look at the end of this beautiful song and say “excuse me, but I am in the category of the “rich and famous” (as most Americans are relatively speaking of course) and God has smote me…Mary said so. And Aud, bless her heart is traveling along beside you. I have always had a problem with the parable of the rich man…this is laying the guilt on at its best. The way I approach this blog is on Monday I sit down and see if you have posted anything, and if you have I then think about. At first I thought you were making fun of those of us who have the “leisure” time to casually serf the web and was going to really carry on with you about that. Then of course as I sat down this time, I saw the error of that one. My error on that caused me to waste a lot of time thinking how I was going to do away with you…so, I was wrong.
Here is how I come to grips with this. Only God can perceive if I am rich or not. We humans have only one way of determining this, and that is of course the dollars we have. If we make ten grand a year, then the one that make a million is the rich one. If we make a million dollars a year, then the one who makes a Billion dollars is the rich one. So, we have to define “rich”. I looked it up in the dictionary there are 15 definitions for “rich”…16 if you count Adrienne Rich the poet. No help there. So, I went to .gov and found that I am in fact dangerously close to the poverty level and my son even closer. I don’t feel that close. So, I think we should go with that and now we do not have to worry whether or not we are rich…we are not so Mary is not talking about us. But wait. How about the people Joyce talks about. According to her, if I am correct, the people she encountered in South Africa who had only the loin cloth to call their own were really, really poor. Except, she says that these people don’t think of themselves in that light. Indeed, they are holy…very holy. And so they are. My point…Trust God on this one and be thankful for Mary and her song. I think the last part is Luke adding to story. I doubt Mary included that in her song.
Comment by Robert Orr December 9, 2010 @ 12:52 pm