A Tough Kid, God Remembers

Text: Luke 1:39-55

The story of the Bible is the story of God. Not the whole story of God, which starts long before us, and ends long after us, and encompasses much more than we will ever know. But it is the part of God’s story that has to do with people on this earth. Can we tell a story of God that has nothing to do with us? Maybe. But maybe not. What we do affects God and changes God; we are part of God’s story. But can we tell our story without God in it? Probably not, being creatures of God; though we do try.

The story of the Bible is the story of God. The story of Jesus is, for us, a big part of that story. The story of the birth of Jesus is a high point in that story. But it is by no means the only point.

And for Luke, at the beginning of the story of Jesus is the story of Mary.

Mary was a tough kid from a rough neighborhood. Joseph, her fiancee, was a carpenter—not an admired craftsperson but low on the economic ladder, a rung below subsistence farmer. She was probably a young teenager, thirteen or fourteen years old. It was not a good time to be a Jew in Palestine. Roman soldiers walked the streets, crucifixion was common for minor crimes, like not knowing your place or talking out loud about a time when Israel would be restored to its former greatness. Or your hope for a messiah, a descendant of great King David, to rescue you.

We rightly celebrate what we see as Mary’s willingness to do God’s will in the matter of the birth of God into this world. But this is not a no-brainer for Mary. It is clear from the story that Gabriel’s announcement is really more like an invitation than a command. It is a mark of Mary’s character that she agrees: I am the Lord’s servant, Mary answers. May your word to me be fulfilled. And she sings a song, called Mary’s song, which we also call the Magnificat.

The miracle of Mary as mother of God is not that she was a virgin. In those days stories of virgin birth were a dime a dozen. The miracle was that God would choose someone with such low net worth in the currencies that mattered: property, heritage, gender, education, and age. The scandal of Mary was not about her virginity but about her lot in life and her political position. We see a poetic beauty in Mary’s story, but people of Jesus time found the whole thing to be, as one scholar said, just another reason to think that Christianity was bizarre. The only status she had in the world was, it turned out, her relationship with God. This would have been a big reason why her relative Elizabeth was so surprised.

Mary’s song starts with Mary. It is all about her at the start. Me, me, me; the word appears five times in the first four verses. Great things for me. All generations will call me blessed, and so forth. Really, this seems fair. Mary is as non-plussed as Elizabeth was and as future readers would be. But these verses are just joyful preamble.

Mary knows, as all prophets know, that calls like this rarely benefit the prophets. God’s choice of Mary does not stem from some special goodness in her, but rather from some special goodness in God. The world is about to change, and Mary has a part. But as a prophet, Mary knows that the going will not be easy. Even as young as she is, it seems to me that she understands that being the mother of Jesus will be hard and come to a difficult end. She answers the call out of courage.

God is using Mary to change the way things go. Something is out of kilter. The poor are hungry and the rich have much. The powerful abuse their power over the lowly. The poor are not poor because they are just unfortunate, victims for whom circumstance has not been kind. They are instead victims of ungodly acts of others. This was not God’s plan for things in the story of God and us. Prophets had condemned Israel for this before, and God had intervened before.

The hungry, the lowly, and the outcast are needy. They need something. For them, the world is broken. Things need fixing up, they need repair. The people need salvation, which means rescue and healing. The poor and lowly need a savior, someone to see that God’s plan is enacted.

The rich and powerful do not. They have no sufficient need to plead for help. They do not welcome the same savior as the poor. They are proud in the imagination of their hearts, says the King James version of the Bible. In their inmost thoughts, says another. In their haughty thinking of their hearts, say one more. This is not about their feelings; the heart was the center of thought. It is how they think. They think they do not need God or to do what God wishes. They give themselves credit. And they do not think that by oppressing and exploiting others they oppose God. Or they do not care. Either way, it’s an issue.

This imbalance between those who need much and those who have much is a central theme of Luke. As we have heard in the Gospel readings all Advent. And of the ministry of Jesus in general. And before that, of the law and the prophets. It runs through the story of God and us in the Bible.

It is political, for it is about power. But it is not revolutionary in itself. Luke is not hoping for the obliteration of one group of powerful, wealthy people to be replaced by some other group of people who then become powerful and wealthy. The hope is that the vertical becomes horizontal. The distinctions we make that allow the rich and the poor to have such different lives are not distinctions that God makes.

In Mary’s song God remembers God’s mercy, and recalls the promises made to God’s people. It is God’s memory that is being celebrated here. And justice is a part of God’s story and of God’s promise to God’s people. It is the prospect of broken justice repaired that is celebrated here.

We think of this song as a hopeful predictor of the future. Mary sings, we think, because she has high expectations for the child she will bear. But as someone mentioned in Bible study last week, the verbs are all past tense. This is a song about what God has already done. It is hopeful. It proves that our hopes are not foolish or bizarre, but grounded in the story of God and us up to now. God has been effective. We trust God will continue to be.

This song is the reading for this last Sunday in Advent because it anticipates the birth of Jesus. But Jesus is not even mentioned in Mary’s song at all. He appears only by reference discovered by the imaginations of our hearts. All the hopes of which Mary sings are met in the coming child. God continues to be with us.

Christians live under a promise of a new way of being. For some, that seems absurd, yet another reason to think Christianity to be bizarre. Things go on, and what has been is what will be. There may be hope, but to the cynical we are whistling in the dark. But it is part of the fabric of our faith, the plot of God’s story, to be naive enough to think that God has something in store for this world that will save it and will heal it.

Thanks be to God.