Magnificat?

Magnificat?

Luke 1:46-55

Dec. 21, 2014

For those of you who pay overly close attention to such things, you will have noticed that the title of this little homily includes a question mark.

Magnificat?

The word itself is the Latin for the opening line of Mary’s Song, which Cheryl just led us through. Magnificat: my soul magnifies.

Mary declares it. Indeed, the tradition suggests that she sings it!

I can’t quite imagine that. I imagine that, confronted with the news that I was going to bear the divine into the world, I would respond more like the way Joseph was famously portrayed in a CPC kids’ Christmas some years ago: “what?”

That’s not quite right. If I could even begin to grasp what the news might mean, my response would be more like: what the hell!?!

We approach the Christmas story these days as an incredibly tamed and domesticated event. The cards and carols are sweet. The manger scene comes as a quaint reminder of an imagined gentler rural ideal – never minding the reality, as the kids reminded us just last week – of the poop.

No, we do not feel the fear that Mary must have experienced.

As Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it in an Advent sermon in the days of Hitler’s rise:

“We have become so accustomed to the idea of divine love and of God’s coming at Christmas that we no longer feel the shiver of fear that God’s coming should arouse in us. We are indifferent to the message, taking only the pleasant and agreeable out of it and forgetting the serious aspect, that the God of the world draws near to the people of our little earth and lays claim to us. The coming of God is truly not only glad tidings, but first of all frightening news for everyone who has a conscience.”

My soul magnifies? Magnifies what? How does this work? If I have a conscience, if I have, that is, a mind that understands fully the times in which I live, then I know that the presence of the divine in my life is, first and foremost, a presence that demands a faithful response. The divine presence demands an account. The divine presence demands that I figure out this magnifying it calls me to. If I am, as Jesus would insist, to be a light in the world, what will I illumine? What will be revealed in that light? What is concealed in the dark places of my own life?

Maybe Mary wondered, too. Maybe Luke just missed the question, or maybe he meant it but there was no way to mark it clearly. After all, the question mark itself probably didn’t enter written texts until sometime around the 8^th century of the Common Era. Its earliest forms in Latin texts were described as “a lightning flash, striking from right to left.”

I suspect Mary felt a bit like she’d been struck by a flash, a bolt from heaven that crashed around her and changed everything. If she responded with a question, then who would blame her.

Whether Mary responded to the news with song or with question or with some combination, I am confident that the question mark is as important a sign to guide our faith these days as the bright shining star apparently was for the magi in that long-ago story.

Indeed, a while back I was speaking with someone about the future of faith communities, and I suggested, quoting Rilke, that if we are to have relevance in the 21^st century, communities of faith must be or become communities of the question. Rilke said, we must “be patient toward all that remains unresolved in” our hearts “and learn to love the questions themselves.”

I think that is exactly right.

Learn to love the questions.

Moreover, learn to ask the right ones. The right questions for the right time may not resolve those unresolved longings and leanings of our hearts, but the right questions for the right time will help us get one thing that we desperately need: a new mind for a new time – for such a time as this.

Mary’s Song is an excellent place to begin. My soul magnifies the Lord. How? How do we magnify the Lord?

On this shortest day, this darkest night, how do we magnify the Lord?

How does my soul magnify the Lord?

The news of these dark and difficult days certainly complicates this question, especially as I imagine it on other people’s lips:

How does Michael Brown’s mother magnify the Lord these days?

How does the cop who shot Michael Brown magnify the Lord these days?

How does the victim of CIA torture magnify the Lord these days?

How does the torturer magnify the Lord?

Difficult days raise difficult questions, and I don’t have any easy answers for them.

These days are filled with fearfulness, to be sure, and hope is often hard to find, obscured as it is by the deep shadows of the valley of death and despair.

Mary lived in just such a time, and while surely her heart was filled with all kinds of questions, something in her gave rise to a song of hope – a song that claims the great turning of the world is beginning to be realized in the incredibly complicated yet utterly human act of bearing life and light into the world.

The world is turning. That’s an obvious, scientific fact. It’s also a sign of hope for a time such as our own. On this shortest day of the year, the turning of the world is a welcome sign for it promises brighter, warmer days to come.

Still, as I put it in a note to you all last week, there is something profound and important about the practice of waiting, and about holding on to something as tenuous as hope while you wait. The late Harvey Milk famously said, “I know that you cannot live on hope alone, but without it life is not worth living.” Hope is not just an attitude, and certainly not a perspective reducible to unrealistic expectation. Hope is a practice, and one that requires not only knowledge of the present reality but awareness of future possibilities. Hope is what we practice when we plant a seed in the cold ground of late winter. Hope is what we practice when we nurture young children. Hope is what we practice when we pick up an instrument that we do not yet know how to play. Hope is what we practice when we make plans in the face of the fear of an uncertain future.

Advent is the practice of hope. We live in expectation that the hopes and fears of all the years are met again and again by the One who came into the world in the little town of Bethlehem all those years ago. In this season of short days, and long, cold, dark nights, it is easy to give in to the fear and let go of all hope. But a light came into the world in that little town. A light shown in the darkness. It still shines, and the darkness shall not overcome it.

May our souls be lit up by that light, and, like Mary, may we magnify its source in all that we say and do. Amen.