Sermon – Feast of St. Mary
St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, August 19, 2007
The Rev. R. Bingham Powell
Luke 1:46-55
Today we are celebrating the Feast of St. Mary. In a sense, we are always celebrating Mary here at our church. We have named our church after her and we are always surrounded by images of her on every side. We have statues, stained glass windows, icons, and pictures of Mary. There are at least nine artistic representations of her here in this room. We are certainly doing our part to make sure that every Sunday today’s Gospel reading rings true when it says, “Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed.” But, even though we are always remembering Mary here at our church, we put a little extra focus on her today, in our hymns and in our readings and we have our Annual Picnic this afternoon, for this celebration of the Feast of St Mary.
Our Gospel reading for the feast is her famous song of praise to God, commonly referred to as the Song of Mary or the Magnificat. The Magnificat is the end of a much longer scene in which Mary finds out that she is to have a child. The basic story goes like this: One day, an angel of the Lord appears to Mary. Initially, Mary is afraid, because when an angel of the Lord appears, it is not necessarily good news. The angel tells her not to fear though because she has found favor with the Lord. The angel goes on to share that Mary will bear a son and she will name him Jesus. Now, this news comes as a bit of a shock to Mary, because she is a virgin, she is engaged, but not yet married to a man named Joseph. This simply isn’t possible. But the angel replies that God will make it happen anyways - the Holy Spirit will come upon her and the power of the Most High will overshadow her - for with God anything is possible. The angel also tells her that this child will be called the Son of God. God is going to come down and be born as a human to this woman Mary. She will bear God into the world. To verify all of this, the angel tells Mary that her relative Elizabeth, who is well well well beyond the age of child bearing. Mary accepts the angel’s announcement, but as soon as the conversation with the angel is over, Mary runs off to visit Elizabeth to check to see if the angel had told her the truth. When she gets there, she finds that Elizabeth is pregnant, too!
This experience of Mary and Elizabeth falls into the long line of biblical stories about the unlikely pregnancy. We’ve heard one of these stories a couple of times this summer with God making the ridiculous promise to the 90-year old Sarah that she would soon have a child and become the ancestor of many great nations. The story is repeated and echoed throughout Scripture - in Isaac’s wife Rebecca, Jacob’s wife Rachel, and Samuel’s mother Hannah, among others. In these stories, God has flipped our understanding of the world on its head by choosing the least likely, even the impossible ones, for the most important tasks.
In seeing the impossibly pregnant Elizabeth, Mary believes the angel and she responds with the magnificent song of praise to God that we heard this morning – “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my Spirit rejoices in God my savior.” We can hear her joy in God shine through in these words. This joy that God has blessed her by lifting up her lowly self to bring God into the world. God has taken the lowly one, the unlikely one, and lifted her up to be the God-bearer.
There is a lot of up and down going on in this story. God is coming down to take on the form of a human, and Mary is being brought up to bring God into the world. Power is brought down and powerlessness is brought up. And in this song Mary proclaims that this is not just about her and this is not an isolated incident. “He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry will good things, and sent the rich away empty. He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever.” No, this song is not about Mary, this song is about how God works in the world. This is how God worked in her ancestors Sarah and Rebecca and Rachel and Hannah and in her relative Elizabeth. This is how God worked with her ancestors who were in slavery in Egypt, by bringing them up into freedom. Mary is praising God in this song because God is flipping this world upside down, using weakness for strength and powerlessness for power. God is signaling by coming down as a human and by using the lowly Mary to achieve that, that God is ending the injustices in this world. Mary is praising her God because her God is a God of justice, who remembers us in our lowliness and in our pain and strives for liberation. For with God, anything is possible.
And this is the story that has continued since Mary sang that song. This is the story that Jonathan Daniels, a young seminarian at Episcopal Theological School, entered into 42 years ago. He had heard Dr. King’s call for volunteers to help integrate the South. He initially wanted to go, but decided that the idea was impractical. He went to Evening Prayer that night, as he did every day. During the nightly singing of the Magnificat, he heard those words “He hath put down the mighty from their seat and hath exalted the humble and meek. He hath filled the hungry with good things.” He heard these words afresh and he heard them speaking to him. He knew he had to go help shine forth God’s justice that is proclaimed in Mary’s song. He went down to Alabama and non-violently fought alongside other Civil Rights workers. He gave up his own comforts to help lift up those without. While down there, he struggled to help break down the walls and barriers of segregation. For his efforts, he was arrested and went to prison. And 42 years ago tomorrow, he was released from prison only to be shot and killed protecting a young black woman from a sheriff’s shotgun, as she tried to enter a store. Upon his death, Martin Luther King, Jr. said “One of the most heroic Christian deeds of which I have heard in my entire ministry and career for civil rights was performed by Jonathan Daniels… Certainly there are no other incidents more beautiful in the annals of church history.” Jonathan was moved to be a martyr of the faith because he heard God speaking in the Magnificat.
This Magnificat has continued to move people to enter into God’s story of bringing up the lowly. Mary is pushing us to live into our baptismal promise to “strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being” so that God’s glory can break in. Most of us may not live into this as radically as Mary or Jonathan Daniels, but perhaps the Magnificat can push us all to do a bit more, to stop participating in an injustice when we see one or to take a step to end the myriad of injustices that surround us. For “my soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely from now on all generations will call me blessed.”