December 11, 2022

Luke 1:46b-55

And Mary said, “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…

This reading sets forth Mary’s reaction to the news that she is with child. It is not the initial message, with the visitation by an angel. This moment comes afterwards when Mary goes to visit her cousin Elizabeth. The Bible passage states that Mary makes haste there, probably looking for some comfort from her older relative Elizabeth who is also with child, notably John the Baptist.

Elizabeth had been filled with the spirit and spoke to Mary of her blessed state. This is what Elizabeth says:

‘Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leapt for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfilment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.’

The encounter with the angel and then with Elizabeth are the basis for a prayer some of you might know, the “Hail Mary.”

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you. Blessed art thou among 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.

Mary responded to the unexpected praise by her cousin with what has become known as the Magnificat, or the Song of Mary. This is also a prayer, a prayer of wonder in acknowledgement of God’s blessing through her forthcoming child. “Magnificat” derives from the line of the prayer in which Mary says that her soul magnifies the Lord.

How might a soul magnify the Lord? Our commonsense notion of the word “magnify” is to make something look or seem bigger. Tough to do so with God. Of course, the Greek word used here can mean “make great” both literally and figuratively. It can mean to declare something as great, meaning to praise or to celebrate. That makes a little more sense in this moment.

But it made me wonder. Mary is in an arguably strange situation. She has been visited by an angel and praised by her cousin, who was infused with the Holy Spirit at the time. So, Mary has been given a clear sense that this is a good thing. But I know personally that I would not have faulted Mary if she had been a little worried, a tad bit concerned. I am guessing not every person she met was infused with the Holy Spirit telling them to say, no really this is a good thing.

Regular people do not suddenly have babies out of the blue. And while it is always nice to praise God, what are we to make of this miraculous birth and particularly Mary’s predicament? I think Mary’s unrecorded reactions to being pregnant under these circumstances were probably more like someone like one of us.

For example, when the angel came with the news, Mary said that it was not possible. Not, thanks for dropping by, but this cannot be true. Mary then makes haste over to her cousin’s house to discuss what has happened. You can run off in haste to share good news, of course, but sometimes you make haste because you really, really need to speak with someone about something. Something not necessarily, entirely, immediately good news. We can imagine Mary in both ways, pleased and puzzled, happy and scared, filled with joy and with trepidation.

This brought me back to the word magnify. In the Gospel of Luke, the evangelist has magnified a certain image of Mary. In one sense, it is an image larger than any potentially accurate account of Mary. Why? Because the only accurate account could be discovered thousands of years in the past, known only to Mary and her few confidants, if there were any besides Elizabeth.

And then there is the notion of magnification, of making something seem greater, the making of the image of Mary and her quick embrace of this situation. We think of Mary as an impassive and pious figure, usually dressed in blue. There is not really any emotional content to these images, just a representation for religious purposes. Accepting, quiet, peaceful.

By the way, why all this blue coloring? Mary is always depicted wearing blue, usually light blue or sky blue. This is thought to symbolize her status as a virgin, pure like the blue skies above. And, of course, as the so-called Queen of Heaven, sky blue would be a sensible color. This color palette was also associated with the Byzantine Empire whose royalty adopted blue as one of their signature colors and whose royalty also made many of the rules about what we now imagine as normal for Christian imagery and theology.

This knowledge about Mary’s signature color made me wonder about the color blue in the Bible. The word “blue” appears in the King James Version quite a few times. But there was no word for blue in Ancient Hebrew.

Two words are often translated as the English word “blue” in modern translations—King James is modern in the scheme of things. One such word was tekelet which was a type of dye used for coloring cloth, and yet it was not blue but violet. Another word was kakhol and was a type of eyeliner. But it was also not blue, more often black. Eventually kakhol is treated as the Hebrew word for blue in the 19th century. Tekelet is used for light blue. But it never meant that for the writers of the Bible.

The holiday season is a time of magnification. Some things become more important than others, some messages become louder than others. That is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is worth paying attention to the possibility. Why this story rather than that one? And if we are paying attention to one message, what might we be leaving out?

Sometimes the messages are being inserted for some purpose. Think about Mary clad in blue. In medieval Christian times, much about religious life was conveyed to the public through art. Most people could not read. But they could look up at a mural in a church and see a woman dressed in blue and they would know that was Mary. They could associate all that they had heard about Mary with a color and then with the image. There is no evidence that Mary wore blue. It was a signal. Pay attention, Mary is over here. Pay attention and remember. Remember what? Remember what you have been told.

But what if you have not been told anything?

Mary is for the most part not an important figure in American Protestantism. For Catholics, she is quite important. Remember that prayer I recited before. It ends, “Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our deaths, Amen.” That line refers to the Catholic belief that the saints can serve as intercessors between this world and God. Pray to a saint, who by definition is up in heaven, and there is thought to be a greater chance that that prayer would be heard by God. Mary is considered by some to be a super-saint, a greater intercessor, with even greater access.

Protestantism generally does not have the same notion of sainthood or of the pathways to salvation. And for that reason, Mary is a lesser figure, one who gets trotted out for Christmas and Easter.

Look around our sanctuary. Does Mary appear anywhere? I looked last night. I could not find her. Maybe I missed something.

And do you know who also is no where to be found? Jesus. No depictions of Jesus. Well, to be perfectly accurate, there is one. In the image of Saint Christopher, there is the image of a child on his shoulders. Christopher is said to have carried an unknown child across a river, and the child was revealed to be Jesus. This legend occurs hundreds of years after Jesus’ death, but it is at least one image in our sanctuary.

We have a golden cross up on our altarpiece. Is that not a reflection of our dedication to Jesus? I supposed that depends. Are we looking to the sufferings of Jesus as the core message of our faith? Is that what we seek to magnify?

Early Christians did not use the cross as a central image. They looked to Jesus as a shepherd, as a fisherman. Someone to gather the people together and to tend to them. Once Christianity became the imperial religion of Rome, however, the cross came into more common use. I find it interesting that the images of Jesus as someone gathering and leading a community would be deemphasized around the time that someone else was being lifted up as the one gathering and leading Christians, this time the emperor of Rome, Constantine.

Jesus being crucified is magnified, becoming the dominant image. What else was magnified by that choice? Jesus suffered, so think about that when you are concerned about your own suffering. Jesus was crucified, died, and was buried but rose on the third day. So, focus on the miraculous aspects of Jesus’ life. Jesus rose up into heaven and sits at the right hand of the Father. So, turn your eyes toward salvation through Jesus and the one true church.

The Early Christians were a group of tight-knit and peaceful people, known for living good and pious lives. That was attractive to Rome because it was a set of qualities that would be good to instill in the people of the empire. Well, good qualities except for one—peaceful. The Romans had no use for peaceful people. Peaceful in their normal lives, yes, but not peaceful when it came to the desires of the empire. Rome could not endure as an imperial power without constantly pushing for conquest and expansion. So, when Rome became Christian, there was no chance that the Roman Empire was going to become pacifistic. And so Roman Christians became warlike.

And regardless of what the Bible tells us, regardless of the lessons of Jesus, regardless of the meaning of Advent and Lent and Holy Week, the message of peace inherent to the Christian faith has not been magnified. A few small groups like the Quakers and the Amish follow that message, but most do not. What one chooses to lift up and to magnify can become far more important in practice than the dominant messages of the Gospels.

Help the poor? Nope. Build workhouses to keep them alive. Build prisons if they won’t behave. Help the worthy, not the lazy, and keep the Protestant work ethic strong.

But the Protestant work ethic is not in the Bible. It is a cultural artifact of the Reformation and it boils down to a simple idea: one must work consistently as a sign of one’s personal measure of grace. One’s blessed state in the eyes of God. In other words, it is a way of showing off how much God loves you.

You see, God favors those who keep busy. So, the logic goes, you better be busy or at least look busy. And if you don’t, then your suffering is your own fault.

I have been rewatching episodes of “Call the Midwife” a British television show set in the 1950s and 1960s. One bit of cultural navigation required is when they refer to the workhouses, places where the poor would be sent. Families were split up immediately, husbands away from wives, children from parents, siblings from each other. You stayed and worked there until somehow you were magically no longer poor. It generally involved terrible conditions, limited food, endless and often pointless work. Work for adults and work for children.

Fortunately, we Americans never stooped to such wretched practices, right? Yeah, sarcasm alert. We indeed used poorhouses or poor farms for much of the 19^th and early 20^th century. These facilities could operate side-by-side with prisons because being poor was such a terrible social state that it amounted to being little more than a criminal.

There is a large example of one north of Boston in the Town of Tewksbury. It began as one of three large almshouses in Massachusetts, along with ones in Monson and Bridgewater. Eventually, a hospital was added to the site and a large majority of its residents were defined as “pauper insane.” In case you were wondering, the farm is still partly in operation.

One famous inmate at the Tewksbury almshouse was Anne Sullivan, teacher of Heller Keller. Sullivan was sent to the hospital at the age of 10 after her mother died and her father abandoned the children. Her brother died of tuberculosis after a few months. Anne Sullivan was allowed to transfer to the Perkins School for the Blind as she was losing her eyesight. This move likely saved her life. She described what she saw at the Tewksbury almshouse as indecent, cruel, melancholy, and gruesome.

She left when she was 14.

The almshouses started to go away after the creation of the Social Security Act in 1935. Poverty would in time no longer be the leading cause of death of the elderly in the United States. May such days never return.

But I would like to point out that right now in most of the United States, an unemployed man without a disability has little to no ability to gain aid from the government. Not a runaway teenager. Not a homeless person lost in the troubles of their mind. Not someone too mentally ill to work but too poor to find any consistent health care. We do not even have workhouses to send them to. Why is that huge gap in our country not being magnified?

If we were to step back for a moment and think about our current moment in time, what do you think is being magnified? What ideas and theories, what questions and concerns? What is being magnified and what is not? What do we care about?

One change is to the nature of work. How we work. Where we work. I think that is changing and we are trying to sort that out. People are more likely to leave a job that dissatisfies them. People are more likely to work from home. People are less interested in taking jobs without flexibility of hours or location. And people are reluctant to work if you pay them poorly—why that seems so puzzling to some is beyond me.

And there are models of different work/life balance around the world which have long been looked down upon by American employers as unrealistic. Perhaps we are too proud to think that the Germans or the Swedes have developed anything we need to learn. Honestly, I think we are used to a certain grueling model of work that has suddenly stopped working. Some would like to cram everything back into our 20^th century economic system and our 19^th century morality.

But that is but one way of choosing what is to be magnified. Is it the best? There is a saying among ministers: no one ever claims on their death bed that they wished that they worked longer hours. They wanted more time with family, with friends, out in the world. That is true for the overworked professional and the exhausted rank and file worker. There is a lot that could change and there is a lot that perhaps should change.

And, I might add, it is worth asking those same questions about what it means to be a church.

Obviously, Sunday mornings are not what they once were in the world of Christian life. We can lament that fact or we can imagine how it might be different. And not how to make Sunday morning at 10:30am livelier. Whether there aren’t other ways of responding.

What about the rest of the week? What can a church become in the life of its people, in the life of its community, beyond an hour of worship and some coffee and cookies to follow?

Why are churches not open and busy every day of the week?

Why not have people in churches learning, gathering, even having coffee all week?

Why not think about what it would mean to be welcoming to people beyond worship?

For people who are not commuting to work every day but who still would like get out of the house to be with other people, to talk with other people.

What would that church look like? What would it involve? And, if it worked somehow, what would we have to say to these newfound friends in our midst?

I think we might want to consider what we have to say, what we have to offer, what it means to be church in this new and unfamiliar world. And then we would need to figure out a way of helping such people in our midst. How we might magnify the Lord, and magnify the best parts of who we are, so that this house of God might become a home for God’s people.

Not just for those people who know the way already. But those people who suddenly have found themselves sorting it all out, sorting out the new ways of this life and this nation, after a strange and difficult time.

Sometimes the message from God we need to hear is old as time and sometimes it is out of the blue. Sometimes there is nothing new under the sun and sometimes a brave new shape of hope comes forth unbidden into the world. And sometimes, honestly, you just have to fake it until you make it.

But it never hurts to ready. It never hurts to welcome our neighbors. It never hurts to love the children of God who find their way to us.

Well, sometimes it hurts. It hurts because it is unfamiliar. It hurts because it means change. It hurts because honestly it makes us rather uncomfortable. Sometimes it hurts. But it is always the right thing for us to do.

Amen.