How can this be?

Mary's song invites us into active participation with the Dream of God.

He has brought down the powerful from their thrones
and lifted up the lowly;

he has filled the hungry with good things
and sent the rich away empty.

Luke 1:52 - 53

This week, I’ve been reflecting on Luke 1:26-56, one of my favorite biblical passages. It includes the annunciation (the announcement to Mary of her pregnancy), Mary’s visit to Elizabeth, and Mary’s Magnificat (her disruptive, subversive song!). There is something to this story that centers on the experiences of women (pregnant women!) that I keep returning to. I love that two women are carrying and birthing the events of God’s arrival.

I love how quickly Mary leaves to go and be with her cousin, her friend! I imagine Elizabeth and Mary pulling together their collected knowledge of pregnancy and birth – drawing from their mothers, friends, sisters, and women in their communities. I imagine their conversations moved quickly between topics – jumping from worry over not having felt the baby move to the expectation of who the babies would become. I imagine them touching each other’s bellies, feeling kicks, or troubleshooting morning sickness as they talked about how these babies would change the world. I imagine, that as the babies grew within them, Elizabeth and Mary’s excitement, anxiety, and expectations grew as well.

Birth is something we’ve all been part of in one form or another. It is physical, messy, and uncontrollable. This story grounds us in our bodies and to the wonder of God with us. The wonder of something that we cannot understand or explain and even some days believe. This story gives us permission to ask, as Mary did, “How can this be?”

Historians and scholars agree that women in antiquity used music, song, and dance to express themselves and pass down stories to future generations. It is likely that these cousins, these friends, Elizabeth and Mary shared songs during their time together.

Kelley Nikondeha writes: Mary didn’t fight. Mary sang. She stood in the tradition of Deborah, a wise judge and mighty warrior, singer of the oldest song in scripture. She channeled the canticles of Hannah and Judith and the mother of liberation Miriam. Following in the footsteps of her ancestors, she composed laments, victory songs, and the range of traditional choruses in between. Songs were her work of resistance, her response to the injustice she witnessed and likely suffered in Nazareth. 

Mary sang. In her song, she is declaring that God is for the oppressed, for the marginalized, for the lowly. Lowly is not a metaphor for spiritual humility, it is her actual social standing. In Greek, it means: misery, pain, persecution, and oppression. Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes: This is not the gentle, tender, dreamy Mary who we sometimes see in paintings; this is the passionate, surrendered, proud, enthusiastic Mary who speaks out here. Mary is declaring that God is not coming only for the powerful, God is coming for the oppressed, for the marginalized, for the lowly, for her. This is the Kingdom of God. This is God’s Dream.

In the 1980s, the Guatemalan government banned public recitation of Mary’s Magnificat. Her song is too subversive, too political, and too dangerous to an empire looking for power and submission.

So what does this mean for us? I think it would be easy to breeze past this passage and say things are not so different now, nothing has changed — there is still violence, poverty, hunger, and abuse. There are still people, especially women like Mary, in the world who are lowly and oppressed. Even here, among all of you, we continue to experience death and depression, stress and disappointment, burnout and financial burden, disconnect, and exhaustion. If things are not getting better, what is the invitation of Advent? Has peace arrived or not? What I keep coming back to is the tension of Advent – the here and not yet — the waiting for peace to be born, and also it arrived in a baby all those years ago. 

I believe God invites us to become pregnant with divine possibilities and give birth to the Kingdom of God. To gestate peace then make way for God’s Dream to emerge from our lives. Remember what we said about birth — it’s messy, physical, unpredictable, and out of our control — but birth is also hopeful. If you’ve ever held a brand new baby, you have experienced this hope, this possibility. Mary understood this even before she gave birth that night in Bethlehem. Before she held Love in her arms and named him Emmanuel, God with us.

Martin Luther said of Mary’s song: she sang it not for herself alone but for all of us, to sing it after her. This is why the Guatemalan government banned it, there is something to these words. I believe if we choose to sing it with Mary —  it places us not only in relationship with the living God, who is the source of all hope and joy, but in relationship with the God who sees the suffering world and pulls us together into the struggle to co-create a new kind of kingdom. The kind where the King is born to a young, poor mother, wrapped in swaddling clothes, and laid in a manger. How can this be? 

As the old hymn says: a thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices, for yonder breaks a new and glorious morn. My prayer for you, in the coming days, is that a thrill of hope breaks through the suffering and heartache, and you begin to sing Mary’s song with her — finding your place God’s Dream for the world.

Wishing you a Merry Christmas and a peaceful ending to 2024 -

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