Advent 3- The Angel Visits Mary- Rev. Wendy McCormick- Dec. 15,2024
Advent 3 – The Angel Visits Mary
Rev Wendy McCormick
December 15, 2024
Two weeks ago, we looked at the story of the angel visiting Zechariah, a less familiar angel story of this season. It is interspersed with the more familiar story we read today. Old, childless Zechariah is visited by Gabriel and then loses his speech because he questions the angel’s declaration that his quote-unquote barren wife Elizabeth who is described as “getting on in years,” will have a child and a very important prophetic child at that. We know him as John the Baptist, and we heard from Wallace Bubar about John last week.
In between Zechariah’s encounter with the angel and the restoration of his speech after the birth of the child John the Baptist, Luke offers a parallel and contrasting story. Instead of visiting an aged man of the priestly class, Gabriel turns to a real nobody, a young unmarried woman, probably still a teen, of no particular station or connection, also to announce a most unusual and unexpected pregnancy. And young Mary asks a similar question to Zechariah’s, “How can this be?”
But then, far from being struck silent, she opens her mouth to sing praise to the God who is doing such an incredible thing through her, a poor Galilean girl. In her book, “Calling All Angels,” Rev Erin Wathen points out just how remarkable this is that in a matter of just a few verses in Luke’s telling, a man is silenced and a woman speaks – sings – the longest passage on the lips of a woman in all of scripture. Did you know that? I didn’t. Mary’s song, famously called the Magnificat, from the Latin for magnify – my soul magnifies the Lord – is the longest passage in the Bible on the lips of a woman.
When you study the Bible in seminary, as Kristin Ream is doing these days, and as I did so many years ago, one of the first amazing – and for some people, troubling -- things you learn is that this one book is actually many books and that none of them was printed until about 500 years ago. So for centuries, the scriptures were hand-copied, first as individual books, individual scrolls, and then eventually as manuscripts of the collected books of the one Bible. Not all manuscripts are exactly the same, and of course most have been lost. Many that remain are partial and damaged. Modern scholars work to compare manuscripts and to give special attention to the oldest ones we have. In the case of the oldest ones, all we have are fragments. A page of Isaiah here, a piece of Exodus there.
Which brings me to this incredible thing I learned in those seminary days so many years ago, something so amazing that I can still feel the excitement when I first heard it. The oldest existing fragment of scripture we have is a single verse from the book of Exodus. Chapter 15, verse 21.
“Sing to the Lord gloriously, horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.” The song is on the lips of Moses’ sister Miriam, and it describes how she and the other women celebrated the exodus with timbrels and dancing. “Sing to the Lord gloriously, horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.” It’s just a fragment, all we have of what we might guess was a longer song, and it’s the oldest piece of scripture in existence. On the lips of a woman. In the less old but more complete manuscripts which give us Exodus as we know it, we have, in the words of my Old Testament teacher, Moses who sings for pages.
So Erin Wathen’s insights about how Luke tells of the visit by the same angel and juxtaposes Mary’s song with Zechariah’s silence really impressed me. As she points out, Luke is demonstrating a great reversal right here in chapter 1 --- women who have been silenced, whether by manuscripts lost to history or by generations of custom and teaching, or by out and out patriarchy and misogyny, women are being given voice. And the men in leadership who have sung for pages and ruled for centuries are suddenly quieted as young Mary sings the longest passage on the lips of a woman in our Bible.
We have to wonder: Who is silenced in our world? To whom might such a great reversal grant a voice in our day? And what does it mean for those who have been silenced to not just speak up but to shout and sing? It’s hard for us to imagine, especially in this church where this pulpit has been held by a woman for so many years, this church which has welcomed and embraced this female preacher who has quite a lot to say and sometimes doesn’t know when to shut up.
Our circumstances are different. That pulpit reversal is very, very recent. Think of the centuries that precede us. And the many churches where it is still forbidden. We are privileged in this and other ways: Socially, culturally, religiously. But our story is about those who are not. Privileged people aren’t really part of this story. Instead, we are given a front row seat to what God is doing and being invited to consider what it means and which horses we might want to back in our own time? Who is being given voice? Who is being lifted up? And what does that mean for us?
As I’ve been reflecting on all of this, a chorus from Lin Manuel Miranda’s hit musical ‘Hamilton’ has been running through my mind --- the world turned upside down. The world turned upside down. It comes from the song titled “Yorktown,” which chronicles the unlikely victory of the ragtag American revolutionaries over the great British army. At the end of the telling of how it all went down, Alexander Hamilton raps:
We negotiate the terms of surrender
I see George Washington smile
We escort their men out of Yorktown
They stagger home single file
Tens of thousands of people flood the streets
There are screams and church bells ringing
And as our fallen foes retreat
I hear the drinking song they're singing
The world turned upside down
The world turned upside down
The world turned upside down . . . .
That’s what Mary’s song is all about. The world turned upside down. Like Miriam singing so many generations ago, a song Mary surely knew, “Sing to the Lord gloriously, horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.” Perhaps in her time Mary knew more of the words to Miriam’s long-lost song. Surely, she knew what Miriam was singing about. The world turned upside down when God defeated the greatest army in the known world and led the long enslaved and oppressed people of Israel out of Egyptian bondage and toward the promised land, freedom and self-determination. The world turned upside down. Her song parallels the song of Hannah, a childless woman like Elizabeth who had known the shame of quote-unquote barrenness, when she was blessed with the child Samuel in her old age and dedicated him to the Lord to take his place in the great story of God’s people.
The point is that in the visit from the angel Mary realizes and celebrates that these aren’t just stories we read in Sunday School and act out once a year in church – no, this is the God of Creation, the God of the Exodus, the God of Israel, who has acted before and is acting again, who is breaking into our world in the prophet John and the infant Jesus, God made flesh, to save the people, to take away their shame and their oppression. This God who from the earliest times has always intervened on behalf of those the world has oppressed, those who have been shut out and silenced. God did then and God does now.
We heard Mary’s words in our scripture reading. In a few minutes we will sing them. And then we will read them together as our affirmation of faith. There are countless musical settings of her words, the Magnificat. In the Catholic and Episcopal traditions, the Magnificat is sung or chanted in daily prayer every day. That’s how important it is.
And it should be sung – just like Lin Manuel Miranda’s chorus “the world turned upside down,” such monumental news can’t just be stated – it needs to be shouted and chanted and rapped and sung – it is only in poetry and music that these powerful words take root in us as they are meant to. So central are these words to God’s story and to the heart of our faith that we need to sing them with the same familiarity we sing “Silent Night” and “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer”. These words are the core of what our God is about in the Christmas story and in our world today.
As Mary shouts and sings her praise to God because he looks with favor on the lowly, as we join her song, we ask: Who are the lowly in our day and in our world? What if we didn’t just feel sorry for them but joined God in looking favorably on them?
She goes on: God scatters the proud, God brings down the mighty from their thrones. Seriously? How might we view the news differently if we realized our God is in the business of scattering the proud and bringing down the mighty, indeed the mighty who rule the nations, the uber-wealthy, the politically powerful? Perhaps we would join generations of oppressed people who have put their trust in the God of the Exodus, the God of Mary, despite all evidence to the contrary – despite all evidence to the contrary -- refusing – refusing -- to accept things as they are. It makes me think of an old spiritual from before the Civil War, “Oh Mary, don’t you weep, don’t you mourn, Oh Mary, don’t you weep, don’t you mourn, Pharaoh’s army got drownded, oh, Mary don’t you weep.”
That song became a protest song in the civil rights era. And indeed Mary’s song we read and sing again today is a kind of protest song. A song of resistance, keeping alive through centuries and centuries among downtrodden people the reality of our God which is that none of it is meant to be that way. And so each year God’s people are invited again to stand with the downtrodden and sing despite all evidence to the contrary that God scatters the proud and brings down the mighty, that God fills the hungry and sends the rich away, that God never forgets God’s own people, that God is at the end of the day a God of mercy. Oh Mary don’t you weep. Sing to the Lord gloriously. My soul magnifies the Lord.
This is our God. Our God who turns the world upside down. Who never stops longing for a world where all people have freedom and dignity, enough to eat and the chance to speak, a world of peace – shalom, wholeness, a world where justice and righteousness rule, not the selfishness and greed and violence that seem to be everywhere.
This is our God. Even on our darkest days, even when we can’t see it, even when we can’t seem to find any evidence, even when we are tempted to join the ways of the proud and the mighty and the rich and the full, turning our backs on all the need and pain that is out there. Even then. This is our God. The God of the Exodus, the God who comes to Zechariah and Mary and is born into a hostile and oppressive empire. This is our God. Still breaking into the world in ways that turn everything upside down, God is breaking into the world in the voices of those who are nearly invisible and never heard from, in hope and possibility given to those who have long since given up, in the very old and the very young and in those who have never been heard from before.
And perhaps if we listen to Mary’s song and join in singing it, we will begin to notice our God breaking in even in our own lives and in our hurting world. May it be so.
