12-23-2012 - Saints? Who needs them?! We do!

⁹In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, ⁴⁰where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. ⁴¹When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit ⁴²and exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. ⁴³And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? ⁴⁴For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy. ⁴⁵And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.” ⁴⁶And Mary said, “My soul magnifies the Lord, ⁴⁷and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, ⁴⁸for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; ⁴⁹for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name. ⁵⁰His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. ⁵¹He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. ⁵²He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; ⁵³he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty. ⁵⁴He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, ⁵⁵according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever.” ⁵⁶And Mary remained with her about three months and then returned to her home.

            As Lutherans on a whole, we don’t really normally know what to do with Mary.  We know for sure that we don’t want to be like those Catholics who came up with the idea that Mary was virgin born as well and who have festivals for her and pray to her.  But so often we end up discarding her in a misguided effort to not be like another denomination within our Christian faith and we miss out on her strength and her faith and the message of God that she sings.

            First off, lets talk about her strength.  Imagine being this girl, this young virgin who has an angel come to her and tell her that she will be the mother of God’s child, the mother of God Himself.  Now before jumping to the honor of this situation, of being chosen by God, consider how this will play out in her life.  Consider how low unwed mothers are seen in our current time.  So often portrayed as welfare queens or as having low morals, even if neither of those stereotypes is remotely true.  And if not looked down upon, they may be pitied instead, but hardly ever lifted up as examples of how one should be.  Now that that discrimination and intensify it a thousand fold.  As our confirmation class has seen in reading various parts of the Bible, women routinely ranked below men to begin with, and actually their main  value in society was procreation and they had to maintain their virtue and only be with the man that they married, or else immense amounts of shame would be attached to them, and to the man that they may eventually marry, although most likely an unwed mother would be cast aside by basically any man.  After all, Joseph is about to do just that, although quietly instead of publically shaming her, until Gabriel comes and tells him to marry her instead.  It takes an act of God in order for Mary’s honor to be maintained at all.  And even today we question if Mary even was a virgin, as theories abound about what really happened, so her morality and purity questioned even 2000 years later.  But yet she had the strength to say yes to God, the strength to stand up to all the negativity and all the hurtful things that would be said about her and to her the rest of her life, all because she was obeying the will of God.  So often we cower when we might lose a friend or make people look at us weirdly when we are asked to fulfill our callings, to spread the gospel of Jesus Christ.  But instead of cowering, Mary allowed her life to be changed and accepted all the consequences that this change would bring.  And we should take her as that example of strength and seek to match it in our lives. 

            Her faith is equally as powerful.  Faith is not something that is purely in our heads, but instead is complete trust in God.  Mary trusted that God would keep His promise and acted in light of that.  This ties into her strength well, because when we trust in God, when we trust that God is caring for us, then we are given the strength to act.

            And her faith and her strength and her experience with God influenced how she saw God and the song that she sings when Elizabeth declares that indeed God has been working in Mary.  For she realizes that God looks with favor upon lowliness, not upon power and might.  He looked with favor upon Mary, who would be an unwed mother, scorned by society, in order to show his love and compassion for all people, and especially those who are outcasts of society.  By being the son of an outcast, God placed Himself with all outcasts.

            Then, she also says that the mighty are brought down.  So often we think about the idea that the more faith we have, the more stuff we are going to get, or the more prestige or power, but instead God says that those who are high up shall be cast down.  It’s the complete reversal of what we imagine that we want, which is what the message of Luke is all about.  Those who are high and lofty, who are too full of themselves and whom others idolize, they will be pushed down in order to show God’s power and because they have worshipped the gods of self and power.

            It is quite the opposite of our assumptions, and yet we are called to live in the light of this reality.  We live in the light that gives warmth and hope to the lost and the outcast, the poor and the lame.  We live in the light of one who cares for the lowest of the low, who when we are at our most broken lifts us up, and holds us in his arms and claims us as His own. That is precisely the good news of God though, that at our most beat down, when we have no friends and we’ve lost loved ones, and when we don’t even know how to love ourselves, God is right there beside us, loving us each moment of our lives, reassuring us that we are never alone and never truly lost.

            And even for the proud, there is hope.  For once God has sent them crashing to the ground, they will be able to look up and see who truly has the power and who truly is king of all. And let us not forget that we may be in this group ourselves.  We too need to be cast down at times, because we see ourselves as the ones with the power, we see our gifts and our resources as things that we have earned instead of being given to us by God, in order to be used for His glory.  How often do we fall into the trap that the powerful have, which is fearing losing that which we have and holding onto it tightly, instead of freely giving it away, as our Father does with his loving grace. 

            May we always learn from Mary’s example.  May we find her faith in our lives, which strengthens us to love the outcast and the poor, and to remember our place in the world as a child of God, that we may do His will and not our own.  Thanks be to God.

Amen.