Luke 1:46-55

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;
for the Mighty One has done great things for me,
and holy is his name.
His mercy is for those who fear him
from generation to generation.
He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
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.
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.”

I knew that foot surgery or not, I just had to preach at this, our celebration of the Feast of St. Mary the Virgin. But, of course it wasn’t until last Sunday that I worked out exactly how this would happen—how a combination of scooting, hopping and sitting would allow me, your incapacitated rector, to make her rather unbeautiful way to this chair to speak about the peculiar beauty of one named Mary, the Mother of God.

Last Sunday after preaching from this very same chair, I got up to hop and then scoot back to my seat when Mark Taylor, who was serving, came over to me. Thinking that he was there to take back this microphone and to reclaim and move this chair, I began to hand him the microphone, when he held out his hand and whispered to me—”I’m here because I don’t want to see you to have to hop back to your pew!”

“Aha” I thought, self-consciously “It must look pretty awful, pretty un-beautiful to see the rector hopping up and back to preach in the midst of a beautiful Anglo-Catholic liturgy.”

For me, the contrast is even greater today as we celebrate St. Mary the Virgin, for we have the hopping, unbeautiful and incapacitated rector doing her thing at what is meant to be an especially beautiful and graceful celebration of Mary, the one who helps us understand what God’s beauty is all about.

And yet, of course, this is the very contrast that our faith tradition and our theology love—how the incapacitated and unbeautiful are a window onto the beauty and fullness that is our God, how those without mobility—physical, economic and societal—reflect back to us something about how God relates to the world and to us.

And so to Mary—Mary, by virtue of her gender (female) and her station in life (poor), belongs in the category of those born into a kind of incapacity and social immobility, and therefore, those familiar with living, by the world’s standards, an unbeautiful and diminished life.

We know this about Mary, herself, but her words in our Gospel for today, emphasize it even more. Having been told that she has conceived and is carrying the Messiah of God, Mary declares that God “has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant,” using the very same word she uses at the Annunciation when she declares “Behold the handmaid (or “servant”) of the Lord. Be it unto me according to your word.”

In both cases, the word she uses is the feminine form of the word for slave. The use of this word may speak to Mary’s utter obedience and willingness to hear and say yes to God’s invitation to bear God into the world. But it may also speak to a sociological reality within early Christianity. That reality is this—in the 2nd Century, if you were looking for Christians, the group you would be sure to find them would be among slave women, a group that was one of the most powerless and incapacitated groups of the time.

And so Mary, herself, and the song she sings testify to a God who comes to do what is unbelievable in the eyes of the world—to proclaim the dignity of those the world believed have no dignity, to proclaim as beautiful those who live unbeautiful lives, to pronounce the immobile and incapacitated as worthy and whole.

For Luke, of course, none of these states—the undignified, the poor, the unbeautiful, the immobile or incapacitated—none of these states—are symbolic of something internal to the human person. No, Luke speaks literally in terms of physical and social status. The poor and those without dignity are literally poor and, therefore, given no societal dignity. The unbeautiful were the maimed and, therefore, socially outcast, the immobile are those who are paralyzed and afflicted, not just for a short recuperative time but forever, and the incapacitated, well, you understand where I’m going. And so Luke’s Mary is proclaims that God bestows dignity and wholeness on these—those on account of literal incapacities have been X’d out by the society and the religion of the time, rendering them invisible.

I was at the U-district farmer’s market in my little scooter last Saturday when I realized that there in that thriving little marketplace, was an invisible little network of people who were not completely able bodied—people on walkers or scooters or crutches or in wheelchairs who were all looking at life from the perspective of curbs and rough pavement and the effort it took to do anything. For me, of course, being a part of this group was temporary; for most of the others it was forever. As I looked at us, I thought to myself. Oh, my God, these are some of the ones that Luke’s Mary is proclaiming are favored in God’s eyes. And yet how can this be, for these are the unbeautiful, the maimed, the vulnerable, the funny-looking, the needy? How can these be the ones that God favors, dignifies, and proclaims to be whole?

The odd and, for once, strangely satisfying answer I got back to my question was this, “Because I said so.”

Because I say so….because God speaks the world into being and when the world grows old, speaks to one of the least in the world who then responds, “:Be unto me according to your word.” Because through the Word made flesh God lives a human life and raises every human frailty and indignity to be a place where God can be encountered—both the literal poverties and incapacities that Luke focuses on and the many other, less literal, poverties and incapacities we encounter in our own little broken everyday lives.

When my son, who was about 8 at the time, was told that his father and I were getting a divorce, he began hopping on one leg instead of walking on two. Worried about what it could be, I took him to the doctor who pronounced that there was nothing wrong with either of his legs. This information, however, had no effect on him and he chose to get around.

So for the next month he hopped on one foot to get on the school bus, hopped around on one foot at school, hopped on one foot to the breakfast and dinner table and hopped around on one foot while playing with his friends.

Over time, as I watched him, it finally came to me—he, my eight-year-old, was expressing the wound and the incapacity that his little family was suffering, an incapacity and a wound, that were not, of course, literal and physical, but that were real nonetheless, frailties that put us all on the outside looking into what seemed to be other people’s normal family lives.

Oh, Mary, lowly and invisible, may your words so magnify God’s dignifying word spoken to the poor that we remember to treat them with dignity.

And through the incarnation of your son, may we see our own and others frailties as the strange, even beautiful place where God will surely meet us.

Mary, bearer of the eternal word and mother of us all, may God’s compassion for human frailty so fill us through you that we must embrace our own and others frailties as the place where God meets us.

Back to Sermons