This is an excerpt from a sermon that changed my life last Christmas. It reminds us that true, authentic Christian spirituality is not about us. True, authentic Christian spirituality is about GOD, Emmanuel. If you think, "Um, Duh" please read this! It's got so many more layers than just the obvious. The sermon is about Christmas songs.
"The practice of singing special songs around the birth of Jesus in many ways reaches back all the way to biblical times. If we look to the Gospel of Luke chapters 1 and 2, we find there what we might call a mini Christmas hymnal. There we find 3 or 4 passages of Scripture that clearly have a musical or poetic feel to them, and the church has seen fit over the centuries to put them to music. The first, of course, and the most famous, is Mary’s Magnificat, which we’ve just read. Then, we find Zechariah’s prophecy (Zechariah and Elizabeth were, of course, the parents of John the Baptist. Elizabeth was a relative of Mary the mother of Jesus). Third, we have the song of the angels seen by the shepherds in Luke 2, and finally we have the song of Simeon, who appears to have been a priest at the temple in Jerusalem when Jesus is brought there as an infant; that is also in Luke chapter 2. But three of these in particular, the Magnificat, Zechariah’s Benedictus, and Simeon’s Nunc Dimittus (the traditional title of these songs is derived from the first few words of these verses in Latin), these three are called canticles in the Anglican tradition, which is to say that ideally they are to be sung or chanted. All three of these feature quite prominently in the Anglican prayer books, and are used daily in morning and evening prayer. So, they have played an important role in the shaping of Anglican spirituality. This evening, we are going to be looking in particular at Mary’s Magnificat, and I want to look at three things this song tells us about true Christian spirituality. So, three things that Mary’s song teaches us about true Christian spirituality, that’s what we’ll be doing tonight.
The first thing that this song teaches us about true Christian spirituality is that God is at the center of it. God is at the center of true Christian spirituality. Now this is actually kind of a subtle idea I want to communicate to you, so it will take a few minutes. Some of you are probably already thinking: “Of course God is at the center of Christian spirituality, everyone knows that. That’s perfectly obvious.” Well, okay, you might be right, we might know it, but I’m not at all sure that we live it. I’m not sure we really feel that way, or that we know this reality existentially. To know something about it intellectually is not the same thing as knowing it in the core of who we are. So let me try to explain to you what I’m talking about, and then you can decide whether these are things you’ve really experienced.
Listen carefully to some of the things that Mary sings about God here, starting in v.47: “my spirit rejoices in God my Savior…He has looked on the humble estate of his servant…he who is mighty has done great things for me…he has shown strength…he has scattered the proud…he has brought the mighty down… and (he has) exalted those of humble estate…he has filled the hungry, and the rich he has sent away empty. He has helped his servant Israel.” What do we notice here? The primary focus of this song is about what God has done. He has done this, and he has done that, and he done this too, and these other things, and all of this he has done. There is very little about what Mary has done, or what humans have done, or are doing. There are a few things here and there, and we’ll perhaps talk about them, but the focus is very much on what God has done. You see God is the primary mover, the primary character, if you will, the primary actor in Mary’s song. In Mary’s spirituality, God is not just an idea out there, a philosophical conviction, or a worldview component, or something like that. The God that Mary is singing to is living and active in her life and in human history. And a God like that can’t help but be the center of one’s spirituality. Let me offer a few illustrations that might help to explain this.
I was reading the other day a joke about the Anglican church; evidently a few centuries ago someone satirically, humorously raised the following scenario: what would happen if the bishops of the Anglican church were to vote that God didn’t exist? And if this happened, what should happen to the church? If the church was to decide that God didn’t in fact exist, could the church just sort of amend its theology and keep on going? You know sort of say, ‘Well it turns out that we’ve been wrong about that God part, but we’ve got some other good things to offer, so we’re going to keep going.” The satirical reply to this scenario was the following: “If the church were to vote God out of existence, well, the church could still operate; the church as an institution could survive very well without God, because it hardly bothered with him as it was.” Now, the question I want to put before you is whether this scenario also describes how many us live much of the time; That when you dig down into our lives, when you dig down into what is really going on below the surface, we find out that the prime mover in our spiritual lives, the main character in our spiritual lives is us, its not really God. Is that how it should be? Is that what’s reflected in Mary’s song?
Some of you may be thinking that I’m up here suggesting that Christian spirituality is passive, that Christianity is quietest, that we need to just “Let go, and let God” that kind of thing. I don’t think I’m saying that; I certainly don’t believe that. I fully believe that the Christian faith requires our whole-hearted participation. But, what I’m pointing out to you is that somehow, in Mary’s universe, it turns out that the main person, the main actor in her spirituality is actually God. Somehow, he showed up in all this. You see, somehow the God Mary sings about here is active in her life and active in human history. And that’s really the question I’m asking here: do you know a God that is active in your life? That’s doing things in your life, that’s at work in human history? Do you believe that’s who God is? Or, is God for you more like a good idea up there, kind of a worldview component, a theological conviction or something like that? I fully believe in the importance of worldviews, philosophy, and all that, but I believe the God of the Bible is more than those things. He’s active, he’s living, he’s at work. That’s what Mary is singing about. If we don’t believe in a God like that, I doubt we can really sing.
Let me put it to you in one other way: I sometimes tell people that when I’m on my deathbed, you know what I want to talk about? I want to talk about what God has done. I want be able to say to the people around me, “Can you believe what God has done? Can you believe how he showed up in my life and in our lives? That’s so much more valuable than talking about what I’ve done, whatever that might be. Do you believe in a God who can be spoken of that way?
The second thing Mary’s song tells us about true Christian spirituality is that it is a paradoxical mixture of humility and joy. Christian spirituality is a paradoxical mixture of humility and joy. We’ll start with humility. You don’t have to read the Magnificat very closely, to pick up on the way it reveals Mary’s deep humility. She says in verse 48: “For God has looked on the humble estate of his servant.” And the virtue of humility is then referred to in a number of other ways throughout the rest of the song. And what we see here in Mary’s life is really quite typical of biblical spirituality. We have a real hard time believing what I’m about to say, but it really is true…and that is that God often uses unlikely people, we could say unqualified people, in very powerful ways. Think about Mary. She seems an unlikely candidate to be the mother of Jesus, the mother of God, the mother of the Savior of the world. She’s presented as not too much more than a peasant woman. Remember, there’s no room at the inn, so she has the savior of the world in a barn? Such a strange story.
Or, think for example, looking back into the Old Testament about David. He’s an important character. Do you remember when the prophet Samuel was going to anoint the new king of Israel? I Samuel 16:6: “When they came, Samuel looked on Eliab, Jesse’s son, and thought, “Surely the Lord’s anointed is before him.” But the Lord said to Samuel, ‘Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him. For the Lord sees not as man sees; man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” A very famous verse.…Then all the rest of the sons are brought before Samuel, and they are all rejected. Finally, they remember, “Oh yeah, there’s one more.” The youngest son, David isn’t even there, because he was out tending the sheep; in other words, no one thought that he could possibly be the chosen one. They bring him in, and Samuel says, “Actually, this is the one.”
A little later in David’s life, think of David and Goliath. David wasn’t in the army at all, but was sent by his father to bring food to his brothers who were on the front lines in the war against the Philistines. The giant Goliath comes out and taunts the Israelites. David hears this and says that he will fight Goliath. His brothers are infuriated at him. Saul says he is but a youth. Goliath thinks that they’ve sent a boy out to fight and says, “Am I dog, that you come at me with sticks? I’m going to feed this boy’s carcass to the birds.’ Of course, David wins. Think of the Apostle Peter. During the hour Jesus needed him most, when he was being arrested and tried, Peter explicitly denies his relationship with him three times. God restores him to become one of the greatest leaders in the early church. Think of the Apostle Paul, who formerly persecuted the church and oversaw Christian disciples being put to death and imprisoned. He also became one of the greatest leaders in the early church.
You see, I would argue that until we truly absorb how unqualified we actually are to serve God in any significant way, we probably won’t be used by him very seriously. Let me put a sharper point on that: I don’t care if you’re here tonight and you think that everything you’ve gotten in your life, you’ve gotten because you’ve worked hard, and because you basically deserved it. That might well even be true. But, I want to tell you very clearly that God’s economy doesn’t work that way. Until you and I gain a deep sense of how unqualified we are to serve God, I really doubt we’ll do much for him. Its only when he begin to realize this, that I think we start to approach God as if we really need him to show up, and that’s when I think He’s a lot more likely to.
Now, we also find in Mary’s song the presence of joy. She sings, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.” There is almost an exuberance that one can feel here. I said earlier that the Magnificat reveals a paradoxical mixture of humility and joy. What do I mean? Well, we don’t usually think these two things can go together. We think, “If you’re really humble, that might be good, okay. The bible certainly commends humility. But, let’s be honest, we’re really humble only if we’re miserable. We’re humble when we’re kind of losing the game of life. When we’re getting basically trampled on by others.”
On the other hand, it feels to me, and maybe this is just me, but it feels to me that we often think that joy comes through a lot of different ways, okay, but basically to be joyful means you’re winning. Winning in all kinds of different ways. You went to a better school, you’ve got a better relationship, you have a better job, you make more money, you’re better looking, you’re smarter,…basically when you’re winning you have joy. When you’re losing, you have humility.” Is that too far off from how we think?
True Christian spiritually brings these two things together: deep humility and profound joy. How? Well, because we’re not supposed to be at the center of true Christian spirituality, as we’ve been talking about. God is. And knowing him brings true humility because of we are in relation to him, and true joy because of who he is in himself.
In the late 19th century, a writer described Mary’s paradoxical mixture of humility and joy in this way: “Where, in so few words, shall we find blended together such assured faith, exalted joy, reverential adoration, sweet humility, and modest reserve? These feelings, in minds of a more common cast, are not easily combined in their due proportions; but here they breathe together in entire unison, expressive of a mind attuned to the perfect harmony of truth. The faith, the joy, the triumph, are apparent…. but chastened by humility, which dwells on “the low estate of the handmaiden,” and by the reverence which speaks of “God my Saviour.”
So, let me close by pointing out very briefly one more element of true Christian spirituality that is highlighted in the Magnificant. True Christian spirituality will give us a song really for God. There is a big difference between singing to God, and having our own song for God. We sing all the time, I don’t think that at all means that we have our own song for the Lord, which to me feels like a much deeper, a much more mystical thing. It is the difference between singing some words on Sunday, and as Mary says here, “Having a soul that magnifies the Lord.” We read earlier from Romans 12, and I think it gives us a fuller vision of what it means to have a song for God: “I appeal to you brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.” This begins to take the idea of song, worship, and so on into a much broader context. What would it mean for your whole life to be a living sacrifice to God? That your act of worship is to give your whole life to him? I can’t answer that question for you, I hope you’ll think and pray about that over this holiday season."
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