Pondering The Magnificat at The End of The World…

I’m stumped. Fear will do that to you.

The Magnificat is a song that Mary sings in Luke’s Gospel account. It goes like this…

My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord,
my spirit rejoices in God my Savior; *
for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant.
From this day all generations will call me blessed: *
the Almighty has done great things for me, and holy is his Name.
He has mercy on those who fear him *
in every generation.
He has shown the strength of his arm, *
he has scattered the proud in their conceit.
He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, *
and has lifted up the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things, *
and the rich he has sent away empty.
He has come to the help of his servant Israel, *
for he has remembered his promise of mercy,
The promise he made to our fathers, *
to Abraham and his children for ever.

I am scheduled to preach on the 22nd and I am struggling to pull my sermon together. It’s the Fourth Sunday of Advent, we’re reading the Magnificat, and many of us feel it is the end of the world we once thought we knew. It’s an apocalypse. I know that’s how I feel. Politics across the globe. Climate inaction.

I’m still so angry about the results of the Presidential election and what it says about the state of Christianity in the US that it’s hard to see straight. And I’m preaching to a “purple” church and would rather not leave my priest with a mess to clean up. Yet, here we are staring the Magnificat in the face.

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

Current estimates put the combined wealth of President Elect Trump’s cabinet at $340 billion. America is a hot mess right now and it’s about to become more messy.

Luke’s Mary had some pretty astonishing ideas about what it would mean for God to be present fully in the world. Many have compellingly argued that this is a revolutionary hymn. And they would not be wrong. The ideas are certain;ly revolutionary. The call to a radically different life where the status quo is inverted is revolutionary. It would get a lot of people killed trying to actually live it in the heart of empire during those first couple of centuries of Christianity.

All I know is that we routinely mistake privilege for blessing when the blessings of God are for those on the fringes of society, the oppressed, destitute, the lowly, and lonely. We cannot call ourselves Christ followers while we sit comfortably in our middle class lives believing that our situation in life is a blessing.

There’s something else we’re being called to here at the end of the world.

Here’s some more Bonhoeffer. This is from an Advent 1933 sermon he preached.

“The song of Mary is the oldest Advent hymn. It is at once the most passionate, the wildest, one might even say the most revolutionary Advent hymn ever sung. This is not the gentle, tender, dreamy Mary whom we sometimes see in paintings.…This song has none of the sweet, nostalgic, or even playful tones of some of our Christmas carols. It is instead a hard, strong, inexorable song about the power of God and the powerlessness of humankind.”

I’m going to breathe and pray a bit. I trust the homiletical process.