Magnificent

Luke 1:46-55

July 22, 2018 • Mount Pleasant UMC

Video Opener: Rachel Greenlee

When we filmed that video, I couldn’t help but think of the old story about a little boy in Sunday School who, the teacher noticed, was furiously coloring at the table. She walked over to him and asked what he was drawing. “I’m drawing a picture of God,” the little boy said. The teacher smiled and told him that was great, but no one knows what God looks like. And without missing a beat, the little boy said, “They will when I’m done.”

Sermon Study Guide

This morning, we’re beginning a new series that will take us into the fall, focused on story. Who doesn’t love a good story? When my kids were little, our bedtime routine always involved stories. Cathy or I or sometimes both of us would help them get tucked into bed, and before nighttime prayers, we would read a book or two. I noticed that, at a certain age, they wanted the same three books read every night; those books we could probably still quote from memory! And then they moved onto chapter books, and we would read a chapter or two every night; I especially enjoyed reading through the Chronicles of Narnia. I will never forget sitting on the couch, reading the chapter of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe where (spoiler alert) Aslan comes back from the dead, and Christopher suddenly sat up and cried out, “That’s Jesus!” There is power in a story, especially a story that sneaks up on you. As we grow older, we tune in when we hear a good story being told, and we spend hours and hours taking in stories in visual form on television and at the movies. Some of those stories are good ones for our souls and others of them…well, not so much. But if we’re honest, we’ll recognize that there is something within us that longs for a good story, a true story, an eternal story, a story that matters, one like what J. R. R. Tolkien described in his epic trilogy The Lord of the Rings. Take a listen.

VIDEO: “The Great Stories”

Even Tolkien’s story has endured as long as it has because it has eternal roots, Christian symbolism all throughout it. Tolkien knew, as we should know, that the only story that ultimately matters is the one that God has been telling since the beginning of time. But we don’t know that story, by and large, or we’ve forgotten that it is a story. Often, we reduce the Bible to a set of propositions, or a formula for how to get saved, or we pick and choose verses here and there that back up what we already believe (and then we post them on social media), but we forget that there is a story that is connected to all those disconnected parts. So for the next few weeks, we’re going to attempt to reconnect the story to our lives, and reconnect our lives to the storyteller. There is a bigger story he wants us to live, and it is a magnificent story. So for the next couple of weeks, we’re going to be looking at what this story is, and then we’ll spend a few weeks looking at the pieces of the story itself, beginning in creation and ending at the return of Jesus, the end of time. In between all of that, my hope and prayer is that you find your life in the story, because what story you believe is the story that runs your life (Smith, The Magnificent Story, pg. 5).

This morning, however, we begin with God, the author of the story. Now, when I say that, I don’t mean God literally wrote each word of our Bibles. As far as we know, there are only ten words God literally wrote with his fingers; we know them as “the ten commandments” (cf. Exodus 31:18). But God is the “author” of the story in the sense that everything that happens comes from him; without God, there would be no story. He does not dictate the story; he inspires it. Paul used the words of an ancient poet when he described the relationship between God and the story: “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). God, working through human beings, is writing a story that is meant to make the world more beautiful, more good, and more true. And we get hints of that along the way, especially in a song sung by a young virgin who has just learned that she is pregnant.

Traditionally, Mary’s song is called the “Magnificat,” which is the first word in the Latin translation of the song. It’s the same root word as our word “magnificent” or “magnify.” In fact, that’s how it’s often translated: “My soul magnifies the Lord.” The NIV that we read this morning says, “glorify,” but the word Mary uses really means “to enlarge, enhance, expand” (Smith 6), which is what we think of when we think of “magnify.” When you use a magnifying glass, as I sometimes have to do these days to read small print, it makes everything seem larger, bigger, and even more focused. So picture this young girl, somewhere between 13 and 15 years old, suddenly pregnant and not in the usual way, having been told she’s going to give birth to the Son of God, now visiting her relative Elizabeth (an elderly woman who is also pregnant)—and think of the words you might use to describe Mary at this point. Overwhelmed? Frightened? Ready to run away? Mind blown? But instead of reacting the way we think we might, Mary turns to God and she “magnifies” him. That doesn’t mean she makes him appear bigger. It means she looks more closely at him. She moves in closer. She makes more room for him in her soul, her spirit, her life. God is not bigger, but Mary’s perception of him is, her understanding of him is clearer. He is more magnificent in her eyes. And what that causes her to do is to see herself in the midst of the story God is writing. It reminds her she is be rooted in the promises made to her people, and it helps Mary see her situation as part of a bigger story.

So, according to Mary in this passage, what is that story? And who is this God who is writing this story? That’s the question we want to focus on for the next few minutes, with Mary’s song as our backdrop. Now, of course, as Rachel Greenlee’s video alluded to, one song can’t begin to tell us everything about the God who is telling this story, but Mary’s song does tell us three primary things. It paints three images of God as a revolution-maker. The first image is this: he scatters the proud (1:51). He will deal with those who refuse to see themselves in relation to God; we talked a couple of weeks ago how that’s what pride is—excessive confidence in ourselves, and a refusal to see that we have any need of God in our lives. Mary is living evidence of someone who has put her pride aside. Do you remember her reaction when the angel Gabriel comes to tell her she will be the mother to the Messiah? Mary was just minding her own business, getting water for the day if tradition is to be believed, when God’s message from the angel disrupted her life and changed everything for her. Her only question in the whole conversation has to do with “how.” “How am I going to have a baby, since I’ve not been with a man?” Once the angel answers that “how” question, Mary puts aside her own needs, her own will, her own pride and famously responds, “May your word to me be fulfilled” (1:26-38). Mary recognizes that everything good in her life has been from God, that he would not lead her somewhere bad now. He will not leave her or forsake her. God owes her nothing; she owes him everything (cf. Bock, IVP New Testament Commentaries: Luke, pg. 45). Those who recognize God’s place in their lives, in the world are the humble, the blessed. Those who do not are called proud, and they will, one day, find themselves up against the creator of the universe who will “scatter” them.

That image of “scattering” is an interesting one. When I think of “scattering,” I picture a handful of something that you just throw up in the air and let the wind take it where it will. Or I picture taking one of those white dandelions with all the fuzzies and blowing on it, so that the seeds scatter everywhere (much to the chagrin of your neighbors). The word Mary uses certainly contains those sorts of images, but it also can mean “waste.” Waste in the sense of “throw out, get rid of.” Now, that’s a frightening image to me. The proud, those who believe they have no need of God, will be scattered in that way. In the end, those who have no need of God will find themselves separated from him. God will not force anyone who does not want to know him to spend eternity with him. C. S. Lewis put it this way: in the end, either we will say to God, “Thy will be done” or God will say to us, “Thy will be done.” Mary sings of God scattering the proud.

The second image Mary sings of is related: God lifts up the humble (1:52). God is not interested in our labels or our ideas of who is “worthy” and who is not. The story is told of Maretus, a poor man in the middle ages, who would wander from town to town throughout Europe. In one Italian town, he became ill and was taken to a hospital that treated those who were considered “strays.” While laying on his bed, he heard the doctors talking to one another in Latin, the language of the educated. They said that since he was a “worthless wanderer,” perhaps they might use him for medical experiments. The doctors had no idea that Maretus was a scholar and could understand every word they said until he spoke up and said, in Latin, “Call no man worthless for whom Christ died” (Barclay, The Gospel of Luke, pg. 16). The one who is humble is one who has stopped worrying about gaining and keeping titles or labels and is simply interested in being a servant of Christ. I think of the Apostle Paul, who was, even by our standards today, incredibly educated and could have probably become a famous rabbi or a university lecturer. Yet, do you remember how he most often identifies himself when he writes a letter? As a “slave” of Christ—some of our modern translations clean that up to say “servant” but Paul really most often calls himself a “slave.” God responds to a heart like that; God exalts the humble. He’s looking for those who aren’t trying to make themselves seem better than they are.

Sometimes we get confused and equate humility with weakness, or with someone who fades into the background or something like that. But humility is actually a position of strength. The humble know that God is on their side and they’re not busy trying to puff themselves up to gain a large following. The humble know themselves well enough that they don’t need to demand their rights or be considered equal to or better than everyone else. They know their worth in Christ, and that’s enough. I find this tends to come with age and a long walk with Jesus. Whenever I think of someone who is humble, I always think of Dorothy, who has gone home to be with Jesus now but when I knew her and would get a chance to talk to her, she was always pointing not at herself but at what Jesus had done in and through her. When Dorothy pointed away from herself, it wasn’t some sort of false humility. It was out of a heart that longed for people to know him instead of her. She was not worried about what her obituary would say about her; she only wanted her legacy to be a gathering of people who knew Jesus. God exalts the humble.

Then there’s this third image from Mary’s song: God fills those who are hungry (1:53). God is concerned about those who do not have enough. Sometimes we like to try to “spiritualize” this verse, as if Mary is focused on those who are “spiritually hungry,” but the witness of the Bible from start to finish is that God has a concern for the physically hungry, for the ones who, through circumstance or bad choices, have to go without. He is especially concerned, the Bible says, for orphans and widows, for the economically disadvantaged in every culture. So in the Old Testament, we have the story of Ruth, an immigrant woman who has no way to make a living. She goes out to the field of a relative of her deceased husband and begins to glean. Gleaning was and is an act where the grain or the crop that is left at the edges of the field is picked up and given to those in need. Ruth gathered it for her own family, but there are folks today who still do that for food banks and church pantries. That’s just one way God calls his people to care for the ones in need, to feed the hungry. In fact, in Jesus’ story/parable of the last judgment, one of the ways people will be judged is whether or not we gave something to eat to those who were hungry (cf. Matthew 25:31-46). And we’re held to that expectation because God is like that, God’s heart leans toward those in need. Mary dreams of a day when no one has too much while others have too little, where we are not afraid to give away what we have for the sake of someone in need.

Being in need isn’t necessarily just about food. Such passages make me think of a friend of mine, Ed, who would often be in trouble with his wife in the winter time because he would over and over again come home without his coat. When she asked him where his coat was, he would say, “Oh, well, l met this person who didn’t have one, so I gave him mine.” Ed didn’t think about it; his wife did when she had to go buy him a new coat every week! But Ed simply responded to people the way he believed Jesus would have him to. That doesn’t mean we all need to give up our coats or our food or anything in particular. What is required of us is to reflect heart of God, and that heart is toward those who are hungry and in need. So the question is what are we doing? We can’t all do everything but we can do something. Do we remember to bring food for the food pantry at 14th & Chestnut? Our barrel in the lobby stands empty a lot of weeks. Out of our abundance, can we do something more regularly to help those in need? God fills those who are hungry, and he uses your hands and mine to do that.

When you read Mary’s whole song, one of the things you can’t help but notice is that Mary sings in the present tense, as if these things had already happened. She sings as if God has already scattered the proud, as if God has already lifted up the humble, as if God has already filled the hungry. Mary can sing with that kind of confidence in the present about the future because she knows how God has already been in the past. If God has been like this, he will continue to be so in the future, and even more so. Underlying this whole song is the theme of what some scholars call “loyal love,” though if we’re looking into the Old Testament for a description of what is happening here (and Mary’s song is deeply rooted in what we know as the Old Testament), the word we would land on would be hesed. That is God’s defining characteristic in the Hebrew Scriptures, but it’s a word, as I’ve shared before, that is nearly impossible to translate. In some translations, you will find a made-up compound word that is one attempt to convey what hesed means: lovingkindness. But that’s not quite it. The best translation goes something like this: when the one who owes you nothing gives you everything. That’s what Mary is singing about here, isn’t it? When the one who owes you nothing gives you everything. That’s Mary’s experience; that is ours as well. God owes us nothing; we owe him everything. He is God; we are not, and because of that, he gets to set the pace for life and determine how life works best, not us (cf. Bock 45-46).

When we get a vision of who God is, who he really is, we begin to see life differently and we understand the story differently. As we will discover in the coming weeks, the truth is this: God is writing a very different story than what we think he is writing. He’s not writing the story we want to tell, after all. He’s writing his own story. We want him to write the story the way we think he should, and often our prayers reflect that attitude, as we tell God specifically how he should answer our prayers. But God, to quote the poet, is his own interpreter. So in the next few weeks, we’ll look at the story he is actually writing rather than the one we think he should write. But, for now, what does it mean that God is who he is rather than who we think he ought to be? It means we need to learn to get on board with his program rather than expecting God to get on board with ours. It means we pray not for him to bless our plans but to be included in the working out of his plans. It means we remember that the church is not ours but his. And it means we always remember that the worst thing is never the last thing, because our God is a God of turning things upside down, bringing life out of death and hope out of hopelessness. Ours is a resurrecting God.

From 1992 to 1995, a horrendous civil war took place in the nation of Bosnia. What made it particularly terrible is that the three factions involved were all tied to particular religions. The Bosnian civil war was rooted deeply in faith, as Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats and Muslim Bosniaks struggled against each other for power. No one was innocent of bloodshed. Over 100,000 people were killed, 2.2 million people were displaced and it is estimated that over 12,000 women—mostly Muslim—were raped. All of this happening in a religious context. In the midst of that conflict, a musician named Verdan Smailovic did the only thing he could think to do: he went out into the devastated streets of Sarajevo and played the cello. Smailovic was not untouched by the war; he lost family and friends in the fighting. But he was not a solider, he was not a politician, he was not a cleric. He was a cellist, and so he did what he could to bring beauty to an ugly situation. In full formal attire, Smailovic sat in the ruins of the city, even when there was sniper fire, and played his cello. People gathered. People who had no food gathered to listen. People who were grieving gathered. When he was asked why he thought people came to listen to him in the midst of their own hardship, Smailovic said, “They were hungry, but they still had soul.” There was something in Smailovic’s music that transcended the ugliness of the world around them. He became an instrument of God to bring hope and healing to a broken and war-torn world (cf. Smith 14-15). Several years later, he returned to Sarajevo and played in a Holiday Inn hotel lobby. I thought you might like to have a taste of his music. Take a listen.

VIDEO: Verdan Smailovic in Sarajevo

Perhaps the author Fydor Dostoevsky was right when he said, “Beauty will save the world” (qtd. in Smith 16). Smailovic’s music is a reminder that there is another world, beyond the hurt and hopelessness we might see around us. There is a God who is magnificent, who is majestic, who is telling a different story. There is a God we get glimpses of when we see beauty around us. So, here’s a challenge for you for the next few weeks. Let’s begin to open our eyes to the extraordinary ways in which God is working in our world. So here’s what I’m suggesting we do: as a reminder of where God is working and what God is like, I want to ask you to begin collecting photos of beauty. Most of us carry these high definition cameras around in our pockets. Let’s put them to good use. Rather than focusing on our next selfie, I want to urge you to be on the lookout for beauty in the world, and when you see it, snap a picture of it and text it to the number you see on the screen. We’ll be building a gallery online of your photos, a place you can go when you need to be reminded that God is up to good in the world. The link for that is in the bulletin this morning, and we’ll also link to it on the Facebook page and the website. The more pictures you send me, the bigger the gallery will grow. This is our project for the week as we begin to think about God’s bigger story. Let’s pray.