Luke 1:46-55
46Mary 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.”
There’s Just Something About Mary
Reverse our worlds
Holy One
Turn us around
Topple the thrones of our hearts
Send our egos away empty
And seat us at your humble table
To feast on your lasting grace
Amen
Mary…there’s just something about Mary…
When I was a little boy I wondered a lot about my Roman Catholic friends and why they had statues of a young woman in their church. In our right and proper Lutheran parish we were generally allergic to statues, even statues of Jesus, though there was a nice life-sized bust of Martin Luther that met you when you entered the Narthex, keeping his watchful Reformer’s eye over every passerby…
“Why,” I asked my father, “do they talk about Mary so much?”
“Well,” I remember him saying after a minute, “I guess if you want to get in good with someone, perhaps you appeal to their mom, right?”
He wasn’t being facetious, and he wasn’t being sarcastic, he was trying to explain to this young elementary brain that, well, there’s just something about Mary…
As I’ve grown older, though not necessarily wiser, I’ve come to see Mary differently, though. In a world where Oppenheimer and Barbie come out at the same time encapsulating two polar opposite events in tension-the ability to destroy ourselves and the ability to play-Mary, too, holds this polar-opposite tension inside her own being.
We all hold this tension in some way, right?
The ability to harm and the ability to help.
The ability to love and the ability to not give a care.
The ability for faith and the ability for abandoning all hope.
In the wombs of our souls we carry all sorts of things, birthing them into the world…with mixed results. And in my most honest moments I must face the deep truth that despite how I pray for thrones being toppled and the rich sent away empty, that means hard things for me perched on my throne of privilege with my full belly…
I hold within myself the ability to long for great change but the inability to fully realize what that would mean for me…
If Mary reminds me of anything, she reminds me that even God’s entrance into the world started with fear and doubt and trembling and humility and uncertainty.
The one who would cast the mighty down from their thrones first sat in a highchair. The one who would lift up the humble of heart was birthed by a visionary young woman the world only saw as humble, but who knew in her being that she was called.
There’s just something about Mary…
She is the unwed teen mother who holds in her womb unimaginable and unending possibility. All at once.
She is the Oppenheimer-Barbie, Barbenheimer if you will, paradox long before we knew about either, Beloved. And I’m not being facetious, and I’m not being sarcastic, I’m trying to explain to my ever-young heart why I’m so endeared to and yet perplexed by Mary. There’s just something about Mary…she is so relatable to me, not because I am her, but because I identify so strongly with all of the mixed up paradox she is.
She is a revolutionary, singing the Magnificat in the face of world powers destined to conspire against her and her family.
She is an immigrant parent, willing to do what it takes to keep her family alive, fleeing in the night to Egypt when Bethlehem was unsafe.
She is a proud parent, standing with her son through his peaks and valleys of life, urging people to listen to him when they are reluctant.
She is a worried parent, sometimes urging her boy to stay quiet in the face of opposition because she didn’t want to find him dead on the streets.
She is a grieving mother, not turning away even as her son was wrongly put on death row, dying in the hands of fearful power brokers.
While many revere Mary because she was Jesus’ mother, I revere her because she is me. She is my mother. She is the radical I aspire to emulate, and the parent I long to be.
And she is imperfect and yet perfectly redeemed by the one she would call her son.
She reminds me in all my paradox, all my imperfection, with all the good and the bad I birth in the world, that I, too, am perfectly redeemed by the one called the Son.
There’s just something about Mary.
An Endless Falling 