Magnify

We are so close to Christmas now, we can almost touch it. Depending on how the calendar falls, the fourth Sunday in Advent can be as much as a week away from Christmas, as it was last year, when Christmas fell on a Sunday and the candle of love was lit a full 7 days earlier.  This year, Advent is on tiptoes, looking over the sunrise to tomorrow, and we are filled to the brim with expectation, but also with many mixed emotions. 

We want to believe that all is calm and bright, and yet we know that it is not so, for many, in Newtown, and beyond, and for some it will be a long long time until they will find hope or joy at Christmas, or any day. 

And yet, may they find, even over the long time of grief and sorrow, over the heartache and the shattering, may they find healing through love. 

Please pray with me.

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all or our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our rock and our redeemer.

Mary of Nazareth, the mother of Jesus is a complex figure in the larger Christian story. We first meet her when the angel announces that she will bear an extraordinary child, and in our reading this morning, she meets with her cousin Elizabeth, who also is experiencing an exceptional pregnancy at an advanced age.  Mary is the one who brings forth the savior and wraps him in swaddling clothes, and cares for him through infancy and during the flight to Egypt, to young manhood when he leaves home to preach of the good news. 

Mary has other key scenes in scripture: from the wedding at Canawhere she intervenes to ask Jesus to take care of the wine, to the foot of the cross where she helplessly watches a terrible end to her son’s life.  Mary is one of the first disciples, since she comes early to an understanding that Jesus was to play a unique role in the history of her own Jewish people. 

After the resurrection, and as the church began to form, Mary is present. And over the centuries, the importance of Mary grew. Building on these biblical stories, and on the cultural archetypes of femininity and fertility, over time, Mary became the iconic mother figure of Eastern Orthodox art and the center of devotional practices in Western Europe. She is a kind, gentle, approachable sacred figure.  Although she never became equal to the trinity, over the ages, many have found mother Mary to be more understanding than the Godhead of Father, Son and Holy Ghost.  The reformers—Luther, Calvin-- found the expansion of her role to be unscriptural and dethroned her as queen of heaven who intercedes with God to answer prayer. So as Protestants, our connection with Mary is less developed.  But many continue to find solace in her divine feminine aspects. Even the Beatles called on Mother Mary who comes to us in times of trouble to whisper words of wisdom. Let it be… 

In our reading, Luke gives her words, which are poetic and powerful. Mary declares that God is intervening in history. A new way of life is coming. The power structures of the present will be supplanted by new relationships. The poor will be fed, the proud brought down, the lowly lifted, the rich sent empty away.  Mary’s song echoes the words from Hebrew scripture of Hannah, mother of Samuel, who praises God for the birth of Samuel after a long time of infertility. Hannah’s song, like Mary’s, connects the personal and the political. Hannah’s good news is good news for Israel, for the world, for creation, because through her will come kings of Israel.  Mary’s is that the savior is coming. In both stories, God intervenes and is making right what needs to be so made.  

As Mary accepts this role of bringing forth a new age of redemption, she says, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my savior.” 

Such an interesting word: magnify. 

Magnify means to make bigger, larger, more apparent, grander, bring to focus and attention.  Why do we magnify things? With print on a page, we do it to see what is too small for aging eyes to see or to bring to light a detail we would ordinarily ignore. We use a magnifying glass or machine or eyeglasses to help us appreciate what is written or objects around us, but which we cannot perceive.

In Mary’s song, she says, my soul magnifies the Lord. And so we can ask, “ how does that word magnify apply to God?” 

After all, God is already greater, wider, bigger, more complex and more awesome than anything we can imagine.  How can we, or any human, Mary included, magnify God?

Perhaps one way to think of this is that it is not so much that God gets bigger or more magnificent but that our view of God becomes bigger and wider. And this has a particular resonance at Christmas when we contemplate the idea of God becoming human, coming as Emmanuel God with us. 

The idea that Emmanuel has come through this human being, Mary of Nazareth, to be with us, is so inconceivable that it took the church about three centuries to work out the meaning of Jesus birth and to come up with a creedal statement, which approximated what might have happened in Bethlehem. With the scientific advances of twenty centuries behind us, we know that we live in a 12 billion year old universe.   And so we can only begin to appreciate the magnificence of the idea that God has come to be with us. It is a mystery beyond all telling. 

In faith and awe we to want to give praise and thanksgiving for such a gift. As we enter into the mode of praising and rejoicing and being grateful, by recounting God’s marvelous works in our lives, our spirits uplift and our sense of grace and peace and joy increase. In fact, we are magnified in holiness by magnifying the Lord. 

This is nothing magical or complicated about this process, for it is part of practical psychology, plain and simple. It’s the way we operate as humans. We already know this, don’t we, in our day to day lives? Anything we focus on grows larger. It c n work in positive or negative ways. We can make a mountain out of molehill, or count our blessings.  It is a question of focus and choice. 

The focus on gratitude is not only in our Christian tradition but it a universal spiritual practice.  It is like taking a magnifying glass to our lives, and looking for the good and the blessing. A kind of appreciative inquiry.  I once heard from a Buddhist teacher to do this in a very concrete way. Count all the good things. If you have a car, count the tires and the engine and the steering wheel. If you have a mouth, count the teeth--- that would be 28 right there.  Fingers, toes, lungs.  And so on. Look at all the trees individually and be grateful for each, and not just the forest.

The idea of course is to bring to consciousness all those aspects of life that we do take for granted and yet form the basis  of our existence.

By observing and noting and taking in this bounty,  the Lord is magnified, for God is the source of all these gifts, which become more visible and more detailed, the more we focus on them.

By the way, we did this on gratitude Sunday, when we listed in alphabetical order all the things for which we were grateful. From my vantage point up front, I could see faces smiling and people becoming more happy as they remembered the overflowing of blessings we all have.  Magnifying the lord has the effect of making greater our own happiness. 

Magnifying  also has a more pragmatic and action oriented aspect. We magnify God when we act in ways that bring the good news of God’s love to people. Just this month, many in our church have magnified God. First through Abraham’s tent. Housing, feeding, helping 12 men who needed a bed and table of good food and a smiling face on cold nights. And in many other ways: The mitten tree, the angel tree,  the craft fair, the various donations made for our Christmas offering, the music of the choir,  the lovely advent festival and all the work of committees and boards to put together Christmas. All these and more magnify the Lord. 

And in our families: the loving selection of gifts, decorating, making plans and cooking and parties and tree trimming and attention to children so that they can enjoy this season with good spirits and happiness. All this and more, magnify the Lord. 

Even in the midst of acts that diminish the human spirit and destroy human life there are persons and ways of living that magnify grace and love. As we look around our state these past weeks, we have seen the actions of first responders, the courage of educators protecting, the resolve of police, the leadership of elected officials, and the wise speech of many trying to find a political answer to gun  safety. What we do, and how we do it,  magnifies the Lord, even if we are in the midst of tremendously difficult circumstances.  And that brings some hope, as people have tried, in some very small and meaningful ways to magnify the good and minimize the bad. Small gestures, small means, can magnify goodness, and bring love to life. 

But as we can magnify, it is also in our power to diminish. We can diminish the Lord, by our actions, our attitudes our way of life.  We diminish this glorious gift of creation when we fail to take into account the fragility of the planet. We diminish when we act in anger, refuse to reconcile, ignore problems until they explode under us, or reject the reconciliation offered by people who have harmed us. We diminish when the needs of the mentally ill are ignored and the violence inherent in the human condition are allowed to be magnified on the Internet, video games,  and in the media in the name of freedom of speech.  

On this 4^th Sunday of advent, as we wait just a little while longer, let’s remember what we are waiting for. It’s not a theological discussion of the incarnation, nor a creed. Nor is it  a scientific analysis  of the universe and how God has acted in the creative process to bring about life  on planet earth., although these are interesting topics in their own right.

In Mary’s song,  she declares that this savior will bring about a new way of life which is more  just and equitable. Yet  she was not giving birth to a political program but a person. We are waiting for a new born, an infant, a baby. Someone to love tenderly, and some one who teaches by his very presence of being a child, that love is the basis of God with us.

When we embrace this child to come, in love, we too like Mary, magnify the Lord. And when we embrace others in love, our spirits rejoice in God our savior. Amen