WWMD?

Old Testament: Micah 5:2-5

New Testament: Luke 1:26-55

Do you believe a song can change the world?

Mary’s song is called the Magnificat – named after its first word in Latin: “Magnifies.” It is truly beautiful, as we heard our choir sing part of Bach’s setting of the words just now. It has also been set to music many other times: Palestrina wrote 35 different settings for the words, Pachelbel wrote some 90 different Magnificat Fugues, and various other composers throughout history have been captivated and inspired by the language of Mary’s song. The words are irresistible to musicians, it seems; they are beautiful.

But, if we listen carefully – if we truly understand what Mary is saying – we will hear in these words not just beauty, not just a meek and mild and obedient girl, but a radical revolutionary calling for the world to be turned upside-down.

How do you picture Mary? According to Luke’s gospel (the only one of the four gospels that highlights her story) she was a Jewish girl, born into the peasant class in Galilee, an out-of-the-way part of the world that had been conquered by the Roman Empire. Scripture tells us she was engaged, but not yet married to Joseph, which means she was very likely a young teenager at the time the angel appeared to her. All these things contribute to a portrait of someone who could not be less powerful: a child, woman, a peasant, a Galilean, a Jew – none of these are markers of strength or privilege.

However, despite all these factors, Luke does not treat Mary as powerless. When Gabriel – an angel, a supernatural messenger of God – approaches Mary, he addresses her with words of great honor: “Hail Mary, full of grace!” It’s not only musical artists who have been captivated by Mary; many painters depict the angel kneeling before her, in recognition of her grace.

This “grace” that she is full of is not to be confused with submissive meekness; blogger Nancy Rockwell sees Mary’s grace playing out in her conversation with the angel and her later actions. When Gabriel speaks to her, she challenges him: “What sort of greeting is this?” she wonders. When he tells her she will become pregnant, she pushes back: “How will this be?” she asks. “God chose a spunky woman,” Rockwell writes. “[A woman with] courage, boldness, grit, [and] ringing convictions about justice. Not submissive meekness. … The power of God is never meek.”[1]

When I picture Mary, I’m thinking less of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty and more of Katniss Everdeen and Hermoine Grainger.

Rockwell goes on to point out that, while many women in the Bible are characters in domestic settings – baking, drawing water from a well, taking a bath, fussing around in the kitchen, sweeping the house – Mary is never portrayed in scenes like this. Instead of a love for housekeeping, she appears to have a love for adventure. Over and over again, we find her traveling. As soon as the angel finishes talking to her, it seems, she sets off on her own to see her cousin Elizabeth. Months later, she will travel with Joseph to Bethlehem; shortly after that, they will become a family of refugees on a life-and-death flight to Egypt. Once it’s safe, they’ll travel back to Nazareth. Then they’ll journey to Jerusalem for annual pilgrimages. Mary will make one last trip to Jerusalem (at least, the last one Luke tells us about) when Jesus is crucified. Perhaps it is Mary’s “bold, independent, adventuresome spirit” that led God to choose her for a radical mission.

At this point, it’s pretty clear that Luke views Mary not as an ordinary teenage girl, but as a powerful prophet. In the Old Testament, prophets are sometimes given words to say, but often they’re given tasks to do: God tells Ezekiel to eat a scroll; Isaiah has to walk around naked for three years; Hosea is called to marry a prostitute; Jeremiah has to publicly smash clay pots. All these actions are meant to symbolize a message from the Lord to the people. God wants to communicate not just with words, but with human bodies. And Mary is no different: she is called to bear a child – to bring life into the world, symbolizing the way that God is going to bring new life into the world through Jesus.

But what will that life look like? This is where things get dangerous and threatening, because Mary refuses to be a silent prophet.

“God has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts,” she sings, “bringing down the powerful from their thrones and lifting up the lowly; filling the hungry with good things, and sending the rich away empty.”

These words are, quite literally, revolutionary. She is talking about emperors falling from power and peasant uprisings. She is talking about the top one percent losing what they have while those in poverty receive blessing. She is talking about upending the whole social order.

“An urban legend surfaces occasionally in church circles, claiming that the military junta in 1980s Guatemala banned the public recitation of Mary’s words.” Scholar Matthew Skinner explains that there is no evidence of this ban, “but if it did happen,” he says, “it would have indicated that the political bosses [really] understood what [Mary] was saying.”[2]

And she is not just speaking privately. She sings the Magnificat in the home of her cousin, Elizabeth, whose husband, Zachariah, is an official temple priest. The temple priests were in a position of some authority in society, allowed to provide a level of local governance among the people. If I had to reimagine this scene in contemporary America, it might look something like a 13-year-old African American girl, unwed and pregnant, standing in the home of her congressman uncle and reciting a political manifesto calling for the country to immediately adopt socialism.

Actually, we don’t have to imagine a contemporary version of this scene, because we have a real-life example of someone with the bravery, grit, and determination that characterize Mary. Her name is Malala Yousafzai, and she is the youngest ever recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Malala was born in 1997 in the Swat district of Pakistan, the daughter of Ziauddin Yousafzai, a Sunni Muslim poet, school owner, and activist. In 2008, when she was just eleven years old, she spoke to a local press club: “How dare the Taliban take away my basic right to education?” she asked. At the time, the Taliban was growing in influence in the region, banning television, music, and girls’ education. The BBC was looking for a unique way to report on what was going on in the region and sought a schoolgirl to act as a blogger. None of the parents felt safe enough to let their daughters do it, but Malala, a seventh-grader, volunteered to write anonymously.

She wrote honestly and fiercely, describing the dwindling numbers of girls coming to school due to the Taliban’s edicts. The Taliban then moved on to attack and destroy schools in the area, prompting Malala to critique the response of the Pakistani military: “It seems that it is only when dozens of schools have been destroyed and hundreds of others closed down that the army thinks about protecting them.

Had they conducted their operations here properly, this situation would not have arisen.”[3] 

(Again, this is a seventh-grader!)

Over the next few years, Malala continued her activism. She was the subject of a New York Times documentary and began appearing on television to speak out in favor of girls’ right to education. In 2011 she received Pakistan’s first National Youth Peace Prize. As her public profile grew, she received death threats. These did not deter her, and in October of 2012, when she was just 15, a masked gunman stopped her bus as it took her and a dozen other girls home from school.

“Which one of you is Malala?” the gunman demanded. No one said anything, but a few girls looked her way, and the gunman fired three shots. She was rushed to the hospital and spent over a week in a coma. She was then flown to a hospital in Birmingham, England, to receive intensive treatment. Despite her injuries, she made slow but steady progress and, three months later, was discharged for rehabilitation.

Less than a year after being shot, Malala continued speaking out – not just against the Taliban, but against the Obama administration’s use of drones in Pakistan. “Innocent people are killed in these acts,” she said, “and they lead to resentment among the Pakistani people. If we refocus efforts on education it will make a big impact.”[4]

What better illustration could we find of Mary’s assertion that “God has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly”? If you’ve ever seen Malala in interviews, you know she has a beautiful spirit – she radiates kindness, peacefulness, and grace. She can also do magic tricks! Her beautiful spirit helps to magnify the prophetic message she has about education and nonviolence. I think Malala is the perfect example of a modern-day Mary.

“[Mary’s] restlessness beautifully characterizes Advent,” Skinnner writes. “[This is] not a season of slowing down or shopping, but a time when Christians should survey the world and shout to God, ‘Enough already!’ Her revolutionary song embarrasses those of us who prefer to count our [own] blessings. Its lyrics expose how docile and faltering we are in comparison to Mary. About her, poet Thomas John Carlisle wrote, ‘An offense against our apathy / this pathetic refugee mother.’”[5]

Several years ago, the catch phrase “What would Jesus do?” – WWJD? – was very popular. And, of course, it’s great to try to live up to Jesus’ example for us. However, I don’t know about you, but it can be a bit daunting, since Jesus was not just fully human, but also fully God. Can I ever really live up to that?

Perhaps, instead, we could ask ourselves, “What would Mary do?” WWMD?

What would Mary do, faced with the reality that, ever since we invaded Afghanistan in 2001, the United States has been engaged in continual warfare, even if there are fewer “boots on the ground” now than there were five years ago?

What would Mary do in response to the racial injustices that persist in our country: the incarceration and death rate for African American young men; the disparity between college graduation rates for black and white students; the levels of poverty that persist among minority families?

What would Mary do about the number and frequency of deaths due to guns in this country?

What would Mary do in response to the levels of food insecurity that exist in our own state, where 11.8 percent of our population – more than 900,000 people – do not know where their next meal will come from?

What would Mary do, faced with the fact that close to 25,000 people in Virginia experience homelessness at some point during the year?

What she would never do is throw up her hands, as I have at times, and say, “Well, it’s just too big a problem. There’s nothing that can be done.”

No, Mary did not sit back and accept the injustices of her world, and neither can we. She spoke out. She acted in faith. She gave birth to a son, and she taught him about the topsy-turvy, upside-down nature of God’s kingdom. And he grew up to say things like: “The last shall become first and the first shall become last” and “Blessed are the poor.”

Mary would not be silent in the face of adversity. Mary would sing. What will your song be?

Preached December 20, 2015, by Rev. Joshua T. Andrzejewski

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[1] Nancy Rockwell, “No More Lying About Mary”
www.patheos.com/blogs/biteintheapple/no-more-lying-about-mary/

[2] Matthew Skinner, “The Most Powerful Woman in the World” 

www.sojo.net/articles/most-powerful-woman-world

[3] “Diary of a Pakistani Schoolgirl” BBC News. 19 January 2009. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7834402.stm

[4] “Malala Confronts Obama” CNN. 11 October 2013.
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2013/10/11/obamas-meet-with-malala/

[5] Matthew Skinner, “The Most Powerful Woman in the World”
www.sojo.net/articles/most-powerful-woman-world