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Magnificat! Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis December 14, 2008, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Luke 1:39-56 Revelation 11:15-19
To magnify, says Webster’s New World, is at root, “to make much of, esteem highly, to worship.” These are the words which precede every later definition of the first word of Mary’s Magnificat. Then there is the so-called rare meaning of magnify: “to make greater in size, status, or importance, enlarge,” a meaning Origen rightly noted was not possible in relation to the God who could receive neither increase nor decrease. Finally we read a meaning suggestive of our sin: “to cause to seem greater, more important than is really so [to magnify one’s sufferings]” notes Webster for instance. But the instances are legion, and so this is where we must begin on the third Sunday of Advent, asking after that which we in fact magnify, which we cause to seem greater, which we allow to reign over our days; asking after those things which, when magnified, leave no place in the soul for Christ to be born. I remember, in this regard, Mr. Applegate, the rector of John Cheever’s novel The Wapshot Scandal. You who have been in these pews long enough may remember him too. Mr. Applegate had begun to think he heard of a Sunday morning, while distributing the bread and wine, the substance of his parishioner’s prayers and petitions….As he moved from one kneeling form to another he thought he heard them asking, “‘Lord God of Hosts, shall I…take up my green dress?’ “Shall I cut down the apple trees?’ ‘Shall I buy a new icebox?’ ‘Shall I send Emmett to Harvard?’ ‘Drink this in remembrance that Christ’s Blood was shed for thee and be thankful,’ he said, hoping to scour his mind of this galling illusion, but he still seemed to hear them asking, ‘Shall I fry sausage for breakfast?’ ‘Shall I take a liver pill?’ ‘Shall I buy a Buick?’….It was the feeling that all exalted human experience was an imposture, and that the chain of being was a chain of humble worries.” We begin, as we always begin, with our selves and our worries magnified. Silently we ponder the achievements not adequately lauded by our peers, the mistakes made too publicly, the rejection suffered unjustly, the embarrassment replayed endlessly until sleep finally comes-—our egos magnified even in our diffidence. These are but a few of the inconsequential details of human existence magnified and made consequential by our sin, crowding our days with our selves and disturbing our nights with trivia. Not so trivial, it would seem, is the magnification of more tangible worries. A portfolio which of late has been diminished and a fixed income that cannot be fixed so easily; the children no longer under our control if ever they were and presently playing in more dangerous fields; the symptom suggested by a friend’s death; the aching loneliness deepened around the table where so much more than bread is broken. These are the fearful and private chasms of privileged human insecurity magnified and, I think, made darker in this season of material expectation. Then there are those things we magnify together and with the encouragement of the nightly news: the terror that still threatens these shores, nations armed and on the brink of nuclear conflict, carnage unabated Darfur, Cholera stalking Rwanda, the Taliban taking hold in our absence, suicide bombs exploding in our presence. How can we magnify these things which already seem too enormous for our minds to comprehend? You know as well as I do that our magnification of all these things empties our souls and marks our days as well as our nights with a restlessness sleep cannot dispel. We are like travelers, says Karl Barth, “who can only stop but never settle down, who must always go on again when we arrive….We live and must die. We know truths and goals and meaning, but as our knowledge grows, the more our knowledge of the total truth and goal and meaning recedes. We scatter as we gather….We think the thoughts of eternity, but as we think it, we have to see that we have only thought something temporal and material, an absolute which is a monstrous relative.” In sum and in our restlessness, we magnify that which is relative. How, then, does it come to pass that the soul of one poor and inconsequential maiden can be said to magnify the Lord? “My soul doth magnify the Lord,” she sings for our sad sakes, this peasant who by all reasonable standards should be more taken with her out of wedlock pregnancy, with her espoused husband likely to be estranged from the start, with her mean estate, with a child sure to be rejected at birth. But no! Instead the virgin in whose womb God’s only begotten Son gestates magnifies the God who has magnified her. Quitting Webster, then, we turn in search of definition to Luke’s meaning of magnify. For according to Luke and modifying Mary’s Magnificat in the first place is the testimony that the God her soul magnifies is the God who first looked with favor upon her. Here only metaphor can do business with the miracle at hand. God looked upon Mary…God’s eye focused upon this unlikely woman…as light focused through a magnifying glass at noonday. Stopped in her menial tracks, bowed down under God’s gaze, Mary is bent beneath a ray so intense as to ignite the light of God’s glory within her. Because of God’s unmerited and unlikely regard, because her human existence has been magnified by God’s purposes, her soul is turned to praise God alone. “Even now I wonder,” muses Annie Dillard, “if I meet God, will he take and hold my bare hand in his, and focus his eye on my palm, and kindle that spot and let me burn?”: let the trivial, the inconsequential, the public and private insecurity too much with us, burn away so that-—in the words of the apostle Paul--another light might shine in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ; or in the words of the elder John, so that God may reign [in our hearts] forever and ever? Not first with God magnified do we have to do, according to Luke’s meaning, but with the God far above our lowly estate who magnifies our darkness by a great light as Christ seeks a place to be born. Then according to Luke and lending another meaning to Mary’s Magnificat, in the second place, is the fact that God did not look simply anywhere. God chose to be magnified precisely in that which was lowly, in that which the proud overlook or refuse to see. This is not only because we have magnified so much that does not finally matter, but because God is a God known only in hiding. Mary’s lowly estate merely foreshadows the stable where he is born, the swaddling clothes in which he is wrapped, the poverty in which he lived, the cross on which he died. “So much of society resembles that manger,” said the Rector of Trinity Wall Street! Perhaps this is the grace of hard times. “We’re stripped down; we’ve lost a lot; we’re worried; we’re fearful.” God chooses to come to us where we would not choose, on our own, to seek Him--in that which is too low to be noticed by pride or power or piety-—lest we mistake His grace for our good fortune. God’s revelation, you see, “never has a recognizable form, its wisdom and power can never be proved, its triumph is never apparent, its success is not tangible and its benefit not for immediate enjoyment. Certainly,” says Barth, “these things do exist; but if one insists on seeing revelation in them, one must clearly understand that what one sees there is certainly not divine revelation. To be divine it must first be concealed.” God hidden in human flesh, yet God’s nearness proclaimed by those claimed for magnificats: “The rector was about to bless the carolers who stood in his living room….In the dark, mixed clothing they had put on for the storm, the carolers looked uncommonly forlorn, but the moment they began to sing, they were transformed. [Gloria Pendleton] looked like an angel, and dumpy Lucille lifted her head gracefully and seemed to cast off her misspent youth in the rainy streets around Carnegie Hall. This instantaneous transformation of the company was thrilling, and Mr. Applegate felt his faith renewed, felt than an infinity of unrealized possibilities lay ahead of them, a tremendous richness of peace, a renaissance without brigands, an ecstasy of light and color, a kingdom! Or was this gin? The carolers seemed absolved and purified as long as the music lasted, but when the final note was broken off they were just as suddenly themselves.” When the final note of the Magnificat was broken off and Mary became just as suddenly herself, the time was accomplished, says Luke, for her to be delivered: delivered from the little chain of worries, delivered from the fears that only the angels may address, delivered from the sin that clings so closely because the one and only flesh fully to magnify God was about to be born, even Jesus Christ. He is God magnified, and in his birth, you and I are born anew for praise. At the last, then, Webster and Luke meet in what is termed the archaic meaning of magnify among secular scholars, in what is simply biblical to those who believe. “My soul magnifies the Lord,” which is to say, glorifies, praises, extols. But now in these latter days God is magnified as Mary’s singular voice of praise is joined by the choir that is Christ’s church, gathered here to repeat the sounding joy. “At the foot of the street was old Honora Wapshot’s house where [the carolers] knew they would get buttered rum….Maggie the maid let them in and passed the rum. Honora stood at the end of her parlor, an old lady in a black dress that was sprinkled liberally with either flour or talcum powder….They sang “Joy to the World.” It was Mrs. Coulter’s favorite, and it made her weep. The events of Bethlehem seemed to be…a revelation…of what she [had always believed] in her bones to be the surprising abundance of life. It was for this house, this company, this stormy night that He had lived and died. And how wonderful it was, she thought, that the world had been blessed with a Savior! How wonderful it was that she should have such a capacity for joy!” Thanks be to God for God magnified in a manger! |