You will find in my library a beautiful and informative book entitled, “Mary Through the Ages; Her Place in the History of Culture.” Jaroslav Pelikan, Sterling Professor of History, Emeritus, at Yale authored the book, and as he insists, “It is impossible to understand the history of Western spirituality and devotion without paying attention to the place of the Virgin Mary.” To illustrate his point, Pelikan includes chapters, among many others, entitled “Miriam of Nazareth in the New Testament;” “The Paragon of Chastity and the Blessed Mother;” “The Face that Most Resembles Christ’s;” “The Great Exception Immaculately Conceived;” and a closing review of Mary’s perennial impact names her, “The Woman for All Seasons—and All Reasons.”

You will find, of course a gallery of portraits illustrating this “Woman Clothed with the Sun,” the majority of these Renaissance portraits depicting the “Annunciation”—a moment in the vast saga of Biblical salvation when the angel Gabriel visits Mary and announces her selection as the mother of the coming Messiah. She modestly, excitedly, reverently receives this angelic message. And the passage we read a moment ago, Mary’s ecstatic visit to Elizabeth, continues Luke’s radiant reflection on the mystery of the Divine selecting Mary, Pelikan reminds us, as “the Mother of God,” and Mary’s joyous reception of this spectacular function, earning her the designation of “The First Disciple.”

I

In her joy, you will remember, Mary sings a song; she sings the meaning of her anticipated child. For generations Christians have called this song, “Magnificat” because in Latin it begins, “Magnificat anima mea Dominum,”—“My heart magnifies the Lord.” But while singing or reading or listening to Mary’s Song, what do we discover? As we take a closer look at “Magnificat” what do we see? What do we hear? A Hebrew folk song? No. A lullaby? Not really. A classical aria? Well, we will hear classical arias on our radios and perhaps a Christmas Eve “Magnificat” performance of Heinrich Schutz or Antonio Vivaldi during this Advent Christmas season. I confess I wrote this sermon to Bach’s “Magnificat,” and just a moment ago we sang with our choir a lovely antiphonal rendering of Mary’s radiant confession. But these sublime versions in poetry and music, inspiring as they may be, while telling the story beautifully, do not tell all of it. The aesthetic can blunt the point; we may miss the force of Mary’s song by our ethereal recasting. To be sure, we recognize here a resplendent psalm, but Mary’s song bears a striking vision; it comes to us not so much as an anthem composed for a garland- and poinsettia-adorned sanctuary like this—not by a long shot. It explodes like dynamite. It takes that gorgeous CD I listened to while writing this sermon and, in truth, exposes jagged edges; it sounds not so much like a choral motet but rather like fingernails scratching across a blackboard. It can be chilling, defiant, revolutionary. You see, Mary sings a Freedom Song. She speaks for God as she anticipates the birth of the One lodging in her womb; she expects a world gone topsy-turvy; she envisions a humanity turned around 180 degrees; she filters the promises of the Prophets’ insistence that for God’s sake, justice run down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream; she anticipates in the life of the One she carries the embodiment of that promise. As we go about our vigorous Christmas routines, our decorations, our catalogue consultations, our window browsing, our cookie preparation, our travel itineraries, our obedience to the President’s pleas that we shop, shop, shop—amid all this Christmas prep we encounter this poetic stiletto from the mother of the expected Messiah: she sees Christmas invoking a massive U-turn, an about-face. “Christmas,” Mary asserts “turns the world upside down.”

II

And where does the evidence lie for such a reading of Mary’s song? How dare suggest what Yale’s Dr. Pelikan informs us is the female most referred to in the Western World, the most frequent name at baptism, the most often used in exclamations—“Jesus, Mary and Joseph!” or as he heard his Slovakian father expostulate, “Jezis Maria!” and in the Ave Maria repeated millions of times each day—how dare we suggest this pillar of culture really turns everything upside down? Well, let’s hear Mary again as she contemplates the meaning of the child she bears:

Remember? Mary speaks of “One who shows strength with his arm and scatters the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.” Oh, oh. Friends, Mary, at Christmas time—Mary fails as writer of sentiments for Hallmark Cards. The holiday greetings, the thousands of ways we wish one another merry Christmas, the Yuletide cheer we pass along to one another: Jingle Bells, the one horse open sleigh and the like, surely legitimate, upbeat, appropriate, (we need all the encouragement and affection we can get from others, and that includes your minister). But Mary? A different tack. No wholesome Christmas card sender she. The “thoughts of the proud” she sees scattered at Christmastime deal with deception, complacency, lies, fraud. She recognizes One who comes telling truth, tearing the veil from those who would deceive us for their own benefit, whose interests overly distort their every word and action. She bridles at those who scapegoat others, who use every conceivable circumstance to justify their own ends. Mary describes an age where misrepresentation, distortion, half truth and spin go down the drain. And she knows as well that deception in high places, the covering up of truth, leads to the erosion of trust, disastrous social chaos, the collapse of institutions, personal disintegration. We catch a glimpse of her prescience, I think, as we stand in awe at the horrific collapse of the Enron Corporation and its devastating effect globally on hundreds of thousands, if not millions, through its failure to reveal the whole truth; and just this weekend, the humiliation brought on two great universities, himself and his family by a football coach who fudged the truth about his achievements—“the proud scattered by the thoughts of their hearts.”

And pursuing a glimpse of the resistance her child will bring to the deceivers and corrupt of this age, Mary proceeds to throw a spotlight on those in high position possessing vast financial resources, military arsenals, political clout. Listen: “God has put down the mighty from their thrones.” How can she sing this? Well, perhaps Mary reviews the history of her people: she sees Assyria, Egypt, Greece, Persia, Babylon—poof! And yes, what do we see? Rome, Venice, the Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian, the British, the Russian empires sprawled on the scrap heap of history. Remember the thousand year Reich?

Ah, Mary knows. Empire builders, superpowers, need be careful in their claims, their self perception, their presumptions. I wonder. In the current Atlantic Magazine, a major article asks the question, “Must the United States Remain A Superpower?” Well, must we? The article suggests that we Americans, in the century ahead, need “come to grips with the ironic possibility that the very preponderance of American power may now make us not more secure, but less secure.” It quotes a French political analyst who suggests categorizing the United States as a “superpower” underestimates the truth; it is, he says, a “hyperpower” and warns against America’s assuming what a National Security Council member calls a U.S. tendency to “adult supervision” over the rest of the world. The authors indicate that other nations, for all of our claims to benevolence, fear our capabilities far more than they are consoled by our intentions. The authors remind us, in the words of Henry Kissinger, that “hegemonic empires almost automatically elicit universal resistance, which is why all such claimants have sooner or later exhausted themselves.” We gather an insight from Edmund Burke, writing two hundred years ago amid Britain’s imperial rise. Said Burke, “Among precautions against ambition it may not be amiss to take one precaution against our own (ambition)…I dread our being too much dreaded…We may say that we shall not abuse this astonishing and hitherto-unheard-of-power. But every nation will think we shall abuse it…Sooner or later, the state of things must produce a combination against us which may end in our ruin.” And a caution from Walter Lippman, writing in 1965, “A mature great power will make measured and limited use of its power. It will eschew the theory of a global and universal duty which not only commits it to unending wars of intervention, but intoxicates it, thinking that it is a crusader of righteousness…” Both authors speculate that the attacks of September 11 came as the consequence of the global role America has chosen, that they were, among other issues, “a violent reaction to the fact of US preeminence.”

Why bring this to our attention as the United States Marines roll through the valleys, across the crags, and scale the peaks of Tora Bora, as the Taliban scatter to the four winds, or discover themselves “cornered,” high technology carrying the day with the stars and stripes in the vanguard, phase one of this war nearing completion? Why bring the risks of preponderant power to our attention on a day like this? Because I think Mary is on to something; and as a Christian, albeit a Calvinist pessimist, and as an American, I am worried. The preponderance of power makes us not more secure, but less. How risk a world apart from our “adult supervision?” How share power? How avoid for as long as possible, with a mature, and wise knowledge of the limits of power, sensing the danger of pride—alert to the pretensions of righteousness and what it might mean from Mary’s perspective if her God really became entangled with America— how avoid for as long as possible a catastrophic fall from our lofty perch? How join the community of nations as a respected but not feared agency, a stabilizing power among stabilizing powers, a nation committed to mutual security, multilateral covenants, faithful to treaty commitments, a nation among nations? Is Mary on the mark? In God’s good time do the mighty—must the mighty—fall?

Or what of this poetic assertion of Mary, “Our God lifts those of low degree.” Low degree! Who are “those of low degree?” Who but those lingering next to the warm air vents in the parking lot of alley 440, the man with the Dunkin’ Donuts cup leaning on our wall, the woman pushing the grocery-market cart overflowing with her worldly belongings. Mary envisions restoration for them to a community, with dignity, resources, hope, sobriety, sanity. And yes, following on this Christmas commitment, Mary knows those among us who are troubled, suffering, lonely. She knows those of us whose children wandered off and never came home; those of us who suffer love grown cold, who wrestle with too much alcohol, who find themselves tyrannized by drugs, those brutalized emotionally and physically by spousal or parental abuse, those who find their memories dissolving, threatened with cancer, afflicted with AIDS. Mary sings of the tilt of Divine love toward those in conditions where light seems rare, where hope fades, frustration invades, despair seems ready to carry the day.

And, Mary is not done. Her song embraces political and economic dimensions. “God has filled the hungry with good things and the rich sent empty away.” Got it? God has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich empty away. Suppose we put this promise in contemporary perspective, right here in the United States, right here in Boston. Did you see the results of the homeless census taken this last week? The number living on the streets, it indicates, increased again, and the census as the Globe writes, “which also counts people sleeping in shelters, revealed for the first time in the city’s recent history the number of people without addresses topped 6,000. That’s a 3% increase from last year and a 54% jump from a decade ago. In that time the number of homeless children has nearly tripled and the number of homeless women has increased by 77% according to city Hall.”

So what does that mean? What impact do such numbers convey? Last year, Marian Wright Edelman, that indefatigable, charismatic, prophetic President of the Children’s Defense Fund, wrote an illuminating essay entitled America’s fifth child. I hope you will excuse me if I read a piece of it for you. Dr. Edelman puts our condition in vivid fashion:

Imagine a very wealthy family blessed with five children. Four of their children have enough to eat and comfortable warm rooms in which to sleep. One of those children does not. She is often hungry and lives in a cold room. On some nights, she has to sleep on the streets or in a temporary shelter and even be taken away from her neglectful family and placed in foster care with strangers. Imagine this family giving four of their children nourishing meals three times a day, snacks to fuel boundless child energy, but sending the fifth child from the table and to school hungry with only one or two meals and never the dessert the other children enjoy.

Imagine this very wealthy family making sure four of their children get all their shots, regular check-ups before they get sick, and immediate health care when illness strikes, but ignoring the fifth child who is plagued by chronic infections and respiratory diseases like asthma.

Imagine this family sending four of their children to good stimulating preschools and music and swimming lessons, and sending the fifth child to unsafe daycare with untrained caregivers responsible for too many children, or leaving her with an occasionally accommodating relative or neighbor, or all alone. Imagine the family reading to four of their children every night who have books in their home, and leaving the other child unread to, untalked or unsung to, or propped up before a television screen feeding them violence- and sex-charged messages, ads for material things and intellectual pablum.

Imagine this family sending four of their children to good schools in safe neighborhoods with enough books and computers and laboratories and science equipment and well prepared teachers, and sending the fifth child to crumbling school buildings with ceilings peeling and leaks and asbestos in the paint and old, old books and not enough of them, and teachers untrained in the subjects they teach.

Imagine four of the family’s children excited about learning, looking forward to finishing high school, going to college, getting a job, and the fifth child falling further behind grade level, unable to read, wanting to drop out of school, and at risk for getting pregnant or into trouble.

Imagine four of the children engaged in sports and music, and arts entertainment after-school and summer camps, and the fifth child meeting his friends on the street, or going home alone because mom and dad are working or have escaped parenting responsibilities they feel unable to meet in drugs or alcohol, and hanging out alone or with peers all summer.

That is our America family today where one in five children lives in poverty. It is not a stable or healthy family or a sufficiently compassionate one. Then Dr. Edelman throws her punch.

Child poverty is not an act of God. It is America’s moral and political choice about how we will treat vulnerable children whom the prophets and Gospels tell us are the apple of God’s eye. Christians believe God entered human history as a poor and vulnerable baby, not as a rich and powerful magnate or defense contractor or political leader or child of privilege, and that each man, woman and child is a sacred creation shaped in God’s own image and likeness, a sister a brother . . . Our “Declaration of Independence” says, “we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” This includes the least of these—our children—who are America’s poorest and most vulnerable group. We trample those rights at our spiritual peril, subvert the very foundation of America’s dream and lose credibility in the world where the majority of tomorrow’s adults are the poor babies and children of today.

I think Marian Wright Edelman and her essay—I think Miriam of Nazareth, Mary, and her song—offer variations on a theme. And as we struggle with budgets in this church, balancing staff salaries, music, administration and capital costs against the increasingly desperate needs of our neighborhood, city and nation, the song of Mary haunts us.

Dr. Edelman brings us up short, and as both church people and citizens of this Commonwealth—Citizens of this Commonwealth and of the United States of America—the analysis of Marian Wright Edelman and the vision of Mary make their claims upon us in the voting booth, the precincts of the State House, the Congress and the White House where, as our own Kip Tiernan observes, they all wear the golden “WWJD” bracelets, asking “What would Jesus do?” most of them, and us knowing darned well what Jesus would do.

Friends, we approach the day of Nativity. We will celebrate it with lights and tinsel, with candlelight and carol. We will wish one another a merry Christmas with enthusiasm and joy. But I beg you, remember— remember—in truth Christmas turns the world upside down, a global and transfiguring hope, toppling the powerful from their thrones, lifting those of low estate, filling the hungry with good things and sending the rich empty away, striking a chord in our hearts, enabling us to sing vibrantly, joyously with Mary: “Magnificat anima mea dominum.”

“My soul magnifies the Lord ‘ and my spirit rejoices in God my savior.”

Scripture Reading
Luke 1:36-55 (The Magnificat)

And now, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren. For nothing will be impossible with God.” Then Mary said, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” Then the angel departed from her. In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.”

And Mary said,

“My soul magnifies the Lord,