Luke 1:39-56
In those days Mary arose and went with haste into the hill country, to a town in Judah, and she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth.And when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the baby leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit, and she exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! And why is this granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For behold, when the sound of your greeting came to my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the Lord.”
And Mary said,
“My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked on the humble estate of his servant.
For behold, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
for he who is mighty has done great things for me,
and holy is his name.
And his mercy is for those who fear him
from generation to generation.
He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts;
he has brought down the mighty from their thrones
and exalted those of humble estate;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent away empty.
He has helped his servant Israel,
in remembrance of his mercy,
as he spoke to our fathers,
to Abraham and to his offspring forever.”
And Mary remained with her about three months and returned to her home.
We are on the final Sunday before Christmas. In just a few days, we will be having our Christmas Eve service with the Silent Night and the candles and all of that stuff, Christmas Day with all of the hoopla of the big celebration. I bet many of you have been turning your radios to the all Christmas channel. Do they have one of those here? I figured they I don't listen to the radio, so I, you know, I don't do that, but they had one in Chicago, so I figured there'd be one here. You've probably heard all of the Christmas songs that are getting us ready for the season. We have a number that we might hear that are focused on the story that we're looking at in the Gospel reading, stories that talk about the Virgin Mary and songs that deal with her, one of the popular ones, the song Mary, did you know you've probably heard that. One, it's a frequent song in our choir concert. Two, it asks, Mary, did you know that your son would do all of these amazing things like walk on water or raise the dead? And my Lutheran pastor brothers always like to remind us that, yes, she did know the angel told her right hear songs like Silent Night with round young virgin mother and child. You might hear Ave Maria or the angel Gabriel from heaven came. I heard on on a Wednesday night last week, Mary's song, breath of heaven, another one we might hear. But today we actually get Mary's song, which we call the Magnificat, from the Latin which is where we get My soul magnifies, or Magnificat. Today we get to see a story where Mary comes to Elizabeth, and Mary gets some amazing things said about her. Elizabeth, filled with the Holy Spirit, says, Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb? Also. Blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the Lord. And then Mary, filled with the Spirit, says, For he has looked on the humble estate of his servant. For behold, from now on, all generations will call me blessed. And I look at some of these things and I say, maybe it's time to address Mary and her role in this whole thing, maybe it's time to ask an important question for us Lutherans, what do we do with Mary? We ask this question largely because Lutherans sometimes break out in hives when we mention this virgin Mary outside of the Christmas season, because we love her when she is holding the baby, as long as she kind of fades into the background. And this is especially true for those of you who've come from the Catholic church into the Lutheran church, we might say, Don't talk about her that sounds kind of Catholic, but I think we Lutherans can give the Virgin Mary some of the greatest titles and honors that the church has given her throughout these years, and use her as an example of the amazing grace that God gives us by His graces. Choice of this poor and lowly girl, Mary chosen to be the mother of God. And we can do that because the very guy who started the Reformation, Martin Luther, did the same. And he did so because the Bible does it right. You look at this Gospel of Luke and Elizabeth, who is filled with the Spirit, says that she is blessed above all women. He calls her the Mother of God, who would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the Lord. And so Mary is an integral part of our salvation, because. She gave birth to Jesus. She is truly the Mother of God. Luther even called her the queen of heaven. But what makes her in this position? How can she illustrate the goodness that God gives us. I think that is the important part, the thing that separates us from the Catholic thing that sometimes we get, like, a little itchy when we talk about her, it's because Mary is a perfect example of God's gracious choice, that God chooses her the same way he chooses us for salvation. So Elizabeth says, Blessed are you among women, and Mary herself says, all generations will call me blessed, and we go, why is this? She says, For he has looked on the humble estate of his servant. And I think this is a fascinating way of praising it the humble estate. What does that mean? What it means is Mary was lowly, not just humble in her heart, like we talk about humility, but she was actually one of the lowliest people on planet Earth. How do we know this? Well, she was from nowheresville in Israel by the town of Nazareth. Her hometown was even more rural than my hometown out in the middle of Wisconsin, and I know something about being rural. My town where I grew up in, was the big town in the area, with 2000 whole people who that's big we had a stop light and everything. And if you drive down the big highway just a little farther away, you get to places where you blink and you miss the town. That's where Mary was from, Nazareth. John tells us that Jesus from Nazareth was so doubtful that the first apostles didn't believe the Savior could come from there. What a Podunk, hillbilly hick town did Mary come from? We also know that Mary was poor, about as broke as broke can be. We know that because later in the Gospel of Luke, she and Joseph bring a sacrifice to the Temple of two two doves, which was only allowable if you couldn't afford the actual sacrifice you were supposed to give of a lamb. She and Joseph were very poor, unable to afford good things. She is of low estate. Her low estate included being a virgin, because virgins don't have babies, just in case you didn't know. But most of all, her low estate was because she was just like us, a regular human being, sinful and normal. God could have chosen any number of virgins all over the area of Israel. He could have chosen any of the virgins who were who were engaged to someone from the house and lineage of David. He could have chosen any number of women who would receive the message from the angel with faith and say, let it be to me according to your will, as Mary did. He could have chosen 1000s among them. But what does God do? Well, he needs to choose one because God needed one mother, one womb, to be the mother of God to produce the Savior and Martin Luther, in his commentary on the Magnificat, says this about Mary.
He says, note that she does not say men shall speak all manner of good of her, praise her virtues, exalt her virginity, or who her humility, or sing of. What she has done, but for this one thing alone, that God regarded her will men call her blessed because God chose her, not because she was extra specially virtuous or good or holy, because that is what God does. He chooses people and gives them His grace. And we see this all over the Bible. Think about Abraham, the very first person chosen by God to begin the salvation story of Israel. And if you look at only our Sunday School stories, you would think he's just this amazing guy, always faithful, always good. But then you read the Bible and realize he was a jerk who tried to sell his wife twice in think about Moses, one of the greatest figures of the Old Testament. Sunday School stories tell us he is this powerful figure, Charlton Heston, going to the Pharaoh and saying, Let my people who go but that is only if you ignore the beginning of the story where Moses, as a young man, murders someone, and instead of facing justice, flees into the wilderness to hide For 40 years, and then when God chooses him, reveals himself in the burning bush. Moses says, anybody but me, don't send me. But God still chooses him. There's a guy named Gideon who's a whole lot like that. Gideon was chosen to lead the armies of God, and he ended up killing 10s of 1000s of Midianites. You know how he was chosen, not in the front of a recruiting campaign to rid the oppressor. He was hiding in a well threshing grain below visibility so nobody would see him and hunt him down. The angel says to him, hail, mighty warrior, and he must have gone who, perhaps another great example is Saint Paul, one who wrote more books of the Bible than anyone else. When he was chosen. Was it because of his goodness or his virtue, or his amazing gifts to the church, or the power of his his awesomeness? He was chosen and the first words that were spoken to him is, why are you persecuting me? The Bible is filled with stories of God lifting up the worst and the most broken and the terrible and the lowly. Perhaps an even better example that fits with Mary is King David. David was a faithful man chosen to be king by God, but I bet there are a bunch of faithful men that God could have chosen to raise up to be a king, men who would have been much like David, men who could have served and followed as as one with God's own heart, like David is described, and even he Given all these gifts brought to be a king, made ruler over Israel, ended up showing that he was a sinner like us. God chose him because God is a God who chooses by His grace and makes decisions of his own accord. And he chose Mary, a young woman, a sinner from the middle of nowhere, to be the mother of God. And the only reason we can call her the queen of heaven, the Blessed Virgin, the Mother of God, the Holy Theotokos, if you want to go back to the Greek, is because God decided that who he would use. That's a perfect image for God's choice for us, isn't it? God chooses you, not because you. Any kind of virtue. God chooses you not because you come from the most amazing city, the finest city in all of the United States. God chooses you not because you are fighting against your sin or because you have money or power or goodness, God chooses you by His grace, through His Son, Jesus Christ, and He gives you this amazing gift. Because that is how God's work. God works. So we worked with Abraham, Moses, Gideon, David St Paul, it's how he worked with Mary, and it's how he works with us. Luther writes again about the Magnificat. He says, oh, Blessed Virgin Mother of God, who was nothing and despised, yet God, in His grace regarded you and made such great things in you that you were worthy of none of them, but the rich and abundant grace of God was given to you far above any merit of yours. Hail to you. Blessed are you from thenceforth and forever to finding such a God? And isn't that true for us? We are blessed because we have such a God who would give this gift of blessing to Mary and to us, who would gather us into the son Jesus Christ to give us eternal life and bless us only because of his goodness, only because of His grace, only because he loves you so much to save you by his son. And this is the amazing thing about the Blessed Virgin Mary, we can hold her in the highest esteem, give her all of these great honors and talk about her without falling into the error of holding her as greater and better than us, because she herself did not again. Luther writes, she finds herself the Mother of God, exalted above all mortals, and remains so simple and so calm and counts not any poor serving maid beneath her. She is still poor and lonely. Only God's choice, his grace, made her the Mother of God. It is true for us, only God's grace makes us blessed, only God's grace lifts us up from our lowly estate of sinners and makes us heirs in God's kingdom. And the titles and honors that we give to Mary, are examples of that, not distractions from it, but examples of the amazing grace that God gives to human beings, that we might be called his children, that we might be chosen by him in Jesus name Amen.
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