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Luke 1:26-55
This is an important text.
Protestants have not paid it much attention.
We put Mary in the nativity scene each year,
and we acknowledge her sorrow when Jesus was crucified,
but other than that we have little use for the mother of Jesus.
Catholics on the other hand make a big deal of Mary.
She fills the need for a feminine side to God in a church that is in many ways
sadly masculine and even misogynistic.
I have long struggled with the meaning of the spirit, spirituality, the soul,
and even the use of “heart” in scripture and in our common use of it.
So much so that I wrote an article on spirit and soul
that will be published next year in a little Biblical magazine.
My concern is that these words are too often used
without explanation or definition.
We don’t know what another person means when they use these words,
so we have to look closely at them.
Because of my interest, the text of the Magnificat jumped off the page for me,
because here are the words “soul,” “spirit,” and “heart” in one text!
“My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.”
Later Mary says that
“God has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.”
More about that later.
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About five years ago I preached here on the meaning of “spirit.”
I had read and concluded that spirit is what transpires between us.
We cannot see spirit because it is our interactions with each other,
our exchange of words and looks, and gestures.
Because God is the word we use for being itself,
spirit is the energy and creative energy that we know in our living.
So God is Spirit and God is love, which is the most powerful of emotions and
thoughts and actions that we exchange with and between each other.
I quoted from Mister Rogers who said,
“If you could only sense how important you are
to the lives of those you meet....
There is something of yourself that you leave at every meeting
with another person.
And that person gives a part of what you gave to them to others.”
Exactly.
So Spirit becomes a huge web of thought and feeling and doing
that can catch on in society like a virus,
and can become a dominant thought or feeling of the whole culture.
In the ‘80's I was concerned that the popular “spirituality” was mostly about the personal self
and was opposed to the great Biblical concern for social justice.
I figured spirituality had to be about seeking justice in society
as much as it might have to do with such practices as
personal prayer and meditation.
Howard Rice, a Presbyterian professor, in his book, Reformed Spirituality said:
“Spirituality is the pattern by which we shape our lives
in response to our experience of God
as a very real presence in and around us.”
Another writer [Gordon Wakefield] says that“spiritual” describes
“those attitudes, beliefs and practices
which animate people’s lives....”
Thus pattern and these attitudes are the values by which I define God.
For me “Spirituality” is the experience of
living in the moment of human interactions
that are bristling with virtues and values,
tempered by human sensibilities.
In our spiritualities we feed our spirits so that we understand
our experiences and accomplishments as reflecting, exhibiting, flaunting,
or affirming who we see ourselves to be.
But we need to acknowledge that spirit isn’t always positive or good.
Sometimes it is negative energy.
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Soul is a confusing word.
We often use spirit and soul interchangeably.
We use soul to describe our essence, which we might call also our life spirit.
We commonly speak of soul as a ghost-like gift of God at birth
that returns to God at death.
The soul is often described as no more than that part of ourselves
believed to survive bodily death.
But to the Jews and to Jesus in his time,
“Soul” was simply the “life” of the living.
Soul is not something we have, but something we are.
I conclude that spirituality is how we name
the religious experience or religious interpretation of our lives —
of our souls.
So if you say “I believe in God or Jesus as the Christ,”
that is the beginning of your spirituality and your identity as a person.
Soul is the inner core of our identity.
Soul is our distinct personality; it is how we would identify our individuality.
You might say “I am a Christian. I am a child of good or not so good parents,
I am a father or mother who tried to do well, I am or was poor or rich,
Or these good and terrible things happened in my life.”
Spirit then is our active individuality as seen and experienced by others.
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We also speak of “heart” as life and as a metaphor for our feeling alive
and for all the feelings of being alive.
Often heart is described as the seat of the will.
Will is an odd word. Mostly we speak of writing a will, which is
the directions of what we want done with our stuff after we die.
A “living will” is what we do and don’t want done to us medically
when our end is near.
So the human will is our intention to do something, our determination,
our conviction.
To some extent it is our character and our faith.
The will is an intersection of body, mind, soul, spirit, and heart.
Recently I read the memoir of a neurosurgeon, James Doty,
entitled, Into the Magic Shop.
He calls the brain, “the magic shop.”
I was surprised to read that in fact
the heart directs the feeling functions of the brain.
I learned about the vagus nerve, a bundle of separate nerves, or fibers that
connect the brain with the various body systems, like electrical wires.
They do carry tiny electrical pulses.
I never knew what a nerve was and I had never heard of the Vagus Nerve.
Through these nerves the heart, lung, stomach and of course the sex organs
communicate to the brain — and in greater number
than the brain communicates to those organs and systems.
I have a diagram of these connections; you can find one online.
The shocker is that the heart and the lungs, the stomach and the bowels and gonads
can be said to “think” on their own and to “speak” to the brain.
The brain then speaks to them, giving instructions to them,
mostly to speed up [sympathetic] or settle down [parasympathetic],
based on the data received through our senses.
These internal body and mind communications are our life!
They are well described as body and soul, and heart and soul,
just as the love songs by those names tell us.
Mary speaks of "the thoughts of our hearts."
We speak of acting on "gut instinct" and letting our sex organs direct us.
Can you see how I needed to understand these common words?
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The Magnificat is very physical and bodily
because it is about Mary’s pregnancy.
She is a young, unmarried girl, promised to a man named Joseph.
It would have been a scandal in Nazareth
if they had engaged in intercourse before marriage,
and so she is called a virgin,
or at least the word used here is for “young girl,” which can mean virgin.
The story of Mary and Joseph, and the Holy Spirit
are told to answer questions like:
“How did Jesus become the Son of God?”
and “How did Jesus become the Messiah?
A long, boring genealogy is provided to show that Joseph
is descended from King David, which adds complications to the story.
The genealogy shows that Mary is also descended from David,
just to cover all the bases.
Several important points are made in this story:
Mary, a poor, young pregnant girl engaged to marry a common carpenter
is chosen by God to become the means by which God
enters the world physically.
She is said to be proud and humbled all at once.
In a world run by men, and by men with total power over others,
Mary is singled out and lifted up.
This isn’t a story about success at the top!
This is about elevation of the lowly, of those who have nothing except God. [anawim]
It is helpful to think, with a number of scholars, that the gospel of Luke
was written by a woman, or by a man using a source written by a woman.
It is helpful to see that this hymn or song is in fact borrowed
from several psalms in the Hebrew scriptures and reads like a psalm.
She speaks of how God has done great things for her, as many psalms do.
But then it shifts into a direction which prefigures great trouble in the entire gospel story.
It is “good trouble,” as Congressman John Lewis described standing up to oppression.
Few good, middle-class protestants have chosen to see what is here.
“God has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
God has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;
God has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.”
I am not kidding. Thousands of preachers have totally ignored the Magnificat,
and thousands more have preached from it without commenting on verses 51-53.
Jesus didn’t come for the comfortable.
Jesus is for the lowly, like his Mother.
From his cross, he tried to bring down the powerful from their thrones.
If you have nothing, you will see this as ultimate integrity.
If you are comfortable God enlists you in the tasks
of filling the hungry with good things and sending the rich away empty.
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But there is a big problem here: Gabriel is given to say,
“He will be called great and the Lord God will give to him
the throne of his ancestor David..., of his kingdom there will be no end.”
This is how the author of Luke introduces the idea of “Messiah,”
a Hebrew word. The Greek word is Christ.
It has a basic meaning of anointed or chosen,
consecrated to perform special tasks or take on special roles for God.
Priests and prophets are anointed, not just kings.
Now we know that the church in its earliest history took the wrong road.
We can see that many of our biggest problems today
are "baked into" the Bible and our religion.
We made Christ, who opposed kingly rule and violence, a king with armies.
In Luke we see that John the Baptist is given the role of prophet,
while Jesus is intended to fill the Davidic idea of Messiah.
But Jesus as teacher and as example is a prophet;
he is king only by the rule of love, not of might.
So the gospel begins in a good place with Mary and her Magnificat,
but even there quickly turns to the idea that Christ will become a caesar.
The image of Jesus as a king means he will use force:
“The zeal of the lord of hosts will do this,” Mary says.
This is the idea of “redemptive violence”
built into this psalm as if God will solve our problems with ultimate violence.
The opposite idea is prophetic realism,
which says that violence never works, never achieves the aims it seeks.
Rather wisdom and expertise should rule.
Both divinely sanctioned violence and the call to nonviolence
are present and in conflict within the Bible.
These are two conflicting ideas in our two political parties today
directly descended from the Hebrews, the Romans, and the Greeks,
2,000 and 2,500 years ago.
A catholic Jesus scholar friend of mine says that
the Magnificat is “political dynamite”
because it speaks of oppression will bring justice.
Justice is a legal and political term, it is controversial:
whose justice do we want? For whom? And on what principles?
Should government protect the rights of religious groups to worship
or seek to protect worshipers in a pandemic by limiting their worship?
This is a political question today that is a direct descendant
of the justice issues of 2000 years ago.
But we are given the law as understood in the great commandments:
“You shall love the Lord your God
with all your heart and with all your soul
and with all your strength and with all your mind,
and [you shall love] your neighbor as yourself.”
