Luke 1: 46-55
And Mary said, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for the Lord has looked with favor on the lowliness of the Lord’s servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is the Lord’s name. God’s mercy is for those who fear the Lord from generation to generation. The Lord has shown strength of arm; the Lord has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. The Lord has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; the Lord has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty. God has helped the Lord’s servant Israel, in remembrance of the Lord’s mercy, according to the promise the Lord made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever.”
I, for one, am grateful that we call Mary the Madonna rather than the prima donna. I can just imagine Mary, the prima donna, basking in the glow of the shepherds and the wise men. In our passage today, Mary exhibits what might be called pride, but it is not an off-putting, egotistic kind of pride. She lets us know that God is the one doing great things for her, rather than the other way around. This past week I wondered whether there might be any modern parallels to Mary’s kind of pride, so I did an Internet search for “pregnancy pride.” I found a number of interesting sites, including a site for a racy harlequin novel called “Pride and Pregnancy.” In this novel, there is “a thrice-married—and thrice-divorced!—personal shopper [who] had sworn off men, and their inherent complications…aka babies.” I guess all of us were at one point complications.
Another discovery I made on the Internet was a blog entitled “Beautopotamus.” The woman writing the blog recalls how once during one of her eight pregnancies she had accidentally bumped into her husband in a narrow hallway in their home. With his hand on her belly, “he suddenly exclaimed, ‘You’re BeatiPOTamus!” Soon the word entered into the husband’s regular lexicon. Having an appropriate sense of pregnancy pride, the wife grew fond of the word because it told her that her husband not only thought she was “beautiful despite” her “hippo-esque figure,” but in fact he thought she was beautiful “because of it.” With happiness, she remembers how after delivering one of their babies, he looked at her with regret and said, “I can’t call you beautipotamus anymore.”
So, I hope I don’t offend anyone this morning by saying that in our scripture for today Mary is at her beautopotamus best. She is at a meeting of the expectant mothers club. At this special bonding event, a pregnant Elizabeth has just finished lavishing praise onto Mary telling her how blessed she is. Elizabeth just can’t believe that the mother of the Lord had come to visit her. You would think Mary’s pregnancy pride would be in overdrive now. To learn more about pregnancy pride, this past week I made an inquiry with one of our resident pregnancy experts: Kathy Woolley. I asked Kathy if there was such a thing as pregnancy pride, and she said, “Of course, when your pregnant, you feel as if you are the only person to have ever done this and you try very hard not to think about how everyone you see came into the world the same way.” If anyone should have been feeling this kind of pregnancy pride, it should have been Mary, but Mary’s response is interesting.
First, she doesn’t take credit for herself. Instead, she praises God. Her soul magnifies God and rejoices in God for looking with favor on her, the lowly servant. But, even though Mary gives glory to God rather than herself, she still realizes that she is special. She realizes that she went from being a nameless person in the history of her people to having a starring role. She says, “Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed.” Something I realized in reading this story is that Luke is doing the reader a big favor by not stopping the action here. If it had stopped here, none of us, even the mothers among us, would be able to identify with Mary. After all, when it comes to pregnancy pride, who can compete with Mary? What mother can beat giving birth to the Son of God? But, instead of leaving prospective mothers everywhere feeling jealous and inferior, Luke’s gospel tells us Mary did something all of us can do: she connects her story to the larger story of her faith. In this way, Luke portrays Mary as having a kind of healthy, non-narcissistic pride. Her pride comes not from what she thinks about herself as an individual. It comes from feeling a part of something larger than her self. She’s a part of divine history. Mary recounts all of the great things God has done from generation to generation. God has deflated the ego of the proud, brought down the powerful from their thrones, lifted up the lowly, fed the hungry, sent the rich away empty handed. God has done all of this according to what God promised Abraham and all the others. Mary realizes she is a part of all this earth shaking history. Well, I didn’t know this was the kind of thing pregnant women said in their bonding sessions with each other.
Now, some of you might still feel like you can’t identify with Mary. You might think your own story is too insignificant to mean anything as part of the larger story of our faith. Recently, I came across something that might help change your mind. A couple of weeks ago a great new book came out called, Listening Is an Act of Love. Some of you who listen to NPR’s Morning Edition might be familiar with the contents of some of this book. The book and a segment of NPR both come from a project called StoryCorps. StoryCorps began in 2003 with a recording booth located in New York’s Grand Central Station. In this recording booth, anyone could come with someone else—a grandfather, a mother, a friend—and record 40 minutes of answers to some of life’s most significant questions. Questions like “What do you want to be remembered for?” or “What are the most important lessons you’ve learned in life?” In answering such questions, some of the best stories ever told are heard and fortunately for us they have been preserved. Everyone who does a recording gets a CD to keep for themselves while another CD is archived at the Library of Congress.
When the project began, the famous interviewer and oral historian Studs Terkel cut the ribbon on the recording booth and said, “Today we shall begin celebrating the lives of the uncelebrated! We’re in Grand Central Station. We know there was an architect, but who hung the iron? Who were the brick masons? Who swept the floors? These are the noncelebrated people of our country. In this booth the noncelebrated will speak of their lives.” The significance of the project is not lost on its founder Dave Isay who realizes we live in a “disposable society” where few persons seem to live beyond their use to society’s machinery. With StoryCorps, however, the stories of ordinary people are recorded for parents and grandparents and a whole nation to pass along from generation to generation. It’s in the stories of the ordinary, not those we see on TV everyday, that a true wealth of “wisdom, wonder, and poetry” is to be found.
The book Listening is an Act of Love is a compilation of some of the stories collected in the recording booth. One of my favorite storytellers in the book is a former New York City bus driver named Ronald Ruiz. Ruiz brought his daughter along with him to the recording booth. He wanted his daughters to be proud of him for who he was. As a bus driver, he “wanted to be unique.” As he put it, he “wanted to be different, because most of the bus drivers were kind of a little bit on the rude side at times.” Ruiz wanted to be “the one that stood out from everybody else.” So it was, that when he got into the recording booth, he told his daughter of a time he was driving his bus and an older woman got on the bus. It was a hot summer day, and she was wearing a fur coat. She looked noticeably lost and confused. Ruiz asked if she was ok, and she said she was fine, but she didn’t know what restaurant she was to meet her friends at. Ruiz decided to help her. Every time his bus got to a restaurant, he would jump out, run in, and see if it was the restaurant where her friends were waiting. He kept doing this over and over again, but none of the restaurants was the right one. Finally, he got to the last restaurant on his route, and he said, “It’s got to be this one.” He told the woman to stay seated in the bus where it was nice and cool. He went inside and said, “There’s a lady in the bus, and she’s not sure of the restaurant.” Then, he saw a group of seniors there, and they said, “Oh, it’s probably her.” Ruiz ran back to the bus, and said, “Sweetie, your restaurant is right here.” She started to get up, but he said, “No, no. Don’t move.” He then dropped the door of the bus down to the curb, grabbed her right hand with his, and escorted her to the restaurant as if she had been riding a limousine. The woman said she felt like Cinderella. She told Ruiz, “I’ve been diagnosed with cancer, and today is the best day of my life.”
Recently, I went to go visit one of our long-time members, Rhoda Page. Some of you might remember that Rhoda had helped me write one of my first sermons here when she shared with me how she had carved a walking stick. Well, when I arrived for my recent visit, Rhoda was prepared to help me again. In a three-ring binder crammed with stuff, Rhoda went to the back and flipped to a section where she had recorded some stories from her life for her family. Rhoda told me to take out the stories so I could take them home, study them, and then use them in a sermon. So here I am. One of the stories was about her grandfather and father. It takes place not long after her grandmother had passed away. Rhoda’s father was a young boy at the time, and he was suffering from pneumonia. He had been battling the illness for a long while, and finally the doctor pronounced him dead. The doctor asked Rhoda’s grandfather if he wanted him to call the “dead man’s wagon.” Her grandfather said no. He would call later. He wanted to spend some time alone with his son. He then built a fire in the kitchen stove. He warmed up some iron and bricks, and he placed them around his son’s body as he massaged him. Every now and then, he would replace the irons as they cooled. One of the irons got close to his son’s foot, and all of the sudden his son let out a yell.
Thank goodness he didn’t die, or else we would have never had Rhoda, and we never would have had this story of resurrection to add to the larger story of our faith. All of us have a story we can add to the larger story of our faith. The good news is that the Kingdom is big enough for us all. In the eyes of the world, Mary was a non-celebrity. Nazareth was in the middle of no-place. Mary was just a poor Jewish peasant woman, but if Mary had never given birth to Jesus, Christmas would never have come. Our faith would have died stillborn. There would have been no resurrection, because there would no life to resurrect. Let us therefore join Mary as she sings, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.” Amen.