Magnified

Fourth Sunday of Advent

And Mary said, “My soul magnifies the Lord”

Luke 1:46

We come to our last week of Advent and the last of our candle themes for this series, this week on love.

I once heard an artist say, “Every song is a love song.” They meant that even if love is not the explicit topic, every song comes from some form of love in the creation process, an expression of the artist’s soul. I think it’s true. And in that vein, Mary’s Song, the Magnificat, is undoubtedly a love song:

“My soul magnifies the Lord,
    and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked with favor on the lowly state of his servant.
    Surely from now on all generations will call me blessed,
for the Mighty One has done great things for me,
    and holy is his name;
indeed, 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 imagination of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones
    and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things
    and sent the rich away empty.
He has come to the aid of his child Israel,
    in remembrance of his mercy,
according to the promise he made to our ancestors,
    to Abraham and to his descendants forever.”

Mary’s Song is so important in the Church that Orthodox and Catholic monks pray it every day. We Protestants don’t do that, maybe because we want to avoid Mary's worship, but we have also lost some of the power of her devotion.

Her song is called “The Magnificat” after the first word of the first line of the Latin translation, where Mary bursts with joy: “My soul magnifies the Lord.” To be clear on the translation, this doesn’t mean Mary makes God bigger; it’s more like, “My soul proclaims the magnificence of God.”

Let’s hold onto that word, “magnify.” It’s a great helpful word when we think about what it means to worship God, not just in the sanctuary, but wherever we are. And let’s think about another word, “attention.”

Worship And Attention

Simone Weil wrote about how prayer is the highest form of attention. It’s the same thing with worship. Of course not just any attention, but attention with pure, holy love. Part of why it is good and a gift from God to worship with each other each week is that it gives us a chance to have the quality of our attention purified; the Bible teaches us that it is only through worshipping God and God alone that gives everything else in the world the proper kind of attention. Now, almost any job we could have will take a lot of our attention: great carpentry, great art, and running a great small business all require great attention. And over a long period of time, worshipping God allows us to bring to those tasks the proper quality of attention, not just how much, but what kind.

This is why the “attention economy” is so dangerous, and it’s something I struggle with. When everything is vying for your attention, it’s not just your attention—everything is vying for your worship. One way you can notice whether you might have subconsciously made an idol in your life is by taking a look and saying, what am I giving lots of attention? How am I giving it attention? Am I giving it undue attention?

One of the great lessons of the Bible and the story of humanity is that humans are worshipping creatures. What we pay attention to is the basis for what we worship. Often we start paying attention to something without worshiping it, and maybe we never explicitly worship it, but over time, if we’re not careful, we start to de facto worship that which we give the wrong attention to—again, not just “how much” attention, but “what kind” of attention. We’ve had so many skilled, expert Christian farmers, scientists, historians, economists, organists, and even politicians just in our congregation alone. They all took great amounts of time and loving attention to their work. Because when you worship God, that is, when you are paying loving attention to God, you can see everything in your field with the right kind of loving attention without mistaking yourself or your work as the Ultimate and Almighty.

That’s not what we humans usually do. Instead, we often subconsciously do what the Zen people would call “mistaking the finger for the moon,” or “worshipping the creature instead of the Creator,” as Paul would say. We worship the things that point to God or the gifts God gives us instead of God.

So, each Sunday morning, when we Christians come together to worship God, wherever we are in the Church, we ought to give God our loving attention, behold God as true, good, beautiful, and praiseworthy, and recognize God and God alone as Almighty and Ultimate. We have plenty of opportunities and plenty of time to enjoy God's gifts the rest of the week. But we can only truly enjoy those things when they’re nested within a worshipping relationship with God.

And that’s why liturgical traditions in the Church use liturgy, so that we are deliberately spiritually shaping our attention together. In the Reformed tradition, we always have a prayer of confession to bring our attention to where we’ve fallen short, then our attention to an assurance of pardon so that we remember our sin is not the end of the story. We give our attention to the Word, both written and proclaimed so that we notice both its preserved form in Scripture and where it lives today (unless the preacher is totally missing it that day). We make time for offering, remembering what God has given us, and when we have the Sacraments of baptism or the Lord’s Supper, we remember even more about the full promises God has made to us. And we have a benediction to then transition our attention back out to the world; holding onto him in our attention as we live our lives. All throughout, we sing hymns to help give the quality of our attention throughout a service a quality of ineffable love. Because every song is a love song, and every hymn is a love song to God.

In a liturgical frame, Mary’s song is maybe the first Christian “Call to Worship” in Scripture. Before Mary fully knows who Jesus is, she is rejoicing in him, calling herself and all of us to worship with that line: “My soul magnifies the Lord.”

The Magnifying Glass

Again, Mary isn’t saying her soul makes God bigger, but think of a magnifying glass. A magnifying glass doesn’t actually make things bigger either. But when you hold it up to your eye, it totally envelopes your whole visual field, it takes all of your visual attention. So when Mary says, “My soul magnifies the Lord,” it’s like she’s saying, “My soul’s vision is filled with the love of God.” “The eyes of my heart are completely on the Lord.” If worship is a quality of attention that is the deepest expression of love, Mary is teaching us what worship is.

When worship is accurate—“right worship,” as our Presbyterian ancestors called it—when that worship is directed towards the true God, the true Lord of creation, it changes everything else in your life. I don’t mean that if you just get the right kind of “spiritual high” on God, it changes everything (though I hope you have had moments of worship services that have deeply moved you). I mean that when we are really worshipping the true God, it can’t help but change your soul’s vision. And when it’s wrong worship, it distorts your soul’s vision, whether you’re worshipping wrong things for the right reasons—like the Israelites who worshipped the bronze snake because God gave it to them for healing—or worshipping the right God for the wrong reasons (as Jesus criticized the Pharisees of doing). Both are wrong worship.

Let’s stick with this magnifying glass image. When your worship is right, and your soul’s vision is truly filled with the love of God, God doesn’t want to hoard that; God redirects our loving attention back into the world, just like a magnifying glass. Our God wants our love for him to pass through him back out into the world. The Epistles’ authors say that is actually how we know we have true faith when it is a love that dwells in God and redirects back into the world, like a looking glass, shedding light so that our attentive love brings focused, loving attention to other people.

When our soul magnifies him, we both clearly see God and the world as God sees it, in much more glorious detail. Let us pray and sing like Mary, her soul loving God in its full vision. Let your soul take in God, exalt in God, remembering fully who God is and how good he has been to you in spite of everything, and let your loving-magnified vision go back out into the world in love.

Shining On Evil

This even works when we reckon with evil. Among other reasons for your love to reckon with evil, it at least avoids sentimentality, which, in the Christmas season, is worth something. As Fleming Rutledge once said, sentimentality is relying on the feelings of love but with no stakes; not earned, just cheap. Sentimentality doesn’t have the magnified image of God before us, which has a full, complete joy that also holds pain. Sentimentality is a love that doesn’t appreciate pain, suffering, or evil, and just wants to avoid it.

Romans 12:9-21 teaches us one of the hardest parts of love is dealing with evil. One of the hardest skills in life is how to deal with evil on good’s terms and not evil’s terms. Most of us will need to take a long time to develop that skill if we ever do, and will often get tempted back into losing that skill. It's usually far easier to just ignore evil altogether and say, “I'm going to live my life in God, and that's great.” But if you ignore evil too much, you can forget what God’s love really looks like. You might start to lose the memory of God’s goodness. You might be tempted to say maybe there’s no evil at all. The opposite problem is we may know there is evil and that God hates it, but by giving it so much attention, we let that evil consume our soul’s vision, where all we can see is evil, which then makes us fight evil on evil’s terms. If Christians didn’t repay evil for evil, too, Paul wouldn’t have needed to write about it. Sometimes this is so hard because evil wouldn’t do evil’s tactics if they weren’t somewhat effective.

But consider Mary’s song again. Consider the vision of Mary’s soul again. Mary looks at evil reflected through the magnified image of God, through her soul’s vision being filled with the love of God, and when she looks at it, she comes to the same conclusion as Paul: God will take care of it. Vengeance is going to be God’s. Mary’s love of God is not a soft love of an impotent God. Mary’s soul-on-fire song is telling us that God is reckoning with evil. Not just one day, but is now already. Saying in other words, “Here are all the things God has done and will do to the unjust, and here are all the things God already has done and will do for those who have been beaten down by the forces of this world.” We’re in the midst of a cosmic battle described in Revelation 12, the angels of heaven fighting the angels of the devil, and the devil ain’t winning.

Cruciform Candles Again

So Christian love gives up needing to be the one who defeats all the evil in the world. Christian love looks through life with the magnified lens of God, loving what God loves and hating what God hates, and loving how God loves. The Christian love that Mary showed is a cruciform, cross-shaped love. Just like our cross-shaped hope, cross-shaped peace, and cross-shaped joy. The true love of Christ is sacrificial. Mary embraced the sacrifice that God put before her. She not only said yes, she sang it. She not only sang it, she belted it.

True, sacrificial love isn’t something we feel, it’s something we do. But it’s not something we make; it’s something we are offered to participate in. And this is why the image of us believers as candles has been so potent to me throughout this Advent season. Is it trite? I don’t know, but it’s true. Because you don’t invent the fire of God, you just hold it. And you let the flame melt you down so that someone else might be warm.

And he does this in sinners like you, me, and Mary. As wonderful and unique as Mary’s role was in the body of Christ, as much as we can adore her, the lesson of her story is that through the Holy Spirit, God can indwell in any of us sinners. We can also be living vessels, living stones of the temple of God, living candles like Mary. You are fit to be a candle that holds the love of God and the God of love. You are enough. May your soul’s vision be filled with that love, and let it shine his love back into the world. Amen.