my scripture this morning is still from the first chapter of the gospel according to saint luke i will be reading verse 46 through verse 56 and mary said my soul that magnify the lord and my spirit has rejoiced in god my savior for he has regarded the lowly state of his maidservant for behold henceforth 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 on 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 put down the mighty from their thrones and exalted the lowly he's 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 seed forever and mary remained with her about three months and returned to her house this is luke's record of this marvelous song of mary known as the magnificat inspired by the holy ghost and given to us for our
instruction and for our edification [Music] for the moving of our souls to praise and adoration and may you hear these words to that end let's pray again our father we look to you to help us in our weakness that you may stoop to our fragile understanding the frailty of our faith that by your word our souls may be quickened to strength that we may give you praise and adoration from the depth of our being we ask these things in jesus name amen of course before i look at this text i have to have a brief
quiz of the congregation to see how many of you did your homework this past week we're going to have a show of hands and i'm going to ask how many of you in fact memorize the magnificat this week let me see your hands if you did that i'm not saying a lot let me see them get them up there i see one see two i see an elder and this is why we preach so earnestly bert you know now the bible says that god's word will not return unto him void but mind tends in that
direction well it's not too late it's too late to make an a but you can still pass the course if this week you attend to this passage and commit it to your memory one of the things that's clear from the reading of this text is that mary as a young jewish girl did something that most jewish girls did in her day and that is she memorized scripture we see strains of similarity between this song that she sings with the song of praise and thanksgiving that was rendered by hannah in the old testament when she was
told of the impending birth of her son samuel also if you look closely at this song you will see that there are several references in the song to elements found in the psalms and the more we ingest scripture and hide it in our hearts memorize it become familiar with it we will find that when we are praying again and again we will turn to the language of the word of god itself and this is modeled for us in this marvelous hymn by mary herself again she is singing this hymn under the inspiration of the holy
spirit and its content reveals much about mary but also much about the character and the nature of god she begins by saying my soul that magnify the lord and my spirit thus rejoice in god my savior one of the things that the scripture warns about more than once is the danger dear friends of rendering to god mere lip service going through the motions wrote worship where we say the words and we confess with our mouths while our hearts remain far from him but what is noteworthy about this hymn is that mary is not simply giving
lip service to god but this song of praise and adoration is welling up out of the depths of her being she says my soul magnifies the lord not that god could become any greater or enlarged than he already is but what she says here when she says my soul magnifies him is that she is saying that my soul has been saturated by a sense of the divine and by his presence and by his mercy and so from the deepest part of my being i want to exalt him that's what it means to magnify to lift
god up in exultation there's been much debate in recent years about the appropriate type of music that we used in worship and we even have a new vocabulary where we talk about praise music well indeed music should be filled with praise for god and if you want to see an example of pure praise music an example not of the 7 11 the same seven verses sung 11 times but praise music that is deep and rich in content whose focus is on the majesty of god then here we have an example of holy spirit inspired praise
music where this young lady says my soul magnifies the lord and my spirit rejoices in god my savior now she's not making a distinction between her soul and her spirit like some people would like to believe but what we have here is a common hebrew form of poetry which is parallelism and in this case synonymous parallelism where the first line and the second line mean essentially the same thing she says at once my soul magnifies the lord she says that again my spirit rejoices in god my savior theologians have paid attention to the last couple
of words of the second line the words my savior what does mary mean by that saint thomas aquinas for example believed that mary could not have been sinless because here she confessed in this him her need of a savior and that insight that saint thomas had may be correct but it's not a necessary inference from the text because the word to save and the word salvation in the bible can mean something other than the ultimate salvation that we have from the consequences of our sins but any time god rescues his people and spares them from
any calamity expresses a kind of salvation and so the salvation that mary may have in view here is simply the rescue from the calamity of being humiliated being a forgotten person being a person of insignificance as she specifies in the next line the sense in which god has been merciful to her however though it's not necessarily so that she's referring to divine deliverance from sin that idea is probably contained in the words that she's using here and if so what is she saying just as the child that is conceived in her womb will be called
david's greater son and not only david's son but also david's lord so the babe will not only be mary's son but he will be mary's savior no woman in the history of the world could sing that song either before then or after that time because only mary was given the unspeakable privilege of being the mother of our savior and she speaks initially of her of being overwhelmed by the tenderness of god for she says for he has regarded lowly state of his maidservant in former christmas seasons i've preached on the magnificat and i've pointed out
that in that line we have contained the original cinderella story the cinderella story that was not a fairy tale it was not a myth but was sober reality and truth because god himself looked at this lady in her low estate years ago i told the story of an experience i had in western pennsylvania when i used to work with labor management relations from a christian perspective and would speak at corporate headquarters in fortune 500 companies but also in the same day lecture at union halls from the steelworks united steelworkers international on the question of dignity
in the workplace and i remember interviewing a man who worked as a chipper in a steel foundry in the monongahela valley of western pennsylvania and being a chipper in the foundries one of the toughest hardest jobs that you can have and i was talking to this man and asking him about his labor and he mentioned to me in passing that when what he called the suits or the executives came onto the foundry floor he said they dropped their heads i thought that was a rather vivid image i thought of executives walking under the foundry floor
carrying their heads in their arm like the horse headless horseman and then dropping it on the floor that that's not what he meant of course but shortly after we were doing a seminar in a hospital and i was sitting on on the chair and watching what was going on in one of the wings of the hospital and there was the nurse who was the head nurse at the nurse's station and i noticed that when a doctor came through the doors she brightened up immediately and smiled at him and said good morning dr so and so
unfortunately he wasn't a doctor that used to work at saint francis hospital in pittsburgh when i worked there in the summers in seminary his last name was cysteric and they used to call him over the loudspeaker saying doctor's sisteric and i used to say we're in trouble here if the doctor's hysteric but in any case this was not doctor systeric it was another doctor and i watched the dynamic and then i watched the nurse leave the nurse's station and she started walking down the hall and coming up the hall was one of the laborers the
housekeeping department in the hospital and he was pushing his basket of soiled garments and he saw the nurse coming and he lifted up his head to acknowledge her and as he looked at her she put her head down and walked past him didn't even acknowledge him acted like he didn't exist and i watched his body language where he just his face sank and you could see the hurt from the snub that he had just received from the nurse when isaiah writes of the suffering servant in chapter 53 of the old testament and describes the pain
of our redeemer he said we hid as it were our faces from him he had no comeliness that we should desire him or to look at him and so our lord himself experienced this phenomenon of people too proud to look upon his countenance because they held him in such contempt and obviously as a peasant girl in nazareth mary had perhaps often experienced the same kind of contempt from people who were in a higher station in life than she was but now she says i can't believe this my my soul wants to exalt him infinitely my
spirit is rejoicing because he has regarded me in my low estate he looked at me i also mentioned on another occasion that unforgettable scene in the movie ben hur when ben hur was in chains and they brought him by the well he was on his knees no one would give him anything to drink and all of a sudden the shadow of a figure came across the screen and you could see somebody stooping over and giving water to this slave in his shackles if you remember you never saw the man all you saw was ben hur
looking up into the face of the man who gave him the cup of cold water and you saw the instant radiance on the face of the slave and everybody knew instantly that he had just been given a cup of cold water from jesus this is mary's experience he looked at me he noticed me he sees me and behold henceforth all the generations of human history will call me blessed because i am blessed supremely blessed no woman in human history has ever been blessed for he who is mighty has done great things for me and holy
is his name and his mercy is on those who fear him from generation to generation here in the magnificat mary mentions specifically three attributes of god he is mighty he is holy and he is merciful the one who has recognized her is the almighty one the one who possesses all power on heaven and earth the one who can create a universe by the sound of his voice by the power of his command let there be and there is the power that the angel gabriel mentioned to mary when she was confounded by his announcement how can
this be since i know not a man mary it'll be because of the power of the most high god the almighty will overshadow you for with him all things are possible he is the one who is mighty now notice this in passing that so often in our culture when people speak of god they do so in really meaningless terms people will speak about a power a higher power a force greater than yourself there's hardly any difference between that kind of language and the language of an animist practitioner who bows down and worships an idol made
out of wood higher power force greater than yourself what are you talking about gravity cosmic energy why do we do that because as long as we can de-personalize god make him an impersonal force a vague amorphous power we have nothing to worry about because impersonal forces will never hold you accountable for your behavior you will never have to face the judgment of cosmic dust but the god who is is the god who has a name he's not simply a power though he has all power he is he he who is mighty has done great things
for me and holy is his name again how beautiful is this description of the character of god god mary is saying is so holy so transcendentally majestic that his very name is holy that's who he is that's his identity he's the holy one of israel not just mighty not just raw force brute power but it's a holy power a holy might holy strength and his mercy is on those who fear him don't miss the impact of those words the one from whom we receive mercy beloved is the almighty one the omnipotent one the holy one
how else could we exist in the presence of the holy one except by mercy but that mercy is not infinite we hear the hymns that speak of god's infinite mercy infinite grace and i think that that's just our giving ourselves over to hyperbole we're so amazed at the wideness and the extent of god's mercy and kindness and grace that we say it's so wonderful it's so great why it's infinite well if it's infinite it has no bounds that god says i will have mercy on whom i will have mercy and he does not extend that
mercy to everyone not everyone receives the mercy of a forgiving god some in the final analysis receive his justice without mercy well who is it who receives the mercy of god those who fear him now here it's not in the sense of fear of being frightened like you would be by a burglar or by a ghost but it's fear in the sense of reverence in the sense of awe in the sense of adoration this is why we're here on sunday morning to come here to worship god and that's what worship is is to show him
reverence that we have this aw this fear of the lord that is the beginning of wisdom it's the beginning of faith it's the beginning of everything and without it there is no mercy and the godless are described in scripture as people who have no fear of god the world is filled with people who have no sense of reverence for god at all no respect no aw no adoration they could care less in fact they show their irreverence by how they use his name how could somebody have any fear of god any reverence for god whatsoever
and use his name as a curse word can you answer that question maybe you're one who does it and if you do ask yourself what does that say about me how impious i must be that i have no reverence for the living god because i don't even respect his name but his mercy is on everyone who fears him from generation to generation this is not something new this is not something unique in the life of mary this is something that goes on and on from adam to noah to abraham to jacob to isaac to david
to jeremiah to peter to paul augustine aquinas luther calvin to you and to me generations come and go they pass but throughout all the ages one thing is constant that the lord is merciful to those who revere him it's interesting that she mentions this in the middle of a hymn that is filled with reverence and filled with adoration he has shown strength with his arm here we have an image of god in human form in which his arm is a symbol of his strength i think the funniest chapter in the bible is chapter 11 of
the book of numbers you may remember that says some of you who didn't memorize the magnificat decided instead to memorize the 11th chapter of numbers that's the occasion where moses is very distraught because this multitude of people that he's led in the exodus are now complaining and bellyaching day after day they want to go back to egypt because now they miss their leeks and their garlic and their onions and all they have to eat every day is this manna that god supernaturally provides for them from heaven i've said this before they got sick and tired
of the manna they had manna for breakfast manner for lunch manna for dinner if they wanted to have a midnight snack they had man at midnight snack they had roast manna fried manna mana sauteed pot manna everything they could possibly do to alter the taste of this stuff they tried and they couldn't take it anymore they said let's go back to egypt give us pharaoh at least under pharaoh even while we were slaves we had onions garlic leeks and moses wants to die he said did i give birth to these people but i have to
listen to this they're crying in my tent give us meat to eat and god said i've heard the cries of the people and they shall have me to eat not for one day not for a week but for a whole month until it's coming out of their noses and becomes loathsome through them be careful what you ask for when you pray and god says you want meat i'll give you meat until it's coming out your nose so you don't want to look at it ever again and now moses is really upset and he said god
how are you going to do that are all our herds going to be killed to supply meat for a month all these people are you going to dry up the sea with the fish so that we can feed them this is even more than you can do it and god answers a question with the question he said moses has the arm of the lord waxed short moses who do you think you're talking to do you think i'm a god with a withered arm do you think i'm a 97 pound weakling that bullies kick sand in
my face as the arm of the lord waxed short moses you will see if what i say comes to pass what a great great image it's the image that finds its way now into this song he has shown strength with his arm then she goes on in this song to demonstrate how god has displayed the strength in his arm and that's what we'll look at god willing next sunday morning let's pray father give us hearts like mary where we sing your praise and adoration with all of our soul all of our spirit may the words
that pass over our lips come from the depths of our being for we ask it in jesus name amen
