Sermon for Christmas Eve 2006
Title:
My Soul Magnifies the Lord
Text: Luke 1: 39-45
By:
A joy in our
last trip to
my aunt’s 92nd birthday.
She has five nieces and nephews, and we were
all able to
be there for an observance of her birthday.
The past few years
have been
difficult for her. Her health has failed
more perceptively than
ever before
in the passage of a couple years. She
has lost many old
friends. The loss of my own parents, who were very
close to her,
was
particularly hard for her. In one
conversation she said that birthdays
are becoming
less and less meaningful to her.
Christmas
too is a birthday and like my aunt’s can be come less and
less meaningful. The passage of time is not the only
distraction. The
celebration
of the meaningfulness of Christmas in this season, has a
lot of
competition. So much is said about the
commercialization of
Christmas
and the transformation of this holiday into a celebration of
capitalism
that I only need to make this one reference to that particular
distraction.
The phrase is often heard, that Christmas is a time for
family – a
family holiday. It has become such a
family holiday – that
the
religious/spiritual side is all but overlooked.
We relish in the
happiness of
children’s smiles and excitement, the gleam in the eye
of
grandchildren, that the infant Jesus becomes a symbol for the
children of
Christmas, loosing in the process, that the infant Jesus
offers a
whole new life for each of us. If
Christmas looses some
of its
luster for us as we pile on more and more lights, tinsel and
ornaments,
then the Gospel of Luke is a good place to turn.
Today’s
lesson, which we read responsively is the Magnifcat or
Mary’s Song,
found only in Luke. The first line is, “My soul
magnifies
the Lord.”
Let us start
with the first noun, the word “soul.”
Luke was
probably
aware of two very different ways to understand the word
“soul.” Luke is the only Gentile Gospel writer. He was not raised
in the
Jewish faith in a Jewish family. He was
a Greek Gentile
from
physician. His education is also reflected in the superb
craftsmanship
in the use
of language which he displays in his articulation of the
Gospel. As an educated Macedonian, Luke would have
been aware
of Greek
philosophy. He would have studied Plato
and Aristotle
and Socrates
who were on the scene a few hundred years earlier.
They were
the ones who developed a dualistic understanding of human
nature. For the Greeks, our lives have two basic
parts, the material
and the
spiritual, the temporal and the eternal,
the body and the soul.
The Greeks
saw life as a matter of the soul’s imprisonment in the
body and death as a great liberator of the
soul from the confines of the
temporal
into the eternal.
Luke, as a
Greek, would have been well versed in all of this.
We know from
the reading the Gospel that Luke also became highly
knowledgeable
about the Jewish faith.
His use of
the Hebrew Scriptures in writing his Gospel was a learned
skill for
him, as a Gentile. His using Hannah’s
song of thanksgiving
over the
birth of her son Samuel as a literary device to convey Mary’s
song, the Magnificat,
is really quite brilliant, especially for one who
was not
brought up in the Jewish tradition.
Luke had a
good teacher. He spent several years in
the company
of Paul as
Paul made his travels around the Mediterranean world.
Without a
doubt, being Paul’s companion was one big learning experience
for
Luke. From Paul, Luke would have learned
another interpretation
for the word
“soul.” In the Old Testament the word
soul was not attached
to Greek
dualism. The word that is translated as soul in the OT more
accurately
means “the whole person.” This word soul
would have been
understood
by Paul and others brought up in the OT faith to mean
all of me,
my inner life (my heart) as well as my outer countenance
(appearance),
my emotions as well as my body.
If we read
the sentence “My soul magnifies the Lord” as Greeks,
then the
action here becomes an inner thing, a private matter
between me
and god. My soul, inner self, becomes
larger because
of the
Gospel in this reading. But if we throw
in Paul’s Jewish
background with its understanding of the word,
then the Lord
becomes
magnified in my whole person, my whole life.
No longer is
it just an inner thing; it is also an outward transformation
of my whole
being.
In other
words, the celebration of Christmas will always ring with some
hollowness
for us, until others can see the Christ-child, not in a manger,
but in us.
My soul
magnifies the Lord. My whole being is
made large
and whole by
the birth of Christ.
Having
considered the noun in that sentence, let us turn for
a moment to
the verb. Magnifies. One straightforward
understanding
of this sentence is that I am a magnifying glass
for others to see the Christ through me. Christ remains a tiny,
insignificant
babe in a far away manger in time and space for
others
around me. Angels are not going to make the baby more
meaningful
for other around me. Stars today are not
going to
lead our
neighbors to know about Jesus. Music,
candles and
carols are
not going to make the story of the babe bigger or
more real
for Jesus our children or our neighbors.
They
need the
magnification of that story in each of us.
Each of
us need to
be mirrors or the prisms in the light house
(discussed
during children’s sermon). We are not the light,
but we bear
witness to the light.
We can
search and search for happiness. We can
be down
in the mouth
about how Christmas has lost its sparkle.
But the real glow of Christmas is to be found
in us.
This message
of our important role as light bearers is
very much in
the mode and method of Luke. In the
opening
paragraph of the Gospel, Luke writes “I too made
up my mind
to carry out a careful investigation of all things
from the
very beginning and write to you, Theophilus.”
Luke is the
only Gospel writer to use the personal
pronoun “I”
in his Gospel. With that pronoun in the
opening verses, he puts himself center stage
and announces
to all the
world, to all who might turn to his story, to all
lovers of
God (Theophilus), that this story is his story.
Telling the
story is his way of magnifying the Lord.
Dr. Arthur
Gossip, former professor of New Testament
Theology at
that the
four Gospels – MMLK – are important, but beyond
them is an
even more important fifth Gospel,
that is the
Gospel of shared personal experience.
There is
another meaning that can be found in the verb
“to
magnify.” Yes, Luke calls us to be the
ones to make
large for
the world around us the story of Jesus.
But I think
the magnify in Mary’s Song works two ways.
It can also mean, and Christmas calls us to
meditate
both day and
night on this, how the Gospel, the good news,
the birth of
Christ magnifies my life.
There are as
many different ways to interpret this and
tell the
story as there are Christians who believe it.
To some the
magnification means, salvation or redemption,
to others it
means becoming spiritually aware, to others it
means
becoming morally aware, to others it means
becoming sensitized to justice issues, to
others it means
there is
more to life than what we know in one lifetime,
to others it
means my life is made whole and complete
because of
that birth, to others it means some
combination
of the above or something else that might be
added to this list.
Whoever you
are, wherever you are on life’s journey,
God is still
speaking to you through the story of this season,
and wants
even more to speak through you to your world
and those in
it around you.