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I have often wondered how Mary could sing these words:
“My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.”
Mary sings these words as a young virgin who is pregnant with the Son of God. I think if I am being honest, if I were Mary, I might have had a few questions first. I might have wanted a few more details. How exactly is all of this going to work? What is Joseph going to think? What is going to happen to me? And perhaps most importantly: How does this story end?
But Mary sings. And that is extraordinary. Because Mary sings before Bethlehem. Before the flight into Egypt. Before the long years in Nazareth. Before the crucifixion. Before the resurrection. She sings while the future is still completely unknown.
How could Mary sing? I think the answer is this:
Mary didn’t know God’s plan. But she knew God. She knew the God whose mercy is from generation to generation. She knew the God who remembers God’s promises. She knew the God who lifts up the lowly. And knowing God mattered, because Mary could not know what came next.
Like Mary, we may know something about not knowing what comes next. Like Mary, most of us make plans of one kind or another. Plans for our families, our work, our retirement, or simply what we expect the next few years to look like. We imagine what the future might hold. And then something happens that we never saw coming.
Perhaps it is a troubling diagnosis. The loss of a job or someone we love. A relationship changes. A door seems to close. Or, as happened in my own life, God quietly began opening an entirely different door. (More on that a little later.)
It is easy to have faith when life unfolds according to our plans. It is much harder to have faith when those plans are interrupted. Mary’s plans had certainly been interrupted. So how had she come to know God well enough to respond as she did?
This kind of faith does not suddenly appear in a single moment. It is formed over a lifetime. Long before Mary carried Christ into the world, she carried the stories and promises of God within her.
Mary knew the stories. She knew that when God called Abraham to leave his home and everything familiar, Abraham went without knowing where God was leading him. He had only God’s promise and the faith to take the next step.
Mary knew that when the Israelites cried out in Egypt, God heard them. They could not possibly have known how their deliverance would come, or what lay on the other side of the Red Sea, but they knew that God had not forgotten them.
Mary knew the story of Hannah, who came before God in anguish and poured out her heart in prayer, not knowing how her story would end, but trusting that God would hear her.
And Mary knew the words of Isaiah that we heard earlier, the promise that God would clothe God’s people with salvation and wrap them in righteousness, words spoken to a people who were still waiting to see God’s promises fulfilled.
Again and again, Mary had heard the stories of people who did not know what was going to happen next, but who trusted God enough to keep going. Mary did not simply know these stories. They had become part of her, shaping the way she understood God long before the Angel Gabriel appeared.
Gabriel told her that she would bear a son who would be called the Son of God. Mary asked, “How can this be?” Mary knew God, but that did not mean she understood what Gabriel was telling her or where her life would lead. Gabriel answered Mary’s question, but he did not tell her what the future would hold.
And Mary’s response was:
“Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”
That was not resignation. It was trust in the God Mary had come to know.
And maybe that is worth remembering, because sometimes I confuse faith with certainty. I imagine that strong faith means knowing what God is doing and where God is leading me.
We saw something similar in Peter last Sunday, as Cadence reminded us. Peter stepped out of the boat without knowing what would happen next. When fear overtook him and he began to sink, he called out to Jesus, trusting that Jesus would be there. Mary asked a question. Peter cried out for help. Neither had certainty, but both turned toward the God they had come to know.
Many of you might know that I spent thirty years as an elementary school teacher. For the first twenty-five years, I absolutely loved what I was doing. I knew I was exactly where God had called me to be, and I never imagined doing anything else.
Then something began to change. It wasn’t the children. I still loved the children. But I became increasingly uncomfortable with what I perceived to be the direction education was taking, and I began to realize that something I had loved for most of my adult life was no longer where I was meant to be.
That was difficult to admit. Teaching wasn’t simply what I did. It was who I understood myself to be, and for years I had believed it was where God had called me. And now I needed to discern whether it was time to let it go.
So I did what I always do when I don’t know what to do. I prayed. I spent a great deal of time talking with God, listening, and trying to hear God’s still, small voice.
I wasn’t praying for another job or a vocation. I was praying for wisdom. I was praying for serenity. I was praying for clarity. I was praying for acceptance.
And gradually, what I heard was very simple: “This is not your battle.” I didn’t know what would come next. But I began to understand that I could let go of something I had loved for so many years without yet knowing what the future would hold.
Looking back now, I can see what I could not see then. God was gently opening another door. It was a door that led me here to Epiphany, the parish that had already been my spiritual home for more than thirty years, and to work that I never could have imagined for myself.
And somehow, it fit. I found myself in a place where the gifts God had given me could be put to use in ways I had never anticipated, working alongside an incredible staff and so many volunteers who give generously of themselves so that Epiphany can continue to grow and share the Good News. I feel extraordinarily blessed to be part of that work.
If you had told me during those years in the classroom that one day I would leave teaching and serve on the staff of this amazing church, I never would have believed you. If you had told me that I would be standing here sharing these words with you, I never would have believed it! It was not part of my plan.
That is why Mary’s story feels so personal to me. She didn’t know where her yes would lead either.
I often think that Mary’s great act of faith was saying yes to Gabriel; saying yes to God. It certainly was. But that was only the first of many yeses.
Saying yes to God once is one thing. Living that yes day after day, year after year, through joy and sorrow, clarity and confusion, is something else entirely.
Most of life happens between the big moments. It happens in the ordinary routines of getting up in the morning and doing what needs to be done: caring for the people God has given us to love, praying, going to work, keeping promises, serving our neighbors, worshiping, playing. And much of the time, nothing particularly dramatic happens.
Mary lived many years of ordinary life in Nazareth between the events surrounding Jesus’ birth and the beginning of his ministry. We know very little about those years. Scripture tells us very little about what Mary did or what she thought. But those ordinary years mattered.
The ordinary days of our lives matter too. Most of the time, we may not even be aware that anything is happening, but those are the days in which we continue to learn who God is.
And each week we gather here to worship God. We hear the Scriptures. We pray. We celebrate the Eucharist. We do these things again and again, and through these ordinary acts of worship, God is quietly forming us. And over time, the words we hear and pray become part of us.
The words of Scripture had become so much a part of Mary that when her own life suddenly took a direction she never could have imagined, those words were there. And then they became her song.
Mary’s song did not come out of nowhere. The Magnificat is filled with the language and promises of the Scriptures Mary knew so well. We hear Hannah’s song and the promise made to Abraham and his descendants.
Here at Epiphany, that song is still part of our life together. Each Sunday evening at Evensong, the choir sings the Magnificat, the very song of Mary we heard in today’s Gospel.
Week after week, Mary’s song reminds us who God is: the God whose mercy is from generation to generation, who lifts up the lowly and remembers God’s promises; the God who was, who is, and who will be forever and ever.
And whether we realize it or not, those words are becoming part of us. Through Scripture, prayer, and worship, we are learning the language of faith before we know when we are going to need it.
That is one of the gifts of a life of worship. We do not know what tomorrow will bring. We do not know when our plans will be interrupted, when something we have counted on will change, or when we will find ourselves wondering what comes next.
But when those moments come, we do not come to them empty-handed. We bring the stories we have heard. We bring the prayers we have prayed. We bring the words that have become part of us.
We may not yet know what God is asking of us. But we can know the God whose stories we have heard, whose words we have prayed, and whose presence has been woven into the ordinary rhythms of our lives. And that is Mary’s gift to us.
Not simply that she said yes once, but that she shows us how to live without knowing what comes next, trusting the God we have come to know.
For Mary didn’t know God’s plan. But she knew God. And by God’s grace, we can learn to do the same.