It’s so good to see you all.
Who’da thunk it, right?
By rights—by the logic of the world—I shouldn’t be standing here. When some of y’all first met me I was a barely dried-out drunk, who didn’t even have anything nice to say about Christianity. Let alone any desire to serve in ministry. Christian community had chewed me up and spat me out. My life had collapsed around me, and I was just learning how to survive one day at a time.
And that’s not to say I have it all together now. But then? At that point? Finding healing in Christ and life in his Church seemed like a wildly unlikely prospect.
But that’s kinda how God works… It’s how God has always worked. Unlikeliness is the pattern of God’s action in the world. God reaches into the unlikeliest places, taking what is unloved, unseen, and unknown, and lifting it up to show forth his glory. This is the Great Reversal that flows forth from the Mystery of God’s Son—the eternal Word—becoming incarnate from a young Jewish woman named Mary of Nazareth.
Mary wasn’t special by the standards of the world. She wasn’t some famous sage or powerful queen. She was a girl living in the far reaches of an empire that cared little for her people. She was an unlikely hero. By the logic of the world, she was “nothing.” And yet we honor her today as the “ever-blessed Mother of God.”
Who’da thunk it?
We honor her as “more glorious than the seraphim.” And she is. Not because she was wise and mighty and honored in the world. But because God chose her and called her. God chose her in her lowliness and weakness and called her to become the dwelling of the Most High. And she said “yes” to that call.
The message proclaimed by the Mother of God is God’s eternal call to the weak and the lowly. It’s the reminder that God chooses the unlikeliest places to show forth his glory. God chooses the unlikeliest people to proclaim his greatness.
The world tells so many of us that we’re nothing. Any of you who live at the margins know what I mean. The world—sometimes even acting in the name of the Church—tells us that because we aren’t straight or white or cisgender or male,we are nothing. And by human standards, maybe we are. Maybe we don’t amount to much in the eyes of this world.
But what we see proclaimed in the Mother of God is that it is precisely in people and places that “don’t amount to much” that God chooses to act. God chooses the weak as instruments of power. God chooses the foolish to reveal infinite wisdom. God chooses those trampled down by the sins of the world to declare that it is the world in its sin itself that is being cast.
This is the Great Reversal that ripples out from the King of Glory humbly choosing the virgin’s womb. God lifts us up and turns the world on its head, putting its boasting and blustering to shame. And in place of that boasting we hear the voice of the Blessed Virgin Mary: “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord; my spirit rejoices in God my savior, for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant.”
Who’da thunk it?
God looked with favor on Mary’s lowliness and called her—not in spite of it but because of it—to boast in her Son and her God who she bore in her womb. So as we lift up our hearts with the Mother of God and share in the sacrifice of her Son our Lord, consider your own call, my siblings: Consider how God is calling what is lowly, foolish, and weak in you, in order to raise you up and make make you sing with joy, boasting in and magnifying not yourself, but God our savior.