Sing for a Change

“My soul proclaims the greatness of God.”

So sings Mary of Nazareth, a young woman (likely a young teenager), living in an occupied first-century province of the Roman Empire. She’s pregnant, and unmarried, and without many resources, and still she sings of the God who brings down the mighty from their thrones and raises up the lowly (Luke 1:47-55).

We recited her song—usually referred to as the Magnificat—in church yesterday, in place of a psalm, and we sang not one but two metrical versions of it during worship.

In this third week of Advent, the appointed texts are starting to sound like Christmas. But this classic song from a young girl made me wonder: Has the world really changed very much since she first sang it? Have there been any kings sitting on thrones in their kingdoms, any tyrants ruling their empires since then?

Yes, of course. And yet, composers have not stopped setting Mary’s song to music, in nearly every generation. Kingdoms rise and fall, and still the Magnificat is sung. Empires come and go; but right here in a twenty-first century world, we still sing Mary’s song of the God who shall not fail in freedom and mercy.

“My soul proclaims the greatness of God.”

So sings a small group of young Black women in the middle of Tennessee. I stumbled upon their story just recently, about a group of students at Fisk University in Nashville.

It was the summer of 1871 and these young women were making their way back to Nashville after singing together at a concert. Traveling in the South at that time was dangerous, especially for Black women. Sure enough, a mob of white men started to harass and threaten them as they walked to a train station.

Clustered together on the platform with no train yet in sight, surrounded by violent men, the young women began to sing a hymn. They likely sang one of the Negro spirituals from the plantations, with words about the tender mercy of precious Jesus.

Quite remarkably, as they sang, the mob of white men slowly began to disperse, one by one. As the train approached, only the mob’s leader remained; he stood there with tears streaming down his cheeks and he begged the women to sing the hymn again.

Have there been racists and episodes of violent bigotry and lynch mobs since then? Yes, of course. But the song of those women made a difference for that young man who wanted to hear it just one more time.

(Those women, by the way, became the award-winning, world-renowned Fisk Jubilee Singers, a choral organization still in existence today, at Fisk.)

“My soul proclaims the greatness of God.”

My own mother sang such divine praise when she became pregnant with me at the age of thirty-nine, at a time when that was considered too old for a safe pregnancy. She was convinced that she would never have children, and she was distraught about this.

She often said how much she identified with Hannah, the figure from the Hebrew Bible who was also without children. Hannah prayed and wept to God for a child—just as my mother said she herself did—and Hannah eventually gave birth to Samuel, the great prophet of ancient Israel and anointer of kings. The song of praise to God that Hannah sings eventually became the inspiration for the song Mary sings in Luke’s account of the Gospel (1 Samuel 2:1-10).

Imagine growing up as I did hearing from your mother about your own birth framed with the stories of Hannah and Samuel, and of Mary and Jesus! That’s more than just a little pressure! Who could possibly live up to such biblical expectations?

I certainly couldn’t live up to that, and I haven’t. But I have tried to pay attention to this over these many years: for both Jewish and Christian traditions, the stories of Hannah and of Mary are not only about these individual women; they are mostly about the communities they shaped with the faith they lived.

We do tell complex stories about ourselves and our communities, weaving our lives together with the dreams of our ancestors from centuries ago. And we do this as a way to keep us rooted in a history of faithfulness for the sake of a future of hopefulness.

The Gospel writer we call “Luke” did precisely this. He loved that song of Hannah (which he then gives to Mary to sing while pregnant), and Luke loved the opening verses we also heard in church yesterday from Isaiah (which he then gives to Jesus when Jesus launches his ministry of healing and liberation in Nazareth), and Luke also loved the prophet Joel, whose words he then uses to describe the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

Luke told stories with ancient texts that were not his own, but they became part of him, and then part of the communities to which he wrote, and now they are part of us.

It matters that these stories constantly feature faith, and hope, and also love in a world where the word “success” usually matters more.

I’ve been reflecting recently on what exactly “successful” means, probably because my parish has been steeped in our annual fundraising campaign for 2024, just like many other congregations; ‘tis the season! As we track responses and tally the totals, I can’t help but wonder whether any biblical figure would qualify as “successful” by today’s standards.

Success in modern Western society is based on a set of recognizable and measureable metrics: more money, more cars, more land, and more acquisitions. The more we own, the more we control, the more we dominate, the more successful we are.

Success might be our collective problem in the world right now, not our solution. As environmental educator and activist David W. Orr has succinctly noted: The world does not need more “successful” people; the world desperately needs “more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of all kinds.”

What we need this very moment are more artists and musicians and bakers and gardeners and caretakers of dogs and cats and of all sorts of creatures who share this precious Earth with us, all of us working together to build communities of tender care and fierce justice—whether or not anyone thinks any of this is “successful.”

Mary of Nazareth didn’t sing for success; she sang her song from a broken heart, cracked open by the suffering of her people, and stubborn enough to believe that the God of her ancestors remains faithful to God’s own promises—even when it doesn’t look like “success.”

She sings her song in an occupied land, vulnerable to violence, and then vulnerable to the scandal of her pregnancy, and still she sings, not with certainty but with hopefulness. As the great biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann has insisted, Gospel hope is not just some vague feeling that things will all just work out in the end; it’s actually quite evident that not everything will work out.

Hope is instead the conviction, against a great deal of data to the contrary, that God is tenacious in overcoming evil with good; that God insists on turning the world’s sadness into joy; that God shall not rest until at last a new realm has dawned where the lost are found, and the displaced brought home, and the dead raised to new life.

That’s the story we must tell, and the music we must compose, and the pictures we must paint, and the energy all of us must cultivate together for a world that can’t imagine trusting that story anymore but still longs to hear it. Just like that young man on a nineteenth-century train platform, with tears streaming down his face, who wanted to hear the hymn one more time—the world is desperate to hear Mary’s song once more, sung with conviction, sung by the way we live, sung for a change.

I suggested all this on a Sunday that marked the 35^th anniversary of my ordination to the priesthood. While I’m deeply grateful for the privilege to preside at the Eucharistic Table, what matters most is the community of God’s people gathered there.

Having returned to fulltime parish ministry nearly four years ago, this much has become quite clear: we need to help each other to hear Mary’s song anew, and then to learn how to sing it by the way we live.

This, too, is very clear these days: there’s no time to waste. So let’s sing…for a change.