Bearing Love: Mary Sang
“My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,”
-Luke 1:46-47
Mary’s preparation for laboring and parenting the savior is in writing a song that will carry her through pregnancy to the foot of the cross.
Read: Luke 1:26-56
For most people celebrating Advent, Mary’s birth story is familiar. The exchange between the Angel, the visit to her cousin, the song of preparation, even the birth itself are stories and passages I have read or heard read many times. But, I feel like I couldn’t really get acquainted with Mary until I became a mother because now I can fill in the gaps between hearing she would be pregnant, traveling to Elizabeth, giving birth in Bethlehem with details like morning sickness, heartburn, insomnia, etc.
Hearing Mary’s birth story is like seeing a Christmas card on the fridge. Being a mother and hearing Mary’s birth story is like being at the photoshoot and knowing that mom is bribing, bargaining and threatening to capture that moment. Our nativity scenes have photoshopped out the sweat, under eye circles and blood. They lack the smell of a stable or the sounds of a first time mother and first-time step father in the delivery moment.
“What can I do?”
“I don’t know what you can do; how about not letting the Savior of the World land on a barn floor?”
Which makes me wonder all the more when she said, “Let it be with me according to your Word” how much she thought that would entail.
I am not suggesting that Mary didn’t know; Mary’s song proves this much. However, there are also some things you can’t fully know until you are in the thick of them. She may have known a vague outline of what it might have meant for her to carry, birth, feed and parent Jesus, but there are plenty of details that she did not know. And, this is exactly where we sit in Advent. Being called to be a part of the Kingdom, but knowing only in part what that means while we wait for its fruition.
Mary accepts her call, and quickly shows us why she has garnered God’s favor through her strength and faith. Mary’s song is a remix of one we’ve heard before (Hannah’s prayer in 1 Samuel 2), but Mary makes the words personal. She does some deep interpretive work on the character of God to claim the fulfillment of God’s faithfulness within her womb.
Songs have the power to shape our imaginations, provide awareness, and connect us to the larger human story and experience. Songs can become an energizing force, and this one reminds me of the kind of resilience born in slave communities singing negro spirituals like “Go Down Moses,” interpreting God’s action for the Hebrew people in a way that asserted the good news of freedom was and would be for them, too.
Learning how to wait from Mary isn’t just about singing. It’s about singing the kind of singing that sustains the soul. It’s about singing the kind of song that gives us the strength to make God’s justice, peace and love real in the world.
I wonder if these words came back to Mary throughout Jesus’ life. Was she witnessing his death and wondering where was the God who would scatter the proud and take out the powerful and bankrupt the rich? It only took a few days later to find that God present with her again.
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Rev. Dr. Fatimah Salleh discusses Mary's birth story and her own call as a mother of four, as a black mother raising bi-racial children, and as a mothering minister who has found her call in pastoring pastors. Rev. Dr. Salleh has also been doing anti-racism training work within the church.
