I’ve been intrigued to discover as I study Luke this time that the language in the Magnificat of the mighty being brought down from their thrones and the lowly uplifted is a recurring motif throughout the book. John the Baptist changes the scripture he quotes from Isaiah to talk about every valley being filled and every hill and mountains made low. Jesus always comes down from the mountain to preach on a plain, and Luke even has the Beatitudes delivered on a plain instead of a mount. God is at work making all things level – bringing down those who prosper now and uplifting those who suffer now. A message that we sometimes can accept at Christmas with its reminder that the Savior of the world was laid in a lowly manger. But in Lent it is far more unsettling.

This is a season of penance and sacrifice, but often only of the personal kind. We give up pleasures or habits for the sake of drawing ourselves closer to God. For many the discipline of such sacrifice is simply a means of reorienting their worship and devotion to God so as to strengthen that commitment overall. The discipline prepares one for deeper relationship with God. But as John proclaimed, preparing the way of the Lord involves bringing down and lifting up. And as Mary asserts, one magnifies the Lord because God has and is in the process of continuing to bring down and lift up. But how often do our Lenten practices participate in this sort of leveling out?

Pietism that relies solely on personal sacrifices that affect us and us alone can serve to draw us emotionally closer to God, but our faith is not something that concerns just us. We exist as a body and as members of the body of Christ the disciplines we engage in should always work towards the good of that body. While being personally closer to God might serve the good of the body in some ways, it is rare that Lenten practices are conceived in such a way. The recent popularity if the images included here attest that at least in popular perception Lent has nothing to do with working for the good of others, of righting relationships that are unbalanced, but is instead merely a selfish (and therefore) pointless practice.

What if our acts of repentance and confession instead served to care for the body as a whole? What if we confessed the ways we have uplifted the mighty (ourselves included) and brought down the lowly? What if our penance and sacrifice involved reversing that imbalance and preparing the way of the Lord by leveling out those relationships? Yes, it is far more difficult to sacrifice a position of privilege and power than it is to give up chocolate or coffee for a few weeks, but it seems to far better reflect the ways God has called us to worship and follow after him. Sacrifice just for the sake of ourselves misses the point. The reminder to bring down and uplift pushes us beyond ourselves to acts of love, repentance, and worship that serve the entire body and not just our particular part.

So while Magnificat is not normally a Lenten text, my meditation on it this year is teaching me that perhaps it should be.

How can Mary sing that the Lord has done great things for her? It's a little crazy: how can this young, lower-class girl who finds herself knocked up sing that God has already–in the past tense–ended injustice and oppression? All she has to do is look around her to find evidence to the contrary.

I answered the question, working in the requisite readings. But days later the question is still haunting me.

What intrigues me is the gap between what the song proclaims and how the song is commonly used. As the exam question implied, we tend to get confused about the song's verb tense. It isn't simply past tense, announcing the fulfillment of the eschatological vision in which rulers are brought down and the lowly are lifted up. Nor is it simply a future hope for a time when all will be made right.

Instead it's both; it's the already and not yet. This can be hard to understand, in part because English lacks the aorist tense. The Magnificat testifies to God's work to reconcile all creation, work that has already begun and will continue forever. Like Mary, we are invited to be intimately involved in this work.

Mary wasn't crazy. She was carrying the hope of the world inside her; she knew that God had entered the world in a dramatic way. This changed everything–but to accomplish the change, the hope had to be proclaimed with assurance. We don't just place our hope in a past event or a future reward; we live into it.

When God sent Jesus to the world to reconcile all things, his incarnation and work on the cross did the job. Salvation dealt with the world's injustices and oppressions. But as humans we could not be transformed all at once–that desire is what got Adam and Eve kicked out of Eden. God works gradually in our lives and world, helping us grow up into the hope that is already there.

Like Mary, we magnify the Lord for already overcoming injustice and oppression–and we also work to end such evils. Mary trusted so profoundly in the reality of the baby she carried that she asserted God's fulfillment of hope in the past, present and future. Her faith challenges me to join her in magnifying God by making this hope a reality.

Births aren't generally unexpected.  I mean, you kinda know they are coming.  But that doesn't mean that you won't be in the early stages of labor and not wonder if you still have time to rethink the whole thing.  Birthing is hard, it's messy, and it doesn't always go a planned.

I think of Mary, unexpectedly pregnant, having to face the scorn of her culture – a taint she and her son would have to carry through life.  Then she is forced to travel to Bethlehem, "now obviously pregnant," as some translations put it.  She was anticipating a birth, a special birth, but I have to wonder if even so it took her by surprise.  Was she at term?  Or did the long journey send her into preterm labor, forcing a child into the world before anyone was ready for it?  Having two children born prematurely, I understand how even something anticipated and desired can still unexpectedly alter one's world.

I think we often in the church have to face these unexpected births.  When we are pregnant with ideas or passions or a call, we have to see it through.  As much as we want to live in denial that there is new life growing within us, that life is going to emerge whether we are ready or not.  That baby's coming out.  And it's guaranteed to be messy.  It's guaranteed to be painful.  And sometimes it may even come early.  Difficult journeys strain the body to the point that new life has to be birthed in order for both the mother and the child to survive.  It's sudden sometimes. And it's scary.  But it's still a beautiful child.

Mary willingly birthed the messiah – the one she knew would bring rulers down from their thrones and lift up the humble.  And she did it without the support of family, with a strange midwife at her side, and a dingy manger to lay the child in as her broken and bleeding body was tended to.  Was this what she envisioned as she sung the Magnificat? Will generations call her blessed for this?  Or do we forget the pain, and the mess, and the unexpected in our vain attempts to sanitize the way God worked in history?

Are we willing to let God birth new life?