Several years ago as a student in seminary in California. I climbed into a 15 passenger van with another adult and 13 teenagers and joined in a caravan with two other similar vans filled with all kinds of sleeping bags, water, snacks and pulling trailers filled with building supplies. We drove through the beautiful hills of Northern California, past sprawling vineyards with huge mansions overlooking valleys that look like they came out of someone's dreams. Through Los Angeles with its brights lights and people feeling so entitled that they jog in $200 workout suits in the midddle of the street, past Disneyland and Knotts Berry Farm, through San Diego where the beaches look like they are pulled straight out of the movies, across the border into Mexico. First into the touristy parts of Mexico, the parts where Californians go to spend time and money, then the parts where real Mexicans shop and eat and then breathtakingly quickly into the slums. Into a neighborhood where stray dogs wander around looking like skeletons and people live in kind of permanent lean-tos made of whatever they have to make them out of, mostly trash from up north, from Americans, old garage doors are very popular because they are big enough to make whole walls with.
We were there to build houses for two families. We had collected money and building materials for a year and these kids were using their spring break and when we got there the slum stretched as far as the eye could see in any direction. Two houses, two simple 12ft by 12ft rooms really that whole families from grandma on down would live in seemed tiny all of a sudden compared to all of the need and pain and dirt and sickness that we could see.
But we had come so we started to build, our work was magnified you might say, made bigger and more useful by some well trained volunteers who lived in this place year round, and some local laborers who donated their time. My group built for a family, headed by grandma, with three adult women and three little kids (dads travelled around to find work)...we would build our twelve by twevle room for them, with windows to the outside but no internal walls and they would use it as living space and still cook and at least some of them sleep in the hobbled together shack that was already on their tiny little piece of land. I remember being up on the roof sweating with the kids as we nailed shingles down thinking how badly I could use some water, it was HOT there and seeing grnadma, tiny old woman lugging two huge jugs of water into her home and refusing the offer of help from one of our group. Off and on while we were there I saw her doing similar things, certain stuff she just wouldn't take help with.
After about four days we finished the house, it was tiny but tidy and sound and we were proud and amazed at what God had done for us and what we had done for God, maybe a little too proud of ourselves really. And we were going to the house the last morning to do a little service of blessing, I worked with some of the kids who knew a little spanish and together we patched together a little prayer service with very pretty carefully choosen words. To thank God for this house that God had built with our hands.
But when we got there for the service grandma had other plans, she had made food for us and found chairs for us all to sit in, i guess he had borrowed from neighbors. All the water and other thigs that she was carrying in and wouldn't take help with had been to make us a feast of thanksgiving, down to the water that she had had to pay for because though the locals could drink it, the water there wasn't safe for us to drink. So carefully she had prepared a meal that was safe for us and must have cost her quite a lot and as we prepared to eat she waited patiently as we did our little prayer service and then she said she wanted to say a prayer. It was short and in spanish. My spanish wasn't great then and is even worse now but I remember what she said was basically translated to mean: Let us thank God because with you he has made my heart and soul very, very full.
Nothing we could have said would have been a better pray, I thank God because with you he has made my heart very, very full, we heard sitting in an empty room that would be a whole house, in the slums, where people lived on the trash from our country, looking at a tiny grandma who the world couldn't see, would never see because she was just to small to matter to anyone but God and because of that to us. And she prayed for us because God had made her heart very, very full.
In the gospel lesson today after being told that she will be mother to the messiah in the form of a little baby Jesus, a terrifying task, Mary says: My soul magnifies the Lord. This song from Mary is called the magnificat, a latin word that comes from the word that she uses for what her soul does, it magnifies the lord. We don't use the word magnify like this very often in fact we almost only use it now when referring to science and technology microscopes, magnify things, tiny things, things that we would never see otherwise to make them life size, even large, there are huge TV screens in some labs where tiny, imperceptible things, things that would never be seen by the untrained eye, are magnified and then projected up so that everyone can see them on huge people sized screens. Magnification makes tiny things, that would be completely missed, into full pictures, in some cases very, very full just so they can be seen.
Magnify isn't a word that we use a lot to describe what we do or who we are or what it means to be Christian but isn't it really just what we do? Lift up, magnify, the little ones, as Jesus calls them, those who would otherwise be left completely out, not even noticed by the untrained eye?
In fact our job is to look in places that other people might never bother to look and to magnify the Lord by lifting up those we find there.
For Mary I suppose this worked both ways, she was at once very small herself, a young unmarried peasant woman, without a lot of money or an important name, just a girl by all accounts and yet when she got the crazy news that she would give birth to the messiah instead of running to hide or going to the temple, which was in certain ways like a palace and demanding special treatment or rejecting the whole thing and trying to come up with a plan to save her own butt, she welcomed God's son, a tiny baby, just like her, just a boy, who would not even have been seen by the untrained eye. And she sang praises to God for all of it, magnifying His amazing race with her very full heart and soul.
One the other hand God magnified Mary's soul through the words of the messenger sent to her to announce the Good News, through her cousin Elizabeth, through the baby John, still in the womb but a prophet who leapt for joy at her arrival, through Joseph who took her in and loved and cared for her despite his doubts, through kings and wisemen, shepherds and lowly cattle herds. Mary was lifted and held up, She might have gotten the song that she sang wrong, in fact, when she said her soul magnifies the Lord because I think that the Lord and all the faithful servants magnified her soul.
Or maybe it worked both ways. Maybe it still does, our souls, our little faith that would't even be seen by the untrained eye is magnified in the community of the faithful and by Christ living amoung us and then we in turn sing praises and remember the great good that has been done for us in God's name from a cookie after service to miraculous birth death and resurrection of God's only son for us and our hearts magnify the Lord right back for all to see and empower us to fill the hearts and souls of others with God's love. This is great good news. Thanks be to God. Amen!
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