Less is More Luke 1: 46-55 Advent IV, December 23, 2018 Bethlehem Lutheran Church, St. Charles, IL Pastor Paul Rohde My friends in Christ, grace to you and peace in the name of Jesus, the long awaited one for whom we prepare, that God may open us yet again like furrows, to discover new love, new life, and new joy. Amen. The verb of Mary s song is one of my favorites for both prayer and life. Magnify, she says. My soul magnifies the Lord. What is prayer? It is magnifying God. What is Advent? It is preparation for God s presence and promise expanding, enlarging, growing. My soul magnifies, Mary teaches us to say, expands the presence, the promise, and the peace of God. But how do we magnify? How do we magnify prayer, or life, or God? My fear is that we might meat the verb with a kind of shoulder shrug, as if it s one more thing to do well you pray more, read the Bible more, or help each other out more. Those are, of course, all good and noble things, but I think it s very clear when we read the rest of Mary s song that she means something very different than that. Magnifiying God is not another check on our checklist. Do your job, check. Maintain your home, check. Prepare for Christmas, check. And pay attention to end of year deadlines [whoever decided to put Christmas at the end of the year, or the end of the year at Christmas?], check. And then you come to church the day before Christmas and the preacher announces we should magnify God, too. Much harder to simply check that one off. The rest of Mary s song makes very clear that it s a not a check on your list. There are a number of things that actually make us smaller in this song. She talks about being humble, a lowly one. She speaks of pride and anything that makes us proud being scattered. She ll speak of emptying. Empty doesn t feel like magnifying, does it?
So I am offering three tangible pictures to hold together when we think about magnifying God... and being humbled, emptied, made servants. I hope together we can see being less in ways that make the enlarging of God and the joy and the justice she sings real. We ll start with this painting. It should thrill Scandinavians that Claude Monet, the famous French impressionist, spent two months in Norway in 1895. His step-son had married a Norwegian and he went to visit them. Monet struggled with the snow. This country is undoubtedly infinitely more beautiful without snow, or at least when there isn t so much of it. Especially because, true to what impressionists are famous for, he painted almost entirely outside, in natural light, to see how scenes change at different times of day. He wrote to a friend I painted...today, while it was snowing continually: you would have laughed to see me entirely white, my beard covered in icy stalactites. We bought this print at a Monet exhibit at the Chicago Art Institute in the mid- 1990s. When we brought it home, I showed it to a friend who is a professional water colorist. He gasped when he saw it and then exclaimed, Less is more. The painting is almost entirely shades of white. A few strokes of red for the house and a little black for the bridge, but beyond that the entire painting is various shades of white, monochromatic, so like a snowy day that way. Less is more. Exhibit two is a story told by Eugene Peterson, the author of the Message. The Message is a paraphrase in every day English that is expressive, imaginative and has opened the Bible to many. Since his death this fall his work has been circulating vigorously again. In an essay I reread, Peterson describes a time in his ministry that he was dangerously close to burning out. He risked contradicting everything he was saying about trusting God by thinking it all depended on him; by being tempted to manipulate others for the result he thought he wanted. He wanted his people to know God deeply, to love extravagantly, to trust completely. But he wanted it so badly, he felt like it all depended on him. He writes of this as the opposite of trust.
In the middle of this crisis, Peterson got to hear Paul Tournier, a 20 th century Swiss physician whose life work was claiming profound connections between physical health and spirituality. On the way home from the lecture, Eugene Peterson s wife said to him, Wasn t that translator amazing? Peterson said, What translator? His wife was perplexed, she burst out laughing and said, Are you kidding? Tournier s whole lecture was in French and you don t know any French. The translator stood just behind Tournier. Peterson writes that the translator was so skilled in timing and inflection and nuance... that he disappeared. The translator became transparent to the words and wisdom and presence of Paul Tournier. Eugene actually forgot he was there and thought he was hearing and understanding everything Tournier had said directly. From this experience, the word Eugene Peterson uses for prayer and faith is transparency, seeing through a prayer, a singer, a servant, translators all of them to God who is at work. A pray-er becomes transparent, like glass, to see through one s words, one s heart, to the One who is greater. To magnify is to become transparent to the trustworthy, steady, active love and presence of God. When Mary sings, My soul magnifies the Lord she is transparent to all that God is doing in and for the whole world. Let s take these two phrases: Less is More and Transparency and apply them to some of the specific things Mary sings. And see if it helps us hear what Mary is magnifying. Mary sings, The rich are sent away empty The poor have good things given to them, but the rich are sent away empty. This phrase gives new and important meaning to less is more. The magnifying of God is not at all one more thing added on. It is not us doing more, having more, seeing more. It is in a profound way less but not in deprivation or even sacrifice. Maybe part of the reason Mary is so able to magnify God is that she is so little, so least, so obscure, so humble. There is in that more space for God and what God is promising to do for her. I yearn for that for all of us. In a season we all have so much to do I yearn for this emptying that we have
more focus, more gratitude, more trust. I yearn for it for you; for me. Less is more. The rich are empty. Not that this is surprising. I think we all know that our stuff gets in the way of things that are much more important. And the quantities this month all the wanting and shopping and wanting and hinting as if this is preparing for Christ. I hope Mary s magnifying gives us pause here. The thought of being emptied, giving it up, is about as appealing as imagining an all-white painting until we see what a master can do with white. Mary shows us what the Master can do with less. Magnifying the Lord is about opening and emptying our souls for more space for God and love. Not to mention more justice, more peace, a healthier ecosystem if our corner of the universe figures out that less is more. Mary s song gives us focus when quantity is burying us. Mary sings of the proud scattered in the imaginations of their hearts. I wonder if one of the problems with pride is that it makes us opaque, unable to see through. Instead of seeing God s mystery, all we see is ourselves. Opaqueness sees only ourselves instead of all that God and others have given so that we may live. Eugene Peterson s ministry was at risk because he thought it was about him. Pride wants it to be about us. Do we get so caught in what ourselves that we miss all that God does for us? Maybe we even miss that the centrality of all we are called to be for others. To magnify God is to become transparent. The writer Anne LaMott says she believes a great definition for the word God is the words, Not me. Because we cannot keep our hearts beating or oxygenate our cells. We cannot will the digestion of our food. We cannot force synapses in our brains. We can receive; we can participate. Mary receives and Mary participates. That we are alive is miracle. All that we receive is gift. To call God not me is to admit we couldn t have started our lives... and we can t keep them going. We magnify God when we become transparent to God active, alive, stirring. Stirring openness. Stirring
imagination. It s about more than us it s about all that God yearns to give life and to opening us to participation in that giving. When Mary sings, she begins with all that God has done for her... she is remembered not for what she has done but for the one who shows her great favor on her lowliness. When God called her into participation in God s amazing intention to be one of us, to become human, incarnate, God in human form, she did not say, I am so great! She said, God has done great things for me... Martin Luther said of her at the annunciation that there were two miracles there. One is that a virgin conceives; the second is that she believed it. She points not to herself. She is remembered for the God who did great things through her. We have the freedom to say God will do great things as we become transparent to the God who is at work in all things. A little aside on the first lesson. Micah says Bethlehem is great, not because Bethlehem is prominent or populous or powerful. Bethlehem is great because God is at work in you, O little town of Bethlehem. I have one last picture that I hope will clarify this. Two of my daughters are pregnant this Advent. There is something just right about expecting a baby in Advent. When I was thinking about magnifying it occurred to me how when people become parents they become both more and less. When you have a baby, you have less control. The baby cries when the baby cries and needs to eat when the baby needs to eat, every couple of hours around the clock. Lord knows you have less money. You have less Time. There is this focus beyond you. Life is less about you... another person depends on you wholly and the passion, the intensity for this little one to live is overwhelming. It is the only thing that matters. And yet you have never been more alive. More aware of the fragility and beauty and gift of life. More in love. Less you magnifies... the child, your love for the
child, your love for all children, because you know in a tangible way that all children are beloved. And more in love with the Creator of life, the mystery and miracle of simply being alive. It s all mystery, all miracle. There is nothing more demanding than a baby, and no greater gift. I worried about this as an illustration because I know that not everyone is a parent. It is especially painful for those who want to be parents and have not been; or who have been parents and lost a child. Then it occurred to me that all of us are and have been children of human parents and of God. To become aware that others have given us life, have made possible learning and loving, may feel like it makes us less. To become aware that we are called to live in this gift may make us transparent to the One who gives it all. Do you hear how this lessening, emptying magnifies the gift and Giver of life? The Roman Catholic writer, Joyce Rupp, speaks about Christmas, and the gift of presence in Jesus, Rupp observes that Jesus did not give people stuff well, he gave them bread and wine, and he ll do that again this morning. In almost every other instance, Jesus gave them his presence, a part of himself; he became less, that we may live. When we say Jesus reveals God, I believe we are saying Jesus is transparent to the God who gives God s very self for all creation to live. Jesus is revealing God s hope that creation may live, may live larger and more justly. Less is more. God became less in becoming human. Jesus became less by giving, forgiving, serving. We do well to follow. God be magnified. Amen.