Mary's Upside-Down Song

(Luke 1:39-56)

Do you know what it feels like to be small?

To be the one nobody picks. The one left at the end of the line, while the big and the loud and the important go first.

Mary knew that feeling.

She was young. She was poor. She lived in a little town that nobody bragged about. If you were making a list of the people the world thought mattered, you would not have written Mary's name.

But God had written it. Right at the top.

Only days before, the angel Gabriel had come to her in Nazareth with news almost too big to hold: she would be the mother of Jesus, the forever-King. And now Mary hurried up into the hills to her cousin Elizabeth, her heart too full to carry alone.

The moment Mary called out, the baby inside Elizabeth leaped for joy. Even the littlest one knew. Something was beginning.

And then Mary sang.

It was a great, brave, upside-down song. Listen.

"My whole soul sings how big my God is,
and my heart dances in him.
For he looked down,
he looked all the way down,
and he saw me.
Me. The one nobody noticed.

From now on every child who comes
will call me blessed,
because the Strong One has done a great thing,
and holy, holy is his name.

He loves the small ones who hold his hand,
and loves them on and on,
from forever to forever.

He has rolled up his sleeve.
He has scattered the proud
who thought that they were so very tall.
He has pulled the mighty down off their high thrones
and lifted the lowly up.

The hungry he has filled
with good things, heaped and spilling over,
and the rich who thought they needed nothing
he has sent away with empty hands."

That is the kind of God Mary was singing about. A God who does not shove to the front of the line, but walks all the way to the back, to find the ones who were waiting there. A God who takes an upside-down world and sets it back on its feet.

Mary was singing about a baby not yet born. A baby who would grow into a man named Jesus. And everything she sang, he would do.

He would sit the poor down at his table and feast with them.
He would lift up the lonely, the sick, the ashamed, the last.
He would say the small are the great, and the great must become small.

The proud kings did not know it yet. But the King who would seat the hungry beside him was already on his way, hidden and small, carried by a girl the world had overlooked.

Soon Mary and Joseph would take a long road to a crowded town called Bethlehem. And there, in the last place anyone would look for a king, her song would begin to come true.