Whisper With a Voice Divine

To Imagination by Emily Bronte (1818-1848)

Luke 1:46b-55

December 14, 2025

Thank you everyone for being here and for showing up on this beautiful morning. I invite you to take some deeper breaths, let yourself arrive. And we will tune into some prayer together. Gracious God thank you for the gift of this place and this beautiful people. May we all hear what we need to today. God may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

Some stories are so important that it is hard to know where to start telling them. On Christmas Eve we start telling the story of Jesus birth all the way back with the words of ancient prophets and work our way forward. But today, we start telling the story of Jesus’ birth with what much of Christian tradition calls Mary’s song, also called the Magnificat, as it begins with these words about magnifying, exalting, holding high what is good…“My soul magnifies the Lord…” It is in a way a love poem to God, a canticle of confidence about how God shows up in and through what humans label lowly, “my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for God has looked with favor on even the lowly…God has done great things for me,

and holy is God’s name…”

And Mary’s Song, these words according to the Gospel of Luke are not just a love poem to God, but also holy vision, a sacred countercultural plan, a radically revolutionary, laying out what it feels like and looks like, what is possible- when things are made equitable and those who are taking more than they need are compelled to share their too much and those who are hungry are fed and there is enough, what was whispered to Mary from a voice Divine. May our souls magnify that God!

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German Protestant theologian important for his support of ecumenism and his hopes for the role of  Christianity in a secular world after the World Wars, wrote about these words in the Gospel of Luke. Some of you know from your Church history that because of his involvement in the plot to overthrow Hitler, he was imprisoned and executed in 1945. But more than a decade before that, he saw the subversive nature of the Magnificat and maybe felt empowered by these words, upheld, and carried by the power of them. In a sermon in Advent in 1933, he said “The song of Mary is the oldest Advent hymn. It is at once the most passionate, the wildest, one might even say the most

revolutionary Advent hymn ever sung. This is not the gentle, tender, dreamy Mary whom we sometimes see in paintings. . . .” It is a revolutionary hymn!

The government of Guatemala in the 1980s found this part of the Bible so upsetting to their status quo that it prohibited any recitation of these words in public. To those causing harm, Mary’s words are dangerous, this Whisper of the Voice Divine tells on the breeze that God has a way of scattering the proud, and showing strength, busting in beyond ordinary time, doing something extraordinary, shattering our constructs or ability to comprehend- throwing down who are proud and who refuse to share, change, soften, breaking…

Mary says woe to those who are using the imagination of their hearts to cause harm, to destroy, to exclude and dominate, let them fall. They will. Move over. She invites us to live inside her imagination, to live inside God’s imagination- God brings down the powerful from their thrones and lifts up the lowly, that’s just what the Divine does, she says, give it time, God moves through us, in us and around us to fill the hungry with good things, God comes to the edge with aid… God is the very presence that does this and we humans can ignore it, this impulse this pull inside of us, that’s our free will, we can choose that, or we can opt to numb it, or corrode it with greed, but it’s in us, deep in our souls and maybe an invisible thread between us, our longing for what is right, what is just, what is true, I believe this has been whispered to us over the eons.

This story is not just about something that happened long ago, a vision for the world for time passed, how Mary said yes, to God’s question, how God showed up thousands of years before us, I think it’s a vision for us now here, for how Divine Voice can still be heard here now, how this is plan for us in this time.

Rachel Held Evans wrote that the Gospel is not about escaping this world, rather these old words are about the Divine showing up right here, in the mess of what is. In the violence. In the pain. In the places where many of the systems around us dehumanize and degrade. God shows up. God speaks to us, whispers to us.

How do we hear? And how do we respond when we do? When the Whisper from a Voice Divine finds us? That phrase comes from the poet Emily Bronte and she anchors imagination in life’s hardships, speaks of being lost, and ready to despair, but then being open to being called out of that, because of the space to imagine, to be open to being drawn out beyond herself away from being alone in fear, being expanded by faith, to as she writes, “hear whisper with a voice divine Of real worlds as bright as thine.”

Mary’s Song invites us both to imagine beyond our current reality, while also listening for God in what is, allowing us to live out this courageous vision for Gods’ dream right here and now, letting this vision be alive in us and through us. Mary’s imagination and vision is for us right here and now, in the ordinary moments of our lives, in our hard days that still invite us to live what is possible, even in the space between what is and what is yet to be. This last week was a hard week and also we had the most spectacular sunsets- there were people lined up on Darley taking pictures of the orange and purple hues. And it seemed perfect. Even in a hard moment there it is! The revolutionary hymn of beauty, of the Divine busting through! How do we sing Mary’s song right now, right here in this time? Part of what we do every week is practice that heaven here on Earth, making this love poem to God our own, where everyone has what is needed and no one goes hungry. What does it look like to more fully live out this holy vision, this sacred countercultural plan, this revolutionary hymn for what is and what could be? The proud will be scattered, the illusions of power will one day be shattered, those called lowly will be uplifted and heard. Instead of living in the imagination of the billionaires, how do we live in Mary’s imagination, living into the beautiful vision for what is possible right here and now?

Beloved of God, how can we live out what Mary sees for us in the ordinary moments of our lives? How do we listen to the whisper of the Voice Divine all around us? May it be so. Amen.