What’s Your Theme Song?

Isaiah 35:1-10; Luke 1:46b-55

If your life had a theme song, what would it be? Would it be Hallelujah? Or would it be “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen?”  Would it be “Let it Be” or “I will Survive.”? "Comfortably Numb" by Pink Floyd or “You got a friend in me" by Randy Newman. What would your theme song be? Mary, the mother of Jesus, had a theme song. She wrote the song herself. Actually it was inspired by the Holy Spirit. Mary first sang the song to her cousin Elizabeth. Both of them were pregnant at the time. Elizabeth was six months pregnant with John the Baptist, and Mary was barely pregnant with Jesus. Mary took a trip into the hill country of Judea to visit her cousin. As soon as Mary entered the house, the baby in Elizabeth’s womb leaped in her womb. Elizabeth, inspired by the Holy Spirit, proclaimed that the baby in Mary’s womb was her Lord, the Son of God. Mary responds by singing a song.

Her song is known as the Magnificat, and it is our gospel lesson for today in the Gospel of Luke. It is Mary’s theme song, and it has two parts. The first is about her soul magnifying the Lord. The second part is about her spirit rejoicing in God her Savior. Does Mary’s song apply to us? Could we honestly sing Mary’s song? Can we make her song our own? Each of us have songs that connect at a deep level in our lives. They are our favorite songs. We pick these songs – or they pick us – because they resonate with lives on a deep level. Let’s see if Mary’s song resonates with our lives.

I. The first line of Mary’s song is “My soul magnifies the Lord” That is the theme of the song. Can we honestly say the same thing of our lives? Do our souls magnify the Lord? What does this mean – to magnify the Lord? It means to be a magnifying glass for the Lord.  My oldest son asked for binoculars for Christmas. He is a naturalist and does a bit of bird-watching.  His old binoculars got wet and broken, and he wants a new pair. It is hard to get any gift idea out of him, so I when he mentioned this I jumped on it. I did some research online and found that binoculars can be very expensive. They run into the thousands of dollars. I was not going to pay two or three thousand bucks for his Christmas present. But there were so many varieties of even less expensive binoculars that I asked him to choose. He went online to binoculars.com and found the 2013 award winning pair for only a little over $100, which is more in my price range. That is what he is getting for Christmas.

Binoculars magnify. Mary said that her soul magnifies the Lord. That means that by looking into her soul – through her soul - she can see the Lord clearer and bigger. It also means that people who look into her soul can see the Lord clearly. Is that true of our lives? When people look into our lives – into our souls – can they see the Lord clearly? Can they see the Lord magnified in our lives? If our answer is “No” or “Not very well,” then perhaps we should address this spiritual issue.

First, we have to identify our soul. We have to locate it. Most people don’t even know their own soul. People are out of touch with their own true spiritual nature. They live as if they were bodies or minds or emotions or some combinations of these. In the Bible the soul is our true self. The Bible does not say we have a soul; it says we are a soul. It is who we really are. I wrote a blog recently inviting people to look into their own soul. With a little direction we can identify our soul, our true spiritual nature. All it takes is looking in the right direction in the right manner. It takes some prayer and time, but it is not difficult to identity the soul that lies at the heart of our being under our psychological self. It is the still quiet place deep within us that nothing in the world can touch.

Once we have identified the soul, it is likely we will have to dust it off. If you don’t use your soul regularly it is probably pretty dirty. I was dusting in my house recently, those high places that Jude cannot reach. In our second floor bedroom we have high ceiling. We have a post and beam house and so we have rafters, and cobwebs collect way up on the ceiling and in the corners. So I was standing on our bed the other day with my long-handled duster trying to reach those cobwebs, so I would not have to look at them any longer while lying in bed.  When I was up there, I was amazed at how much dust was up there out of sight. Dust on the rafters and on the top of the picture frames. So I dusted, and Jude was sneezing for the next 24 hours.

There is likely dust on your soul. You might have a dusty soul. If you haven’t used your soul recently it is likely very dirty. If the lens of a binoculars or a magnifying glass is covered with dust we will not be able to see through it. It will not magnify anything. It certainly will not magnify the Lord. So the first thing we need to do after identifying our soul is clean it off.

How do you do that? Everyone knows you don’t clean off your eyeglasses or camera lens with your fingers. That will just smudge it and make it worse. You blow on it to get dust off. If the dirt is more substantial it takes some lens cleaning solution and tissue. In the spiritual life our soul is cleansed by the Holy Spirit, which is the Breath of God. “Breathe on me, Breath of God,” the hymn says. Cleanse my soul. Only the Spirit can do this work.

We cannot see the holy God with impure eyes. God has to do the work of cleansing in our souls. Our part in it is confession and repentance, and making amends to people if necessary. If we are going to magnify the Lord, the magnifying lens of our soul needs to be crystal clear, and only God can do that. Just like we cannot perform heart surgery on ourselves, so we cannot perform soul cleaning. This is the grace of God. He is the great Physician, the Supreme surgeon. He needs to do it, but we need to ask him. Ask him to open you up and clean you up - to do whatever is necessary to clean off your soul so that it is one again operational and can do what it was designed to do, which is to magnify the Lord.

The purpose of our lives is to magnify the Lord. That is supposed to be the theme song of every one of our lives. Most people’s lives sound more like a country song – lost love, wounded hearts and wrong choices. Or maybe your theme song is about being misunderstood or missed opportunities. Maybe it is a sad song about loved ones who have died and illnesses endured. That does not have to be the song of our lives. These elements of life are real. They can be mentioned in some of the stanzas, but the refrain of our life’s theme song, needs to be that God is magnified in everything that happens in our lives.

Our souls are a magnifying glass. If the magnifying lens of our soul has been cleansed by the work of Christ in our lives, then it can do its work. Astronomers had no clue of the billions of galaxies that were out there in space until we put the Hubble telescope up in orbit. There, above the haze and grime of Earth’s atmosphere, it could see clearly. It magnified our sight into the far depths of space. It transmitted to us a universe rich in color and motion, beautiful galaxies doing dances through space. It takes your breath away to see what human beings could never see before. In the same way it takes your breath away to look through that Hubble telescope which is the soul, your true nature, deep within. Look into the world through the lens of your immortal soul and you will see God. Your religion will no longer be based on blind faith, but on faithful sight. Your soul magnifies the Lord.

And your soul will magnify the Lord for others. There are some people who shine with the glory of God. That is why ancient paintings used to picture halos around the heads of saints. That light of the glory of God shone through them. Our lives can magnify the light of God’s presence to others. The purpose of our lives is not just so we can know God. It is so that others can know God. Others can know God when they can see God clearly in and through us. People think that proclaiming the gospel of God is about words. It is not. It is about the quality of our lives. Words can be a part of that, but if our lives do not coincide with our words we are seen as hypocrites. There is nothing Jesus hated more than hypocrisy. Our lives – our actions, our demeanor, our tone of voice, the expression on our face and in our eyes – these are what communicate the Spirit of God to others. The Holy Spirit of God who dwells in us is magnified through our souls and translated into speech and action in our lives. And people see that. That is how we magnify the Lord.

II. The second part of Mary’s song is to rejoice in God. “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior.” If the soul had a color, its color would be joy. The soul is actually a rainbow of colors including love, peace, compassion, patience, gentleness. But the one that Mary focuses on in her song is joy. Different people have different spiritual qualities that dominate their spiritual life. The dominant spiritual quality of Mary’s life was joy.

How wonderful it must have been for Jesus growing up – to have a joyful mother! No wonder he turned out so well! We all know what our own mothers were like. If we gave it some thought, we could probably identify one quality that best describes our mothers. The quality Jesus would have said described his mother was joy. It was her theme song. “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior.”

How can we have joy as a dominant note in our own lives? How can we make Mary’s song our song? How can we sing, “my spirit rejoices in God my Savior?” First, we have to know God as Savior. We have to know God as Savior before we can rejoice in God as Savior. Mary said, “my spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior.” She did not say God my Creator. I am filled with joy when I am surrounded by Nature and feel overwhelmed by the beauty of nature that reflects the beauty of God as Creator. But that is not what Mary is singing about. She is singing about God as her Savior. She is talking about the salvation that was to come about through the infant in her womb at that very moment.

A lot of people these days don’t like the idea of God as Savior or Jesus s Savior. For them it has negative connotations. It presupposes that they need saving. Some people don’t like that idea. They don’t think they need saving. Jesus ran into people like that all the time. They thought they were fine just the way they were. They do not think they need to be changed, at least not in a fundamental manner. A person that does not need to be saved will never know the joy of God as Savior. They will never sing along with Mary, “My spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior.” To rejoice in God a Savior means that we first admit that we cannot do this life all by ourselves. We need the grace of God. Only then can we know the joy of God.

Finally notice that the word is rejoice. It is an interesting word. It starts off with the prefix re. That means again. Re-joy. Joy again and again. This is not a fleeting experience of happiness. It is not a past event that we look back on fondly. This is a repeated joy. Re-joy. Re-joice. Joy can be the dominant note of our lives over and over again.

What is the most common emotion that you feel? What do you feel most often during the day or during the week? Is it sadness? Is it boredom? Is it frustration? Is it anxiety? Fear? It can be joy! I am not talking about fits of giddiness. I am not even talking about having everything going just right so that you will be happy. I am talking about deep abiding joy - the gift of joy given to us by God the Savior that produces praise of God. That was the keynote of Mary’s life and it can be the theme of our lives as well. As the hymn Blessed Assurance says, “This is my story this is my song, praising my Savior all the day long.”