May be given to me to speak in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Amen, please do be seated.
And Mary said, My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God, my Savior. How lovely these words are. Of Mary's song, inspired by the Holy Spirit, when she met Elizabeth, who was pregnant by a miracle of God, even in her old age, and Mary saw that all that Gabriel had said to her was true. I wonder how many times these words have been said and sung over generations past, and I wonder how many times they've been said or sung with the word, why engraved on the minds of those who uttered them? Why on earth was Mary magnifying the Lord, as we know, she was in a terrible situation. On the face of it, a 14 year old pregnant out of wedlock, more than likely about to be abandoned by her family and turned out onto the streets if she wasn't stoned to death first, when Mary embraced Elizabeth, everything in the world should have told her that the future was bleak. 
It wasn't just because of the child in her womb, though he certainly didn't help. She was a peasant woman born in a time and place where, even in the normal course of things, she had no rights, power, freedom, no right to say anything about her future. She lived in Nazareth, a grubby little village of which came the idiom, Can anything good come out of Nazareth? She had every reason to suppose that the best her life would ever amount to would be scratching a subsistence living from the earth with a poor but probably kind husband, only to raise money, which would mostly go to the Romans or Herod, and which otherwise might just, if she was lucky, allow her and her family not to starve to death. This hymn has been sung throughout the history of the church offered by plenty of people who I'm sure felt their future was as bleak as Mary's was. Through the 2000 years since Mary sang, the church across the world has stood as human beings have engaged in ever more expansive wars, come up with ever more inventive ways to be cruel to one another, and done very little to address the fundamental inadequacies which come in human society. The Magnificat has been sung while Christians huddled in houses terrified the Roman or Jewish authorities might fight them and put them to a terrible death. It was sung in early medieval churches by peasants scratching the same difficult living Mary experienced. It's been sung by people who were too young to be preparing to march into one or two world wars. It's been sung by parents so poverty stricken that they've come to church before heading to the food bank to make sure they can feed their kids for the week. And to those who've Sung and said those words which might well feel as far off as a fairy land. Mary sang. He has scattered the proud. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones. He has lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty. Has he? How could Mary have hoped for any of this. She lived in a world in which the rich never lost, the proud were never beaten, and the throne was literally won by a murderer and a liar who held on to his power by murdering most of the rest of his family.
Are things gotten that much better by now? I'm sure you're wondering what's gotten me in such a bad mood, and I have to say this isn't the most hopeful sermon opener that I've ever written in my life, but if the church is to be of any use at all, and if our gospel is to have any impact, then we must start from the truth, even when it's difficult to hear. We can't pretend that the people of God have always had it easy, or that when Jesus came, everything in society suddenly got fair, even if we're privileged enough never to. Have used one. We live in a community where people regularly rely on food banks just to make sure that they and their children can eat. 
Think about that for a second. People have to go and rely on food given and donated by strangers just to make sure that they have enough in their pantry for the week. We live in a country where people are smashing up their own towns because they believe a racist lie spread over social media. We live in a world where countries are threatening to obliterate each other just because they have the power to do so. The Magnificat is powerful, but not because it pretends that everything is okay. It's powerful because it is a hymn of defiance in the face of a broken world, when we look at the situation Mary faced when we contemplate the miseries of those who have sung the Magnificat over these last 2000 years, we can trace human nature as the root of many of those troubles, the human desire for power, wealth, privilege. These caused Mary's troubles much as they cause ours today. 
Those issues I've mentioned, poverty, war, occupation, over taxation, these are issues faced repeatedly over human society, no matter where we live or when we live, because we live in a world which is broken, our Earth isn't a place of need. It is a place of abundance. Human beings don't have to fight over resources. If we did, it might at least explain, if not justify, some of the atrocities we inflict on each other. But even with the population growth of the last couple of centuries, there is more than enough on this planet for everyone to be fed and watered and sheltered, and from there, the path to other rights, like education or work is so much more straightforward. But from the very first dominant civilisations, human beings have done exactly what the Romans did to Mary those who have enough. Have decided to take more, more than they could ever use in order to deliberately create poverty amongst others, because having more than someone else makes you more powerful than they are in human pride, the rich have decided that their lives and the lives of their children are worth more than the lives of anyone else. And so throughout history and cultures and societies, the rich have taken as much as they can, and from their abundance, they have built thrones, sometimes literal, often figurative, and in their vanity, they have demanded the subjugation and deference of those that they've stolen from demanding, For example, that people work zero hours contracts in ridiculous and substandard accommodations, they meet out what little they feel like giving from what they have stolen, and called it their right to establish systems of inequality which continue to perpetuate the injustice that they created which allows the rich to stay at the top and the poor to stay at the bottom. When Mary declared that God would strip the wealthy of their overstocked larders and feed the hungry, when she declared that God would in seat the threat those powerful in their thrones and lift up the heads of the lowly. She wasn't singing of something that had already happened. She sang a song of liberation as a cry against the injustice that she had endured all her life. She a desperate peasant living in a land, a land of a usurper king who built himself a lofty palace and an ostentatious temple to prove that he was as great as Solomon. She knew that God had more for her than the subsistence living that she was enduring. And when Gabriel spoke with her, she knew within herself that God had laid the groundwork for the destruction of our broken world. She was told that she found favor with God and that He wanted her to carry his Son, the Son of the Most High, the long awaited Messiah. What else could it mean? Gabriel had come to her, she who nobody accounted except that every human assumption about wealth, power and privilege is wrong. What could it mean except that God had chosen to lift up the lowly in order to turn the world on its head when the Holy Spirit came upon her, the word of God joined Mary's human nature, and so Jesus was conceived. 
Our broken humanity raised up into his divinity, our selfishness and greed, our lust for power in the in the sight of so brilliant a light, our darkness could not stand in Jesus the second Adam, our second chance, selfishness turned to selflessness, greed to generosity, pride to humility, a lust for power to a lifelong struggle against inequality. Every time Jesus embraced a leper or called a woman to discipleship or questioned the Pharisees or gave his last coins to the starving or healed those who society failed, he continued the Magnificat as a song of liberation. 
So he proclaimed in His message to the synagogue of Nazareth, as Mary was surely looking on, the Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed Me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent Me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favour in establishing his church, in teaching his disciples to break injustice, wherever and however they saw it, Jesus handed on the Magnificat as the anthem of the kingdom of God. By his life, he taught that there was a better way to be by his death, he took our human brokenness and put it to his put it to death in his body on the tree. By His resurrection, he rose to a new creation. 
Our world set on an inevitable path. That means that the old will pass away, the new will be created, a new heaven and a new earth in which the Magnificat is not just a dream but a reality. And the disciples took on that mission and expanded it across the Empire. They set the groundwork for the destruction of racial barriers, gender inequality, slavery by teaching There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female. You are all one in Christ, Jesus, of course, along the way, the church got distracted. 
It got rich, and sometimes it made common cause with broken humanity. Sometimes it even perpetuated inequality, and sometimes it still does. Before the throne of God above there will be a judgment as well as forgiveness for the ways that we get it wrong. But today, as we hear the Magnificat, our reminder is clear. Set. Your set before your face the truth of the world's brokenness. 
Don't pretend that things are fairer than they are. Instead, demand better for the poor and the voiceless. Be radically welcoming, boldly inclusive, unfeignedly generous. The Magnificat is your anthem of defiance, your voice of liberation.