March 25, The Annunication: Pregnant with the Messiah

Today is the Feast of the Annunciation in the Church's calendar. We celebrate the day when the Blessed Virgin Mary said Yes to God exactly nine months before Christmas, the Nativity of Jesus.

In every Evening Prayer we sing or say the Magnificat, the Song of Mary, as Luke preserves it in his Gospel. When we pray the Magnificat, we not only remember that Mary is the Theotokos, the Mother of God, but we also realize that each one of us is pregnant with the Son of God, who lives inside of each individual, in our hearts. Because Christ is in you and me, we want to see life with his eyes, listen to life with his ears, walk the sidewalks with his feet, and handle all of life with his hands. Seeing everyone and everything with the mind and heart of Christ allows us to grow into the fulness of his stature.

Tonight June and I will sing a special hymn, "For All the Faithful Women," 419 in Evangelical Lutheran Worship. It's sung to a lovely Finnish folk tune. Here's the first verse:

For all the faithful women
Who served in days of old,
To You shall thanks be given;
To all, their story told.
They served with strength and gladness
In tasks Your wisdom gave,
To You their lives bore witness,
Proclaimed Your power to save.

In each subsequent stanza we give thanks, one by one, sometimes two by two, to God for numerous faithful women whose life stories are told in the Bible. Miriam; Hannah; Ruth; Mary, the Mother of Our Lord; Martha and Mary; The Woman at the Well, Mary Magdalene, Dorcas, and Eunice and Lois.

Stanza 6, in which we give thanks for Mary, the Mother of Our Lord, sings this way:

We honor faithful Mary,

fair maiden, full of grace.

She bore the Christ, our brother,

who saved our human race.

May we, with her, surrender

ourselves to your command

and lay upon your altar

our gifts of heart and hand.

May all of you, with Mary, proclaim the greatness of the Lord today!