Today, we heard the words of Mary’s Magnificat—a song of radical hope and upheaval. In it, Mary exults in God’s justice, undoing the world’s expectations. The proud are scattered, the powerful dethroned, the lowly lifted up, and the hungry filled. God breaks the rules, shattering human systems that hoard power and wealth, all for the sake of abundant life for everyone. And here’s the thing—God even breaks his own laws to bring about his justice, or at least how we think we understand them. What we believe is right, what we insist is just—God turns on its head. God’s justice isn’t bound by the ways of doing this or that we create to feel secure or feel like we measure or can check off boxes. It’s not limited by borders, hierarchies, or who we think is worthy. God’s love tears down barriers—walls that divide “us” from “them,” boundaries that withhold mercy, and systems, bureaucracies, procedures, regulations, rules, or practices that say who’s in and who’s out. Where we draw lines, God erases them. Where we insist on control, God breaks free. The Magnificat reminds us that God’s justice doesn’t reinforce the ways we behave but undoes them—especially when they harm, oppress, or deny life. Christians rejoice at this radical upheaval and embrace it with loud words of praise—“My soul magnifies the Lord.”
Let us pray. May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
On Pastor Olson’s birthday, I sat beside him with a cup of coffee in his living room, and we got into a theological discussion—as one does at a birthday party. “Love is a verb,” he said, “but we quickly make it a noun.” I paused for a moment. We’ve all heard that old line before—“love is a verb.” But I hadn’t considered it quite this way: the idea that we domesticate love and turn it from something that moves, something that shapes the world, into something static and manageable.
As you remember from school, a noun is a word for a person, place, thing, or idea. A verb is a word for an action or state of being. So when we treat love as a noun, it’s easy to turn it into a thing, a concept. We can admire it, claim to have it, and feel good about it. It’s easy, predictable, and safe. But when love is a verb, when it’s allowed to move, to breathe, to act—it gets messy. It requires something from us. We can’t just sit back and say, “I love.” Love as a verb calls us to do something. It calls us to move, to live.
That’s why Jesus tells us to love our neighbor and to love our enemies. He’s not telling us to feel something. He’s telling us to do something. Love is something we do. It’s no mere idea. It’s something that moves in us, shapes our choices, and changes the world. And the harder part, the part that makes love holy, is that love can’t be tamed. True love won’t be confined to the neat, safe boxes we create for it. Love is wild. It can’t be held still, and it won’t be managed.
True love is undomesticated.
This is where we see the love of God in today’s gospel. The love God shows in choosing to come among us in the form of a helpless child—born not to a queen, but to a poor, unmarried girl—is wild. It’s unruly. It’s not what anyone expects. It’s love breaking all the rules, tearing down every wall, and turning everything upside down.
What Mary says today is the expression of this love—the love God chose to bring into the world, the love that shatters the idea of who gets to receive favor and who gets to be first. When Mary says, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,” she’s not just speaking a pretty sentiment. No—she’s giving voice to a love that moves in her, a love that does something. She’s responding to the active love of God in a way that mirrors that love—living out her own love in action.
Before we go any further, let’s pause and think about what that means. Love, in its truest form, isn’t passive. It’s no abstract thought. It’s not a warm feeling we store up inside. It’s something we act on. It’s something we do. The love Mary proclaims, the love she’s feeling in the deepest parts of her soul, isn’t a neat little box she can keep to herself. No—she sings it out. She lets it explode in the Magnificat. She lets her whole being magnify the Lord. Her love is not a thing she possesses. It is a living force that moves her. It makes her act. It compels her to praise and rejoice.
The love of God Mary celebrates isn’t a domesticated love. It’s not safe. It doesn’t behave like we expect. God came in no form of a powerful king ruling with strength. God chose a teenage girl, unmarried, poor, and unnoticed, to bring salvation into the world. A teenage girl! If that isn’t wild, I don’t know what is.
Imagine it: Mary’s life is flipped upside down. Her body will carry the Savior of the world. But the message she’s given isn’t about glory or fame as the world defines it. No—Mary will carry a child who turns everything the world values on its head. God offers no reward to the powerful or the rich. He doesn’t come to bless those who already have it all. Instead, God comes to the lowly, the humble, the ones who have nothing to offer the world but themselves.
What God does in Mary’s life is nothing less than a radical reversal. We see this in her song today: “He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.” God’s love fits no mold. It doesn’t reward earthly glory. It doesn’t reinforce earthly power. It undoes all of it. It lifts up the humble, fills the empty, and gives hope to those the world’s forgotten.
This is God’s love.
It doesn’t necessarily jive with our preconceived notions of right and wrong. It doesn’t always act like we expect love to act. And it’s this same love that’s alive today. The power of the Most High that overshadowed Mary is the same power that moves in us. It’s not just an old story. This is the living, active love of God, moving through time and space to fill our lives, to fill our hearts, and to move us to act. The Holy Spirit is at work in us, stirring us, changing us, empowering us to live the same undomesticated love in our lives.
As believers, as disciples of Jesus, we are called to live this love. We are not called to sit back and admire it from a distance. We’re not called to make it a nice, tidy concept we can control. We are called to act on it. We’re called to let the power of the Spirit move us the way it moved Mary. As St. Paul tells the Corinthians, love is patient, love is kind, love doesn’t insist on its own way. And most of all, love never ends. It’s alive. It’s moving. And when we live love, when we let it move in us, it transforms the world.
Mary’s response, her love in action, is our example. We are called to respond to God’s love the same way she did: with our whole being, magnifying the Lord, rejoicing in God’s salvation, and living it out in action. This is love as a verb. It’s not something we just think about. It’s something we live. It’s no mere idea. It’s something we do.
And the more we let that love move in us, the more we will be like Mary. We will respond to the love of God with our hearts, with our hands, with our voices, with our lives. We’ll magnify the Lord—not in a safe, comfortable way, but in a way that shakes the ground beneath us. Just as Mary’s love made her the mother of the Savior, our love can bring the Savior to the world. Not by giving birth to him physically, but by living as he lived, by loving as he loved, by showing a love that is wild, untamed, and unstoppable.
True love will not be domesticated. True love, God’s love come down from heaven in the living, active, working person of Jesus breaks through the walls we’ve built, and when he abides in us and we in him, he moves us, he stirs us to live and love as he did. The Holy Spirit fills and sends us out, just as she did with Mary. And so true love is as active, as undomesticated, as the love that brought salvation into the world through a poor teenage girl. When we live love, we don’t just keep it to ourselves. We let it move through us, transform us, and shape the world. And in doing so, we give glory to God—just as Mary did, and just as we likewise are called to do.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
The Rev'd Daniel W. Spigelmyer, Jr. 