My soul magnifies the Lord—magnificat in the Latin. Thanks to the Virgin … Mary for that glorious rendition.

The magnificent tenor Andrea Bocelli sings his own magnificat of sorts, called When a Child Is Born. “A ray of hope flickers in the sky/A tiny star lights up way up high/All across the land dawns a brand new morn/This comes to pass when a child is born./A silent wish sails the seven seas/The winds of change whisper in the trees/And the walls of doubt tumble tossed and turn/This comes to pass when a child is born.”

When a child is born, he sings. On this day we think about when the child is born. And we use the present tense, don’t you know?!, when speaking about the birth of the child Jesus. It’s the same as when we sing “Joy to the World, the Lord Is Come.” Of course it happened in the past, not once upon a time as in a fairy tale as if it never really happened in history. It happened in history once upon a time, but its effects—the birth of this Child—are of such a nature that they light up our imaginations still. They are like a dream too good not to be true. They are like a fairy tale that hits the earth running and never looks back. Everything changes. Nothing is the same.

That’s the way it is any time a child is born, of course. I remember being there in the delivery room when a child was born to Kim and me, three times. Each time it was the same: amazement, wonder, joy. And each time I would leave the hospital thinking how sad it was that all these people I was passing looked like nothing much had happened that day. They walked on with their same numbing resolve, stuck in routines like ruts leading nowhere. I just wanted them to know that it would be all right now, things would be different now; a ray of hope was flickering in the sky, a tiny star lighting up way up high. I wanted them to feel the change the way I did, to know that things would be different now because a child is born.

How much more Mary must have felt that night in the stable! It didn’t even take the nativity event itself to do the trick; just a kick from the child in Elizabeth’s womb and the blessing of her dear cousin. They give her assurance that it was indeed true and that everything would change because of this child.

The lovely new movie The Nativity pictures this scene beautifully. Mary has gone from her home village in Nazareth to visit her much older cousin, who was considered barren. She goes to be with her and to help her with the birth of her child, John the would-be Baptist. And immediately upon Mary’s greeting Elizabeth, the child in her cousin’s womb leaps for joy, and we get the Hail Mary blessing in return that has been expanded in Catholic devotion to recognize the important role of this young woman who said yes to the angel. The movie has a sweet take on how this very greeting from Elizabeth helps to confirm Mary’s belief that she is indeed with child, and that that child is indeed the Son of God.

The seventeenth-century divine poet John Donne wrote Holy Sonnets in praise of the key moments of the incarnation, in which the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. In the second sonnet, he sees the astonishing significance of what the Greeks called theotokos, mother of God; how the one who was the agent of all creation should allow himself to be the child of one of his creations. Listen to Donne’s words to Mary: … Ere by the spheares time was created, thou/ Wast in his minde, who is thy Sonne, and Brother;/Whom thou conceiv’st, conceiv’d; yea thou art now/Thy Maker’s maker, and thy Father’s mother;/Thou’hast light in darke; and shutst in little roome, immensity cloystered in thy deare wombe.

Immensity, indeed. Songs, carols, films, poems: these are just a few of the fields in which the womb of the human heart has been opened and the mind stretched to conceive the inconceivable and to wonder at the wonderful.

Madeleine L’Engle, the author of the ever-popular fable A Wrinkle in Time, wrote also these immortal lines about this time of year: This is the irrational season/When love blooms bright and wild./Had Mary been filled with reason/There’d have been no room for the child[“ After Annunciation,” in The Weather of the Heart (Shaw, 2000).]

We think about that phrase “no room for the child,” and where does your minds go? To the “no room in the inn” line of Luke’s nativity story, right? We know Jesus was born in a stable because there was no room in the inn. But we also know that no one gbut that innkeeper was willing to make room for them, either. The shunning of this poor traveling couple, the woman great with child, has seared our consciences with the ethic of hospitality. We know that Jesus would grow up to say that inasmuch as you have done unto the least of these, my brothers and sisters, you have done it unto me. When we welcome strangers, when we clothe the naked and feed the hungry and give drink to the thirsty and visit the widows and orphans and imprisoned, we are making room in our lives for Christ himself. In other words, the story of Bethlehem’s hospitality, or the lack of it, has affected our sense of neighborliness forever. Love makes room for our neighbor, where reason only hangs out No Vacancy signs.

But even that must be seen in light of the first act of hospitality Mary showed us. Imagine you are a humble young girl of no more than maybe 14. You live in a poor part of Palestine, in the country, in a village that cannot sustain itself without traveling miles to trade. Your Jewish family struggles to survive under the cruel rule of the narcissistic Romans, who seem to take delight in your suffering because it makes them feel powerful. You have simple hopes harbored in your heart: a good husband, strong children, a life among your neighbors in Nazareth that would be pleasing to God and praiseworthy to others.

It is a conservative family and community you grow up in. Although in some other places Jews considered betrothal enough like marriage that you could safely have intimate relations before the wedding, no so in Galilee. To be with child before the wedding would lead to scandal at best, stoning at worst. It would certainly destroy every dream you held so dear. But then an angel appears to you and declares God’s intention that you should be the vessel for the enfleshing of the Word that would redeem all things just as it had made all things. You might be flattered by the offer, but would you really be eager to receive this gift? Mary had to make room in her heart for God’s will in order to make room in her womb for God’s Son. She welcomed him in a way that humbles us still, because it meant she would be giving up her lesser dreams for herself for God’s greater ones for the world. She had to let the God’s love have its way with her before Joseph’s love could have its way with her; and thereby she risked everything anyone might ever again believe about her.

The Florentine monk nicknamed Fra Angelico depicted this scene with utmost purity in his giant fresco that adorns the wall at the top of the steps that lead to the small monastic cells in the convent of San Marco. Mary bends low in humility, and we can imagine her saying to the angel, Let it be unto me according to your word. And when we look at the angel, we are not certain whether he is jealous that Mary should have such an honor or nervous that the future of the world should hang on the obedience of one so young and human. As the writer Frederick Buechner,puts it, The angel, the whole creation, even God himself, all hold their breath as they wait upon the answer of a girl. [Listening to Your Life (Harper Collins, 1992), p.77.] But before we are done looking, we might wonder whether Gabriel himself is in awe at the faith of this blessed woman who would be the mother of the Lord.

The world itself has learned to value children in a way it had not before the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Before we imagined that God would deign to come in the form of a child, children were conceived only to be potential adults. They were cheap labor. But people of Christmas faith have come to see each of them through the light of the Christ child as reflections of divinity, as symbols of innocence, as signs of God’s presence.

A four-year-old girl, soon after her brother was born, asked her parents to leave her alone for a little while with the baby. They worried that she was jealous of the little boy and might want to pinch him or shake him. So they told her she needed to be with Mommy and Daddy when she was with the baby. They started watching her for signs of jealousy, but such signs never appeared. Instead, everything pointed to a sincere love for her baby brother. Again the little girl asked to be left alone with the infant, so finally the parents allowed it. They let her go into the nursery by herself, leaving the door open enough to keep an eye on her. The girl walked up to her baby brother, put her face close to his, and quietly said, Baby, tell me what God feels like, because I’m starting to forget. [Thanks to Carl Reeves for passing this on to me.Ffrom Ken Blanchard, We Are the Beloved (Zondervan, 1994.), 7.]

Lest we forget what God feels like, God keeps giving us children. And lest we think that only children conceived and born in the most respectable way bear the marks of God’s presence, we remember the story of Jesus, Mary and Joseph. This child was born out of wedlock, strictly speaking. The whole community raised an eyebrow, the family was no doubt shamed, and the husband of Mary had to swallow his pride to stand beside his wife and her child. Shepherds and wise men, sheep and goats and cows would worship him outside proper places.

Michael Lindval tells how this spirit struck the little Presbyterian church in Northhaven, Minnesota, in his novel, The Good News from Northhaven. One Sunday after a typical service of worship that included the baptism of an infant, a woman waited for the pastor. She was a nondescript back-row worshipper, “dressed in Salvation Army style, clutching a black plastic purse.” She informed the pastor that Tina had had a baby and thought it ought to be baptized. Tina had grown up in the church’s youth group. but at eighteen she had gotten pregnant out of wedlock. On the Fourth Sunday in Advent—this day for us today—Tina brought her two-month-old baby, James, to the font at the front of the church. It was the pastor’s custom to ask, Who stands with this child? Ordinarily, the parents and grandparents and godparents would stand. The pastor was too nervous to peek, lest no one stood. But he began to hear rustling through the sanctuary and finally looked up to find that a couple of the elders had stood, followed by the sixth-grade Sunday school teacher. Then a new young couple stood. And finally, much to the pastor’s astonished eyes, the rest of the congregation joined them. The whole congregation joined Tina and her Salvation Army-dressed mother. They were all his family, his holy family.

My friends, I have given you one vignette after another, impressionistic in sermon style, this morning to illustrate the impact of the incarnation. We have a limitless supply of impressions that emanate as light from that manger cradle and wrap themselves in our hearts. The world is changed by the Magnificent Word that has come to us all through Mary. Her song, her magnificat, has become ours. Let us sing for joy!