Theotokos Telescopes

 Read this! It's amazing! Luke 1:39-56

So, long before I realized how much math was involved, long before I believed the myth that math was just something I couldn’t do, something that wasn’t my “gift,” long before I was panicking about my Physics grade, I wanted to be an astronomer. My older sister had a teacher who was really into stargazing, and once in awhile, she’d gather up her students, and their younger siblings, apparently, and we’d go out into the school parking lot late at night and point mediocre telescopes into the sky. There were often clouds. There was a ton of light pollution. But sometimes, we’d get to see the ring of Saturn, or the great red storm on Jupiter. We’d count the craters on the moon, and name that fuzzy ball of light out there “Pluto.” Once in awhile, the lucky ones would spot the flash of a shooting star. We could just barely make out the cloudy line of the Milky Way. It was a magical time. We were up late. It was chilly. I was hanging out with the “big” kids way past my bedtime. We spoke to each other in whispers as we took turns gazing through the eye piece. I remember I needed a stool to reach it, or maybe it was my dad who bent his knee so I could climb up and peer through the lens to see the mystery it held. I felt a sense of shame rush through me every time I accidentally nudged the counterweight, shaking the view out of focus. But what an amazing experience, to be able to see, in clear view, what was really behind those balls of white light hanging precariously in the sky. Suddenly, what was unattainable, what was far away and unreachable, was brought close up, was made clear, a mystery was revealed. Things lightyears away were brought into focus. It made me feel very small. But it was this strange kind of good kind of small. And I wanted to spend my life feeling this strange kind of good kind of small.

Astronomers call this sense of awe, this feeling that comes over us as we encounter the vastness of the universe and the very smallness of our existence, “galaxy brain.” According to an article in The Atlantic, galaxy brain is this experience of realizing just how very inconsequential our lives are compared to the “long view,” these “glimpses of places that are so far beyond ourselves.” And Psychologists say that this “galaxy brain” is actually pretty good for us. It’s a “diminished sense of self.” It’s this feeling of smallness or insignificance compared to this thing that is so incredibly larger than ourselves. It’s a recalibration of what really matters in life. It puts our relatively small worries and concerns and problems into perspective. The article says that “Alarming as that may sound, research has shown that the sensation can be a good thing: A shot of awe can boost feelings of connectedness with other people.” So it’s totally counterintuitive. Taking a look at things that are impossibly far away from us, contemplating things that are inaccessibly huge, thinking about things that are so outside of ourselves, can bring us back, back to ourselves. And to each other. This is an experience that many astronauts have when they go up into space. They call it the “overview effect.” It’s this kind of “mental shift that many astronauts have experienced after seeing Earth as it truly is, a gleaming blue planet suspended in dark nothingness, precious and precarious.” Carl Sagan called Earth “the pale blue dot.” When the spacecraft, Voyager 1, was reaching the outer limits of the solar system, the spacecraft turned around and took one last picture of Earth from 6 billion miles away. And in this image, amidst the light rays from the sun, is a tiny dot, a pale spot of light, only 0.12 pixels in size. And that, is our Earth. That’s us. That’s everyone we’ve ever known. That’s everyone we’ve ever loved. That blue dot contains the course of human history, all the tragedies and the suffering, all the powerful and the powerless, all the billionaires on their yachts and all the kids living in tin shacks and digging in landfills for scraps, all the Big Macs and overpriced lattes, all the credit card debt, all the plagues and pandemics, all of it, right there, condensed onto this pale blue dot, suspended precariously in the ever-expanding dark of the universe. Sagan says, “every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” He says, “Our posturing, our imagined self importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.” 

And yet. Here we are. We are a part of this light.

By looking out into the vast endlessness, things are put into perspective. By seeing the big, we are reconnected to the small. Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell, reflecting on his vision of the Earth from his moon landing in 1971, said, “You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it.” Coming to some small understanding of what’s out there can bring us to an understanding of what’s in here — in us, in the same dust and energy and matter that formed our very beings, in that hidden place, deep in our mother’s wombs. It’s into the same infinitely vast and also infinitely particular that we go in our reading today.

In one small peasant girl, in one small town, in a Judean countryside two thousand years ago, we encounter the realization that it’s all connected. The ever expanding universe is found in the tiniest multiplication of cells. What is big can be found in the small. What is powerful is found in the lowly. Mary becomes the theotokos, the God-bearer, the insignificant nobody from an insignificant town, who is called to carry the universe inside her, as it starts in a tiny cell, and she says yes.  She says ok. She is terrified and overwhelmed and trembling and still, she says yes. She has a moment where she sees, truly sees, the bigness, the vastness, the overwhelming existence beyond herself, and she says yes to it. She invites it in. She makes herself present for it. She steps in to the awe and wonder of the incomprehensible and says “Ok, Sure. Let it be so.” I’m here for it. Amen. Let’s do this. 

And so, she sings.

She sings “My soul magnifies the Lord.”

And a whole bunch of other amazing things. 

She sings about how great God is and how lowly she is but how God has lifted up the lowly so that means she’s great now, too. She sings about how big and vast and bold and wide and unending God is and how God has scattered all those who think they’re the ones who are great and big and bold and powerful. God has brought down the mighty from their thrones. They’re just dust in the vastness of the universe. And the lowly, the dusty, the flecks, the small and the insignificant have been raised up. The hungry are filled. The rich are sent away empty handed. She plants herself firmly in the history of her people. She announces that she is small, she is lowly, a mere slave, and she is the hinge upon which all of history will be changed. She’s just dust. But really important dust. She’s just a girl on a tiny pale blue dot. And that means everything.

And so she sings My soul magnifies the Lord.

Listen again to the radicalness of this first line. 

My soul magnifies the Lord.

Mary’s soul magnifies God.

Magnify. The Greek is Megalunei - to enlarge, lengthen, increase, to magnify, to extol. From mega - to make great, to increase.

Mary’s soul magnifies the Lord.  

Like a telescope, or a microscope, or a jeweler’s loupe, or even those cloudy scratched up plastic magnifying glasses you found at the bottom of your cereal box, Mary’s soul brings us closer to what could not be seen by the naked eye.

Mary becomes our telescope. A telescope usually works through a series of mirrors that gather, bend, and refract light. Telescopes are simply light collectors. And Mary becomes a light collector. She is that thing through which we get an up close and personal view of who God is, of where God is, of what God does and what God looks like. She holds the Christ Child, the one who will travel light years and multiple dimensions and through galaxies and from beyond the universe in order to show us that God has been here all along. When we look through Mary, when we listen to this song, God is magnified. It truly is a Magnificat. 

And because Mary is our telescope, that means we can be telescopes, too. Or microscopes. Or maybe just a magnifying glass. Or that cloudy plastic thing we found at the bottom of our Lucky Charms. We can be a people who magnify God. We can bring others closer to God just by their looking through us. It’s a bold and crazy claim. But this is how God has chosen to be seen and felt and heard in this world. Through the incarnation we can now know that all the world is a telescope, even us. God can be seen in the blades of grass and the grains of sand and the shipping boxes and the clutter in our basements and in the cold cups of coffee forgotten in the microwave. God can be seen in the dust on our bookshelves that will one day become the dust that forms a star that will gather a solar system and make up part of a galaxy. Mary is that lowly servant girl who is the first to get it. She’s the first to see it. God is magnified through her. And because of that, God is magnified through us. Because she said yes. Because she chose to carry God inside of her, and then give him to the world. Because Mary’s soul magnifies the Lord, our souls can too.

This doesn’t make Mary a demigod. This doesn’t make her any more holy than we are. Rather, through her human, frail, lowly “yes,” we are shown how we can give our own human, frail, lowly yeses. She shows us how. You step in. You show up. You enter into the darkness. You wait. You collect the light.  You give your whole self. You’re scared senseless. And then you say, let it be, Amen.  And that’s it. You become a telescope. People can look through you and see God, magnified. 

We’re no Hubble telescope of course. We’re no Voyager 1 or major observatory. Some of us are just those scratched up cloudy magnifying glasses covered in breakfast cereal dust. But somehow, no matter how muddled or cracked or foggy our lens gets, no matter how wobbly our tripod, we, too, get to be people who carry a vision of God within ourselves. We, too, get to be people who help others see God a little more clearly. 

Thirty years ago, the Hubble Space Telescope was launched into space. Five years later, astronomers were chomping at the bit to get a chance to point it in some specific direction. They were all vying for a chance to use this amazing new technology in order to learn more about their pet projects, to answer some of their particular questions. How are galaxies formed? What does a dying star look like? What impact does a comet have when it crashes into a planet? Where are the black holes? But Bob Williams didn’t have a specific plan or a specific question to answer. He was the director of the Hubble institution, and he could use the telescope to look at whatever he wanted. And, according to The Atlantic, “he decided to point it at nothing in particular.” His colleagues told him that this was a terrible idea. A waste of resources. But he insisted. He had a hunch that there was something out there. And for ten days the Hubble telescope took picture after picture in this random direction. They pointed the telescope into the dark, into an expanse of seeming nothingness, for ten days — a really long, expensive time for such a piece of fancy technology. And through all those mountains of data, through pointing at a random point in space, they found over 3,000 galaxies floating in the darkness. 3,000 fuzzy specks of light made up of billions of fuzzy specks of light, which are made up of the same dust that we will all return to someday. He just pointed into the dark. Into out there. 

See, it doesn’t matter were we point our telescopes. It doesn’t really matter where we point ourselves. Point yourself into the seeming darkness. And wait. The light will come. You are a telescope. You are meant to gather the light. And there is light. 3,000 galaxies of light. Nothing is a waste of resources, nothing is a waste of time, nothing is truly dark when we set our sights on God — God who is beyond us, and God who is inside of us. God is out there, somewhere. And God who is right here. And we can be a part of making that piece of God more visible to others. We, too, can be theotokos. We, too, can be light bearers. 

Our souls magnify the Lord.

Thanks be to God.