Within the past few decades, it has been the rage among some parents to play classical music for their unborn babies. Search online for any recording of Mozart’s music and you will assuredly encounter at least one entitled Mozart for Babies.
It all started in the 1990s when a group of researchers at the University of California set out to determine whether listening to music had any effect on spatial reasoning. And they discovered that students who listened to Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major for ten minutes acquired eight to nine more spatial IQ points than when they tested after ten minutes of silence. So, researchers thought, listening to Mozart makes you smarter. I suppose that means we will all be a bit more intelligent this evening after hearing Mozart’s Spatzenmesse!
But later studies seemed to show that it’s not necessarily true that listening to Mozart’s music increases intelligence. Rather, it’s the simple sound of the human voice that elicits favorable reactions from unborn fetuses. It enhances the ability of the brain to form important neural pathways while still in the womb. In short, singing to your baby is a good thing.[1]
I can’t help but imagine what it was like when Mary sang her song all those years ago after she was told she would bear the Son of God. John the Baptist must have heard her song from within his mother Elizabeth’s womb, as she stood close to Mary, their bellies touching while they rejoiced in their respective surprising pregnancies. Our Lord himself, in Mary’s womb, would have heard her song as her vocal cords resonated and she gave voice to her exquisite hymn. Jesus’s developing body would have vibrated with the dulcet sounds of Mary’s voice. How could Mary have simply said those words? Wouldn’t she have sung them?
There’s something electric, almost primal, about the Magnificat. Mary’s song, of course, recalls Hannah’s in the Book of 1 Samuel, when she learned that God had heard her request and granted her a child despite her barrenness. Hannah’s song is emblematic of God’s innate proclivity to look upon the despised and lowly and bless them, just as his only begotten Son would later seek out the lost and heal them.
So, Mary’s song is nothing less than a song of potential fruitfulness, blessing, and hope. At its heart, it celebrates that God creates and gives life. From nothing he made everything that is. From situations of slavery and barrenness, he gives freedom and fecundity. And so, Mary’s song takes us all the way back to Abraham and God’s promise to him, that through God’s astounding grace alone, he would be the progenitor of a lineage more numerous than the stars in the sky and the grains of sand on the seashore. To put it another way, this God could do anything from nothing, and this God fulfills what he promises.
Which is exactly what we see in the life of Mary. We see the God of all creation and King of the universe working miraculously through the natural order to dwell among us in Christ, to make all creation new, as he had promised through the prophets, and to raise us from sin and death to life eternal.
It's hard to imagine that one little song, nestled within Luke’s Gospel, could bear the weight of so much hope for the human race. But it does. It’s the song to which we give voice each day at Evening Prayer. As each day fades away, as we mourn our sins and bewail the state of the world, as our hearts break for one more unfed stomach or one more neglected person trampled on by cruel governments or one more ounce of hope lost by the destitute, we utter Mary’s song. We sing because we have no answers to all these tragedies. To singlehandedly subvert them is beyond our control, and to offer trite assurances of comfort would be insensitive. And so, we sing. We sing what Mary sang to the infant Lord, and we sing this song to bequeath it to those who will come after us, who are yet in the womb of creation. We sing as a mother playing a part in the formation of the mind and spirit of an unborn child still in her womb. We sing with the hope that the power of a song can play some part in the shaping of a people yet to come who will trust in the mighty power of God to do something new, to create fruitfulness out of barrenness, to turn sorrow into joy, to bring life out of death.
Just a few years ago, I heard a story about two children I know, both choristers in a church. Their mother overheard their intense, heart-wrenching conversation through the door to their room one evening. The youngest was weeping over the state of the world in which she was beginning to take her rightful place. She was inching slowly out of her childish innocence into maturity, becoming more cognizant of the ruthlessness of her fellow race, of societal bullying and angry, of vindictive speech in the public discourse. And she cried, overwhelmed by how to cope with such a world.
Her sister wanted to comfort her but was much too thoughtful and mature to offer platitudes. How could she tell her that everything would be all right, at least in this life? So, she didn’t. But what she did do was say—or perhaps she even sang—the words of the Magnificat. Those choristers knew the precious words by heart, sung in countless Evensong services. He has put down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted those of low degree; he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent empty away. And so, through tears, they sang. They sang of the mysterious hope that subverts the certainty of earthly sorrow.
On this feast day of the Blessed Mother, our Anglican heritage with its theological modesty and humility, is reticent to explain the specifics of Mary’s end. We are perhaps more comfortable with singing, and that is meet and right. Other traditions choose to speak of her dormition and assumption into heaven, both body and soul. But this evening’s collect holds back from saying too much about what happened to Mary while leaving us with a solid reassurance that Mary has indeed been taken up to be with God. How could it be any other way? And so, we are left with only a mystery about which we must sing.
The blessed Mother has been revered as the mother of the Church. It is she who bore the Savior of the world. Through her, the Church, Christ’s body on earth, is born.[2] As the mother of the Church, she is our mother. And in this earthly life, we are, in some sense, still being born. There is a great paradox here. In our daily dying, we are closer to our natural deaths. But when we finally die, as the Christian tradition has long affirmed, we are born into true life. Death is the gateway to eternal life. It is when new life begins. And in a world mired in sin, that new life is worth singing about.
The Blessed Mother continues to birth us into being. She is the midwife of a new creation. And we are still in her womb. As she sang to our Savior and Lord in her womb over two millennia ago, she still sings to us. Her song, if we listen to it and absorb it, can make us whole. It’s her song, the Magnificat, that forms within us the great pattern of salvation, whereby the proud are cast down and the lowly lifted up, and those who are hungry are fed, and the rich are sent away empty. This paschal pattern—the pattern of dying and rising again—is the assurance of hope that God has always done a new thing, God is always doing a new thing, and God will always do a new thing.
Mary, who has been exalted to heaven, continues to sing to us and gives us her song. The angels echo her song, too. And we on earth join our voices with the company of heaven and all the saints who have died. We persist in singing, through good times and bad ones, so that her song may become ours, and our song may be the proclamation of the good news to the ends of the earth. She sings, and we the Church sing, knowing that the song that is Mary’s gift to us is nothing less than the song of a God who is always making everything new. And this song is unlike any other because it has no end.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Feast of St. Mary the Virgin
August 15, 2025
[1] Barnaby Martin, “Can Listening to Mozart’s Music Make Your Baby Smarter?” in Medium (https://medium.com/@barnabymartin/no-listening-to-mozarts-music-won-t-make-you-smarter-de90e07b6d26), accessed August 14, 2025
[2] See “The Virgin Mother” in John Behr, In Accordance with the Scriptures: The Shape of Christian Theology (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2025), 83-84.