Among the greatest gifts of our Anglican tradition is Evensong. This form of singing the daily office of Evening Prayer is among the most moving and transcendent service that we have. It has inspired musicians to write settings that are masterpieces of church music. Second only to the singing of the psalms are the choral settings of the Magnificat and the Nunc Dimittis, the song of Mary and the song of Simeon. 

Daily in churches, from humble congregations to great cathedrals, and even in royal chapels, the Magnificat is sung. This song of a very young woman from Nazareth, at her visitation to Elizabeth in Judea, has been heard evening by evening by lay people, by bishops, deans, canons, priests and deacons, by kings and queens, by the powerful, as well as by those from more humble stations. In our own Oratory of the Four Evangelists in the diocesan offices, our Bishop and canons and a few lay people hear it week in and week out. 

Mary's song is from the prophetic tradition. A daily warning, especially to those of us who have some measure of influence, that God looks always with favor on the lowly, not the high and mighty, fills the hungry but sends the rich empty away, scatters the proud but remembers with mercy each and every humble soul who fears the Lord. This is a daily reminder that God's grace always is a surprise and represents a power unlike our worldly—and even our ecclesiastical—understandings of power, calling us to remember the hungry, the humble, the poor, and remember that in Incarnation of God among humanity, God first shows up in the least likely place among most unlikely people. For some this may seem a challenge and an affront. If it so strikes us, so it should.  

The Magnificat calls us to look not to our cathedrals or palaces, to presidents or governors, not to kings or Caesars, not Jerusalem, not to Rome, not to London or Washington, but instead to today's Bethlehems and Nazareths, to look for mangers, stables, shepherds, to look for feisty young women. God has a way of frustrating lofty plans and surpassing common expectations. God always arrives fresh and new, always in glory, and not accompanied by the thin pomp of the powerful, but instead in a form that astounds in a simplicity and in a power that makes kings quake and angels sing. 

-Canon Steve Carlsen, Canon for Vitality, Episcopal Diocese of Oklahoma