Announcements and Blessings

Sunday, December 11, 2011

Advent 3B

Text: Luke 1:39-56

³⁹In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, ⁴⁰where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. ⁴¹When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit ⁴²and exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. ⁴³And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? ⁴⁴For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy. ⁴⁵And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.” ⁴⁶And Mary said, “My soul magnifies the Lord, ⁴⁷and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, ⁴⁸for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; ⁴⁹for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name. ⁵⁰His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. ⁵¹He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. ⁵²He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; ⁵³he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty. ⁵⁴He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, ⁵⁵according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever.” ⁵⁶And Mary remained with her about three months and then returned to her home.

My knowledge of Mary growing up was limited to basically two events.  She was present at Jesus’ conception and birth, and she was present at his death.  She kind of ‘bookended’ the gospel story.  Part of the reason she was limited to that in my upbringing was I’m sure, due to the fact that I was a Baptist in a country that even now professes to be over 80% Roman Catholic. And while it is a sad statement, it is also a true statement that just as the reformers were apt to do, Baptists in Chile who came out of the Roman Catholic tradition tended to leave lots of things behind; the veneration of saints, the theology of sacraments, the confessional, infant baptism, and the veneration of Mary – in many instances simply because they were so tied to the Roman Catholic tradition.    

I think that dearth of knowledge – that scarcity of exploration of Mary’s experience, and most importantly, her response to what is the single biggest event in human history made for a lesser understanding of the message of the gospels for me.

I’m not going to come out and tell you we need to begin to set up an altar with the image of Mary, or that we should think of her as co-redemptress alongside Christ, or that we should pray to her so SHE can speak to God on our behalf, I am too Baptist to do that. 

What I will say is that we DO need to stop and think about Mary more often than simply twice a year.  And I say that fully realizing that in some cases, the only time many people DO stop and think about JESUS is at those same two times each year, so we’re crowding the scene a little bit, but bear with me.

If, as it is commonly accepted today, Mary was a young teenager – around 14 years of age – when she found out she was pregnant, I wonder what the REAL first thought that went through her head was.  I mean, yeah, the first words RECORDED that came out of her mouth were ‘how so, I’m a virgin?’ followed shortly by ‘here am I, the servant of the Lord, let it be with me according to your word.’   But I would love to know what her first THOUGHT was.  I wonder if it might have been something that would be impolite to translate from the Aramaic she spoke?  I wonder if her first thought was fear?  Societal norms were different in those days – to put it mildly – and young girls of fourteen were already of an age when they could begin to conceive, so I don’t think there was a freak-out moment when she realized she wasn’t going to get to play with her friends anymore.  She had probably long since given up childish things and had for at least two if not three years been a working member of the household – whether in keeping house, or cooking, helping with the family business or tending to some responsibility or other, she was not a child. 

In our society today, we enjoy an extended childhood far beyond what our ancestors did – and far beyond what many other cultures in the world today do as well, and our expectations of what is proper for a young woman of 14 and what is not are different from that which was common in first century Palestine.  But in one way they do remain somewhat aligned – in that a child is better BOTH conceived and born within the bounds of a loving relationship between his or her parents. I fully realize that seems to be less and less the norm, but that line in the gospel narrative still resonates with us today.  We can associate with Joseph’s response to the news of Mary’s condition – that he would quietly and discreetly dis-engage from her so that there would be less of a hullabaloo when the folks in town began to notice the growing baby bump. 

I am of two minds when it comes to the “Magnificat” – that is the name given to the song that Mary sings after she and Elizabeth get together - it is called that because ‘magnificat’ is the word that comes first in the Latin version of scriptures that we read in English as ‘my soul magnifies the Lord’ – it is a beautiful hymn, a beautiful expression of someone being totally in love with the will of God for their lives, totally submitted to whatever that means for them, totally engaged in moving forward into it.  It even manages to include echoes of God’s justice that sound an awful lot like it comes from Psalms than from the New Testament.  It’s closest in wording to Hannah’s song, which is found in 1 Samuel 2:1-10.  So there is a pretty good chance that Mary was paraphrasing a passage of scripture that she grew up with and personalized it for herself on this occasion. 

There is also the chance that the whole hymn was inserted at some point in the early oral history of the church – the words being placed in Mary’s mouth by faithful followers who would rather hear this than Mary’s cries of joy and fear intermingled with peals of laughter when Elizabeth comes to her door and opens it and sees her and says “Holy crap! You too?!”  There are many possibilities that can be explored in that way. 

But God has seen fit to give us the Canon in this form, and we believe that to be for a reason, and however it came to be, God was in the process, so here we have this joyful, faithful, spiritually uplifting and idealized response to God’s moving in her life from the woman who stuck it out.  She never denied Jesus.  She pushed him when he needed to be pushed, at that wedding in Cana, scripture doesn’t say she gave him a spanking when he got away from the family when they went to the temple when he was twelve, and she didn’t, but I can promise you that somewhere in there with the fear any parent feels when they temporarily lose a child in a place they don’t live, she probably thought ‘just wait … when we get home …’

You see, Mary has, to some degree even more than the apostles and Jesus himself, been dehumanized in the centuries since she found out she was pregnant.  It makes it that much harder to connect with her today.  We read about the disciples making mistakes or being boneheaded about something, we read about how Jesus cried, or was angry, or was tired and rested.  We read the letters of Paul and his humanity comes through loud and clear.  He is angry, he is sarcastic, he is blunt, but he can also be a poet, he can evoke images with sublime words that cut to our very core. 

So don’t be shy about studying Mary, reading books about her, doing Bible Studies about her.  She’s no more or less human than every other character in the Bible. 

And while God DID use her in a special way, the bottom line is that she was willing to LET God use her – in whatever way God needed to.

We can all learn from her submission, her faithfulness in the face of the uncertainty of what the future held, and her willingness to continue to follow and to believe – wherever that ended up taking her – even if it was to the foot of the cross at Calvary.

What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

Announcements and blessings … we have been blessed beyond measure, insofar as we have also, within us our Lord Jesus.  But a blessing as we know, is not something to be contained within ourselves, but is to be shared.  So insofar as we live out that blessing of having Jesus in us, we are announcing his presence.  We are announcing that he is active and living in the world, and he is doing that through us.  So that is our challenge. That is what has always been our challenge – to make our living in that sense comparable to Mary’s.  And it’s not a perfect model to go after, as idealized as her life IS in the gospels.  It is achievable.  It’s not just an idea we hold within ourselves, it’s not just a concept that we profess to believe; it’s not just a life ethic that we follow.  We host in ourselves the Holy Spirit.  And the Holy Spirit is out to do amazing things.  REALLY amazing things, if we just let him.

Let’s pray.