Sunday, December 21, 2014

Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary: How to Respond to God's Word in the Real World



In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. And he came to her and said, ‘Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.’ But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. The angel said to her, ‘Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.’ Mary said to the angel, ‘How can this be, since I am a virgin?’ The angel said to her, ‘The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God. And now, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren. For nothing will be impossible with God.’ Then Mary said, ‘Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.’ Then the angel departed from her. ~ Luke 1:26-38

In the Magnificat, sung in churches and concert halls across the globe during Christmas, Mary the mother of Jesus, prophesying in the power of the Spirit no less, predicted that “from now on all generations will call me blessed” )1:48). Well – her prophesy has often fallen on hard times in many of the churches I grew up in. My former student Nick Anderson just recently returned from an internship in Mexico where church members would physically remove her picture or even spit on it. According to church calendars, Roman Catholics have at least 15 days a year dedicated to blessing Mary. While 15 might be more than we are comfortable with, and I am not suggesting that there aren’t certain aspects attributed to Mary that we shouldn’t feel uncomfortable with, I do believe that it’s time for us to give Mary the honor due her. So welcome to Honor Mary Day!

I do believe that we should heed the Bible’s lead and call Mary “blessed” but I’d like to think that Mary would agree with Dorothy Day who once said, “Don’t make me a saint. I don’t want to be dismissed that easily.” So what can we learn from Mary, the anti-Saint, about practicing faith in the real world, about following God and responding to His call? Mary made courageous leaps of faith all the while continuing to face real hardship. She argued with and questioned Jesus throughout his ministry while following Him. In the Medieval period of the church, Mary was considered the model believer. The one looked at to help define what it meant to follow God. Because most Christians were illiterate, popular preachers used paintings and other art forms to help parishioners learn critical spiritual truths. And the annunciation became the model for how one should respond to God. I would like to use this medieval model for us today. They pointed to four stages or elements in Mary’s response to God’s plan: conturbatio (disquiet), cogitatio (reflection), interrogatio (inquiry), humiliatio (submission).

            1.      Conturbatio – Disquiet (anxiety) - "‘Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.’ But she was much perplexed by his words . . ."




Mary as the model Christian faces reality right from the get-go – this was a dangerous greeting. She lived in a world steeped in scripture and new the stories of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Moses – that to be “favored by God” or “overshadowed by God”, to hear that “the Lord is with you” or to say “yes” to God, was often to encounter what one had not asked for – what seemed disorderly, dangerous, even rebellious – it often meant coming face-to-face with one’s worst fears. She wasn’t anxious because of the messenger, the text tells us, but because of the message, the same greeting given to Gideon when God called him to the frightful task of standing up against the Midianites in Judges 6. 

Why should she have been disquieted, anxious, maybe even scared? Because she understood full well the potential consequences? What did such a decision look like in the context of a Torah world?

a.       She could be charged with adultery and sentenced to death. – Mary’s world was regulated by the Torah, the law given to Moses, which stated that those committing adultery were to be stoned. Deut. 22:23-24: “If there is a young woman, a virgin already engaged to be married, and a man meets her in the town and lies with her, 24you shall bring both of them to the gate of that town and stone them to death, the young woman because she did not cry for help in the town and the man because he violated his neighbor’s wife. So you shall purge the evil from your midst.”

b.      If the possibility of death wasn’t bad enough there was also the threat of dishonor and shame for herself, Joseph and her whole family (“fear of looking bad”) – Friends, I want to stop here and make a more personal point because I suspect in this community many of you would be willing to die long before you would be willing to be potentially shamed. It is important to recognize that Mary could have said “no” and kept her reputation, even appeared to have been following God’s will but that would not have been the case. She would have looked good to Torah, looked right to her community, emerged as a good wife but would have missed out on being “blessed.” Friends, following God is messy – it will lead you to messy places, with messed up people – the whispers, the gossip, the potential to be misunderstood, even slandered. But hear Gabriel this morning – don’t be afraid of these words. You are favored – God will be with you.

c.       Shame on her son for being illegitimate (a charge that dogged him even as an adult and that should have forbade him from certain celebrations, Deut. 23:2) NOT to forget also that her choice put her at political odds with the greatest political-military power on the earth, the Romans.

I don’t want young Mary to have to make this choice, to face those dangers, to feel that anxiety, but deep down I don’t want to either. And here’s the point – her disquietness, her anxiety, reveal that she did understand these issues and said yes anyway. So Mary might have been meek and mild as the song suggests, but her radical choice to assent to God – was not. It was made in the face of real fear. Later she would be told that because of her son, “a sword will piece your own heart as well.” Rather than “meek and mild” maybe we should call her “scary Mary.” Martin Luther said it best: 

How many came in contact with her, talked, and ate and drank with her, who perhaps despised her and counted her but a common, poor, and simple village maiden, and who, had they known, would have fled from her in terror? ~ Martin Luther, “The Magnificat”

Now, I don’t know if this is a law of the universe or anything but I have come to believe that the ability to hear and say yes to God’s word in one’s life demands a certain reluctance, a certain initial disquietness, that comes from being honest. To acknowledge reluctance is to discern real concerns and consequences and listening to the voice of the Spirit and obeying God’s call are never the stuff of fantasy. Illus. the missionary couple to Kuai. How do I know God’s speaking to me, working on me – I’m often, like Mary, reluctant.
Mary reminds that faith in the real world or joining any work of God comes with two edges – great joy and great pain. Mary embraced both. She was the first person to accept Jesus on his own terms, regardless of the personal cost.

            2.      Cogitatio – Reflection - ". . . and pondered what sort of greeting this might be."





Now, Mary didn’t let fear get the best of her. She acknowledged her anxiety and refused to accept the “blind faith” often heralded throughout churches. How did she do this – she pondered! Notice that she looks no longer at the angel but at the scroll, the scriptures.

These are standard words in Judaism for thinking about events in one’s life in the light of scripture so that one could make sense of and narrate what God was doing. So “to ponder” is not to withdraw into silence meditation only – though that certainly should be a part of it. To ponder was, as one NT scholar writes, is “to deliberate in order to interpret. Mary was actively figuring out what God was doing in the world and about her place in it. It reminds me of the Mark Twain quote: “The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.” Because Mary used her mind, she discovered her place in God’s kingdom, her critical role in God’s salvation.

And friends, if we have any reason to bless Mary today it would be because of that. For what did her pondering, her reflection bring us? It didn’t mean that she was simply a passive vessel for the “holy one” but the first apostle – the first messenger of the gospel!

No sooner does Gabriel return to God than Mary dashes off to Elizabeth to tell her the good news of Jesus. She was the first person to tell the gospel story (notice the book in the image). Mary is one of the first eye-witnesses and story-tellers of what God was up to. Luke reminds us in verse 2:19 that “Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.” Many scholars suggest that this is a clue to one of the critical eye-witnesses for Luke’s Gospel (1:1-4) – Mary herself. She was the first witness, the first teacher, the priest that mute Zechariah couldn’t be. And she wasn’t just a womb but a thoughtful voice – throughout, a critical composer of what would become the story we tell of Jesus. She had to rise above the negative stereotypes about women in her context to see herself as a critical thinker and contributor. Young women – ponder your place in God’s kingdom. Bring your God-given mind to bear on God’s call in your life. We need you pondering, reflecting so that the story can continue. To be faithful to hear and act on God’s word we all need to ponder God’s word.

            3.      Interrogatio – Inquiry - ‘How can this be, since I am a virgin?’




It’s interesting that Mary doesn’t ask a question until after she has reflected and pondered. Unlike Zechariah, she doesn’t ask for I sign, “How will I know?” but for an explanation, “How can this be? Her question came from a place of commitment and investment. Mary as our example reminds us that committed Christians can asks hard questions of God’s word and God’s activity. People practicing faith in the real world can feel free to ask real questions like “how.” But also “why are things this way?”

Moreover, her question doesn’t skirt the obvious problem – but addresses it head on. Her deep faithfulness does not gloss over the real challenges. So the mother of our Lord give us critical advice if we are going to be faithful hearers and responders to God’s word: Question authority. And she reveals that such questioning is not disloyalty and does not lead to disqualification. Friends, an unquestioning faith will not give birth to the work of God. My friend Paul with M.S. couldn’t speak because he had a tube in his throat to help him but he could always tell when someone wasn’t asking questions. He would joke with them and say outlandish things all the while they smiled and nodded their head in agreement too afraid to ask for clarification, to ask a question. If Paul could tell, I can assure that God can as well. God knows you need to ask questions – so ask them.

            4.      Humiliatio – Submission - Then Mary said, ‘Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.’




To honor Mary we need to let her define herself – She hears about God’s plan and her part in it and then has the courage to call herself “servant” and not “super queen.” That, in and of itself, might be the best revelation of why God picked her in the first place. Her specialness wasn’t a title to be proclaimed but a duty to subsume. She had the honor of being the first woman to be addressed directly by an angel and yet identifies herself as a servant. Mary may be the Queen of Heaven but she was not the Queen of England.

When the Queen Elizabeth II visited the United States on her last visit she came with four thousand pounds of luggage with two outfits for every occasion, forty pints of plasma, and white kid leather toilet seat covers, as well as her own hairdresser, two valets, and a host of other attendants to the cost of approx. 20 million dollars.

It’s interesting in the many panels revealing Mary’s submission, her humility, signaled by the crossed arms, that the angel Gabriel assumes the same posture, with a head bowed slightly lower. Mary’s submission in the end doesn’t match the submission of God, the great condescension of the Most High who will fulfill his promise in the most extravagant way – through the humility of a little baby, dependent upon this humble one. Mary is simply mirroring the One who calls out to her. Will you do the same? To hear the Word of God is always to humbly accept what has been humbly given. God never asks of us what God himself has not taken on.

To become a Christian is to, like Mary, say “yes” to what God is doing through his son, Jesus. I can’t think of a better time – some of you have been with us now for awhile but have not yet made that step. Listen, we love you – that will never change. But the angel has come and announced his birth. How will you respond?