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?
