I’ll still refer you
to my general post on preaching during this peculiar season: God
Became Small: Preaching Advent – which has
loads of thoughts on what preaching in busy December is/can be like, and lots
and lots of illustrative stuff.
John
1:6-8, 19-28. More John? It’s Advent 3, for crying out loud (which I guess
John did a lot of). The Baptism story is coming in early January… I am sure God
does not mind if we veer from the lections – especially if we light the pink
“Mary candle” this Sunday. Surely Advent should focus once – more than once
actually – on Mary, the most Adventish of all Bible characters, the consummate
one preparing for, yielding up her life to the coming of the Lord.
How did she come to such a fate / decision /
moment? Although there are volumes to be said about Mary, seasonally speaking, a
short sermon is in order – and let it be reflective, marveling over Mary, her
mood, her steady trust, uncertain but confident in God. No takeaway, no moral,
no lesson. We ask folks to get “lost in wonder, love and praise” as we linger
over the “round yon virgin.”
I’ll use the Luke 1:26-38
reading, although December 17 only allows a week from conception to birth! This
fact might itself be worth pondering. When you’re pregnant, the baby doesn’t
show up 5 days later. Thankfully. You have to wait. It matters what you eat and
drink. You become uncomfortable. Your old clothes don’t work any more. You’re
awakened, your balance is askew. And it takes so much time. God coming to us,
into us is like this.
So much about Mary intrigues. I love the sermon
that simply looks on Mary with awe. No big takeaways, no moral points, no
missional directives – except that in the Annunciation, God asked to take on
flesh, to become real in her, which is precisely what God asks of each of us.
In my new book Birth:
The Mystery of Being Born, I devised a little
chapter about her, lingering on how she “pondered,” and more. I’ll simply
excerpt parts of that for you now:
*******
If we want to make theological sense of our own
birth, if we want to begin to understand God’s intimate connection with us as
far back as conception, and then continuing through this moment, we can do no
better than to ponder the marvelous, elusive and alluring story of Mary, the
mother of our Lord. “Ponder” is just what she, so understandably, did
after those mystical and perilous nine months from the first stirrings in her
inner being to the arrival of her son, God’s son. As she tried to rest,
exhausted and yet jubilant after delivering this most wanted, unexpected and
desperately needed child in all of history, “Mary kept all these things,
pondering them in her heart” (Luke 2:19).
She “kept.” Luke’s Greek implies “treasuring.”
And which “all these things” did Luke have in mind? I suspect that she
treasured more than just the shepherd’s crazed report of an angelic choir, or
the agony of birth, or the months of uncertainty during her pregnancy, the
arduous journey to visit Elizabeth, Joseph’s tender mercy, and even Gabriel’s
unasked for visit. Hadn’t she treasured the simplicity of her old life in
Nazareth? Was it hard to treasure her interrupted dreams – not to mention what
Rowan Williams called “the dangerous difference that God’s Word would make”?
All these things she “pondered” – a word
derived from pondus, meaning “weighty.” We ponder what is
substantial, maybe a burden; to ponder what is heavy, strength is required. The
Greek suggests something even more picturesque behind “pondered”: sumballousa,
meaning literally “tossing around together” or “debating.” Have you ever had so
much substantive stuff in you at once that it seemed to churn incessantly? and
then bat it around with yourself, you almost can’t help opening yourself to
God? Richard Rohr sees Mary “in that liminal space between fascination and
attraction on the one side, and fear and awe on the other.”
Luke tells us that Mary “pondered” again when
twelve year old Jesus got lost (but not really lost) in the temple (Luke 2:51).
We can be sure she pondered much as Jesus grew up, left home, gathered a
passionate following, and then conflicted with the authorities. We shudder over
what she must have pondered on that dark night after his crucifixion. And in
the long years to come after his resurrection and ascension: who pondered (and
missed) him more than Mary?
Luke’s telling observation of how Mary
treasured and pondered all these things invites us to do the same, gifting us
with considerable liberty to do so creatively. Mary: what woman’s name has been
repeated more times in human history? Who has been the subject of more
paintings, statues, jewelry and carvings? How many have fingered rosary beads,
mindlessly or in desperation?
Amy Grant intoned her catchy “Breath of heaven,”
getting inside Mary’s mood: “I am frightened by the load I bear… Do you wonder
as you watch my face if a wiser one should have had my place” – and then she
pleads, “Hold me together… Help me be strong. Help me be. Help me.”
Heaping attention on Mary would make her blush, and
she would gently insist that we stop. Martin Luther was right: “Mary does not
desire to be an idol; she does nothing, God does all.” Her loveliness, her
holiness, and her appeal reside in her unawareness. A simple young woman
saying Yes to the life of God already growing in her: without
realizing it, she was now the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy of Holies, the open
space where the infinite, uncontainable God became finite, contained in her
womb.
So much we’ve spoken of here is the result
of imagination, and pondering – so skeptics will argue that we cannot know such
things. Here’s what we do know. Mary lived in Nazareth, a small, backwater
village of no account, population in the dozens, her family and neighbors eking
out a hardscrabble existence. We would say that she married young – but so did
most women back then. Even cynics will grant that she had a son, and probably
other children, and a husband, Joseph, a carpenter or stone mason.
We yearn to see her face. Much of Christian
art depicting her is kitschy. I have always been fond of the serene, lovely
paintings of her by Sassoferrato – although her skin is terribly white, while
the real Mary would have been, like middle easterners of her race and place,
more darkly complected. To visualize the feel of Mary’s face, we might veer
toward something like Dorothea Lange’s iconic “Migrant Mother,” her 1936
photograph of a mother exhausted and yet courageous.
Herbert O’Driscoll’s wise
devotional book about Mary,
Portrait of a Woman, features Garibaldi
Melchers’ “Woman and Child” on the cover. Her more weathered complexion
suggests strength and gentleness, maybe endangered, with a ferocious kind of
love, shielding her child from danger.
We are pretty sure Mary was
illiterate. Certainly as a poor young woman from the middle of nowhere, she
didn’t own a book; her family didn’t have their own Scripture scrolls. But she
had seen the scrolls unfurled in the synagogue; she had listened attentively to
the regular readings. Like most devout Jews, she had committed the Psalms and
much more in the Bible to memory. She was, as her son was, an Israelite, the
people of God’s promises. Thomas Torrance put it elegantly: “And then at last
in the fullness of time, when God had prepared in the heart and soul of Israel
a womb for the birth of Jesus, a cradle for the child of Bethlehem, the savior
of the world was born, the very Son of God.”
Martin
Luther called the Bible “the swaddling clothes in which Jesus is laid.” To
ponder Mary’s pregnancy, we ponder the Scriptures that were very much alive in
her mind and heart during those days of anticipation, anxiety, discomfort,
probably nausea, something going on inside her she could not entirely fathom –
in a unique way, and yet like all mothers in waiting. The Psalms resonated, with
their dark cries for help and comfort. I wonder if she was deeply moved to
reconsider the story of Hannah, barren and then surprised with a son? Once
Samuel, her dream, her loveliest ever gift from God arrived, she didn’t cling
to him but gave him back to the Lord, to serve with Eli in the temple at
Shiloh. That boy in turn heard a voice in the night, and after some confusion
responded, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening” (1 Sam. 3:9). Did that
moment shape her reply to Gabriel? “Let it be to me according to your Word.”
Which texts
spoke most deeply to her? Did she have favorites? Surely the stories of
Hannah’s pregnancy and the stirrings in Rebekah’s womb moved her. The blessing
in Numbers 6 (“The Lord make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to
you”) must have resonated encouragingly. When the birth pangs were intense, did
her mind drift to Psalm 22 (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”), as
her son’s did in his hour of agony? After he was gone, what pulsated in her
heart when she heard 1 Corinthians 13 (“Love bears all things, believes all
things, hopes all things, endures all things”), which would have been
circulated and read where she lived out her years? What if pregnant women, or
young mothers read the Scripture during their days of wonder and struggle,
picturing Mary pondering the words in her heart?
Mary perceived the new life dawning in her
belly as a call, as her divinely ordained vocation. Having a child wasn’t her
pursuit of fulfillment or security in old age. She was responding to God’s
calling. Or we could say the nascent life in her became her calling. How do
mothers, when the news sinks in that, Yes, I am pregnant, begin
with Mary to discern what God is asking of them, and how the nurturing of the
child in the womb, and then after birth, can be the embodiment of a life of
service to God, of a determination to follow the one Mary nurtured in her womb?
Tradition suggests that Mary was about to draw
water from a well when she was interrupted by the angel. A well in Nazareth
supposedly marks the place, housed in a massive basilica that fields more
visitors every day than the entire population of the Nazareth Mary knew. There
is something mystical about water, our thirst for it, the beauty, the
shimmering ripples eliciting a kind of simple awe. Water will matter for her,
and for all mothers. They need to stay hydrated. Their fetuses live in a
numinous, aquatic realm until the water breaks. And then the bath, a lifetime
of drinking, and Baptism, and the delight in rivers, lakes, ocean waves and the
gentle rain.
Whose assignment was ever bigger than Mary’s?
And yet, isn’t ours similar? Herbert O’Driscoll captured our inevitable kinship
with Mary: “She had felt the divine visitation which in some way comes to us
all. What had been asked of her was unique, and yet an echo of it reaches all
of us if only we have ears to hear. She had been asked to offer herself to the
divine will, to become a servant. She had made her choice, as we all must.
Fully and freely she had said Yes. For those who say Yes nothing is ever the
same again.” God’s calling is always like hers: God asks to become real in
us, to take on flesh in our lives.
In the Bible, those who are called have their
reasons not to say Yes. Moses has his speech issues, Jeremiah’s too young,
Isaiah is unholy – and now Mary, who knew their stories: she has not been with
any man. God always counters, and uses the unusable. We might ask, Why
Mary, of all people? We presume she was of immense holiness;
Wordsworth called her “our tainted nature’s solitary boast.” She calls to us
out of her holiness; Richard Rohr suggests that “somehow she is calling all of
us to our absolute best.” She was a virgin. But in those days, as a matter of
both holiness and family honor, most newly betrothed women were – hence, not
the shock this sadly would be today. Luther pinpoints her humility – a humility
that did not even know it was being humble: “She gloried neither in her
virginity nor in her humility, but solely in God’s gracious regard… True
humility does not know that it is humble.”
Her ordinariness, and in such an ordinary
place, makes her the sort of person God would choose for this extraordinary
mission. Ultimately, what we realize about Mary is not that she had this or
that ability; what she had was simply an availability. “Let it be to me.” As
with all of us, God is looking for a readiness, an availability, or what Maggie
Ross called “a willingness for whatever.” She heard the angel speak of what was
impossible. With considerable courage, naivete, and trust, she went with it,
she let it be in her. And I feel sure that over time she came to realize what
was dawning in her was not for her or even her people but for the whole world.
People who have gotten born, when they fix
their attention on Mary, eventually begin to realize the wisdom of Meister
Eckhart, the fourteenth century German mystic: “We are all meant to be mothers of God. What good is it to
me if this eternal birth of the divine Son takes place unceasingly but does not
take place within myself? And what good is it to me if Mary is full of grace if
I am not also full of grace? What good is it to me for the Creator to give
birth to his Son if I also do not give birth to him in my time and my culture?
This, then, is the fullness of time. When the Son of God is begotten in us.”
I admire an Ethiopian prayer to Mary from the ninth
century that doesn’t overstate things at all: “Your hands touched him who is
untouchable and the divine fire within him. Your fingers are like the
incandescent tongs with which the prophet received the coal of the heavenly
offering. You are the basket bearing this burning bread and you are the cup of
this wine. O Mary, we earnestly pray to you that, just as water is not divided
from wine, so we may not separate ourselves from your son, the lamb of
salvation.”
