Chetwynd Shared Ministry
December 24, 2017
Scripture Readings: Luke 1:26-38 and Luke 1:46-55
I want to invite you
to take a couple of minutes and imagine yourself into Mary’s situation. She is engaged to Joseph but they aren’t
married yet. In a place and a time when
the patriarchy was even stronger than it is today, and when women were married
at a younger age than in our time and place, Mary was probably a teenager. And marriage didn’t happen because two people
fell in love with each other – marriage was all about a contract between
families. Two families would come
together to arrange the marriage, and marriage was to continue the family line
– in other words, the important thing about marriage is that you have children.
So here you are, a
young girl who is going to be married into Joseph’s family in order that
Joseph’s family would survive for another generation. Your family isn’t a wealthy or powerful
family. You live in Nazareth, a small
village in the rural part of the backwater that is called Galilee. Everybody knows everybody in your village –
after all, there aren’t that many people to know. And you are a girl – you are the property of
your father, until you become the property of your husband.
And here arrives an
angel, a messenger from God, telling you that you are going to have a
baby. How do you feel? Afraid of what your family and Joseph’s
family are going to say? Afraid of what
your village is going to say about you?
Afraid of this new experience of pregnancy and birth? Are you feeling ashamed of what is going to
happen to your body? Are you puzzled
about how all of this is going to happen?
Are you curious about why God has chosen you; why you have found favour
with God?
One of the first
things that the angel Gabriel says to you is “Do not be afraid.” I wonder if he says this because he knows
that you are afraid of what is happening.
But then again, whenever angels appear to humans, the first thing that
they say is “Do not be afraid.” Maybe
angels are inherently terrifying, or maybe this is the first part of God’s
message to all of us.
But even if Mary is
scared, she doesn’t let fear drive her actions.
Instead she says “yes” to the angel, “yes” to God. “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it
be with me according to your word.”
There is a popular
Christmas song that asks, “Mary, did you know?”
Mary, did you know that the child that you’ve delivered will soon
deliver you? Mary, did you know that
when you kiss your little baby, you’ve kissed the face of God? Mary, did you know that your baby boy is the
Lord of all creation? Mary, did you know
that your baby boy is heaven’s perfect Lamb; this sleeping child you’re holding
is the great I AM? Our reading today
answers these questions. Mary knew. Not only did Mary know, but she agreed for it
all to happen.
This year, there has
been a lot of discussion about this story and how it relates to the current
revelations of sexual abuse by so many people in power, and the #metoo stories
that are being shared. People are asking
if this story should be treated as Mary’s #metoo moment. There is something to consider in this
perspective. After all, in the encounter
between Mary and the angel Gabriel, Gabriel has the power and Mary is in the
much more vulnerable position – not only is she a female living on the margins
of society, but she is a human compared to her angelic visitor. Could Mary have given full and informed
consent to what was about to happen to her body?
I choose to answer
this question by looking for what isn’t in the story – for the details that we
aren’t told. We aren’t told whether Mary
was the first young woman approached by the angel Gabriel. Maybe she was just the first young woman who
said “yes” – who gave consent for her body to be the home of God’s Word Made
Flesh. I can’t imagine that the
God-Who-Is-Love would allow any woman’s body to be used without her consent.
And this then leads me
to wonder more about Mary. She said
“yes” when God asked her, and she became the human parent of Jesus. I wonder how Jesus would have been different
if a different woman had said yes, if his human DNA had come from a different
woman, if he had been raised in a different family.
But it was Mary who
said “yes” when God asked. It was Mary
who said, “Let it be with me according to your word.” Mary allowed her body, her very self, to be
transformed by the workings of the Holy Spirit.
And shortly after
that, we see what God is working in Mary when she visits her relative
Elizabeth. The Holy Spirit has not only
created a foetus within Mary’s body where there should, by all logical
reasoning, be no foetus, but the Holy Spirit has also given Mary the voice of a
prophet. She visits her relative
Elizabeth, and when she is there, she sings the words of her Magnificat that we
read responsively this morning – Mary’s words of praise to God, and her vision
of what God’s world will be. Mary sings
out:
“My soul magnifies the Lord
and my spirit rejoices
in God my Saviour,
for he has looked with favour on the
lowliness of his servant.
Surely, from now on all generations
will call me blessed;
for the Mighty One has done great
things for me,
and holy is his name.
His mercy is for those who fear him
from generation to
generation.
He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the
proud in the
thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful
from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good
things,
and sent the rich away
empty.
He has helped his servant Israel,
in remembrance of his
mercy,
according to the promise he made to
our ancestors,
to Abraham and to his
descendants forever.
Mary’s question, “how
can this be?” has been transformed into “My soul magnifies the Lord!”
This is a very
revolutionary song that Mary sings. When
you look at pictures of Mary on Christmas cards, or when she appears in the
Christmas carols that we sing, she is often pictured as “meek and mild”; but
not only did she have the courage to say “yes” to God, she also sings this song
that is anything but meek and mild. Mary
sings about the powerful being brought down from their thrones, the
marginalized being lifted up, the hungry being fed, and the rich being sent
away hungry.
Does this sound like
the teaching of anyone else in the bible?
Mary here sounds an awful lot like what Jesus is going to sound like 30-some-odd
years later. Jesus who taught that the
last shall be first and the first shall be last. Jesus who taught that the way we behave
towards those on the margins of society is the way we treat Jesus himself. Jesus who gave food to all who were hungry,
healing to all who were ill, peace to all who were troubled. I wonder how much of his message Jesus
learned from his mother’s teaching?
How might Mary’s song
be heard in the world of 2017? We are
living in a world today where a small group of people and corporations are
becoming more powerful, and more and more people are getting pushed to the
margins. Imagine for a minute, what the
world might look like if the powerful were brought down from their thrones and the
marginalized were lifted up; if food was distributed so that everyone had
enough and no one was hungry and no one wasted the excess. Who might be brought down from their thrones,
and who might be lifted up? Now imagine
the same thing happening here in our town of Chetwynd. Who is having their power taken away, and who
is being lifted up? Who are the hungry
who are now being fed?
Did you notice the
verb tense that Mary uses in her song?
She sings her song as if these things have already happened. God has brought down the powerful. God has lifted up the lowly. God has filled the hungry with good
things. God has sent the rich away
empty.
But if you look at the
world that Mary was living in, it would be obvious that these things haven’t
happened yet. The emperor in Rome was
still in charge, still governing through fear and oppression. There were still a small number of elite and
a large number of people living in poverty.
This vision of God’s kingdom hadn’t happened yet. And if we look around our world today, it is
obvious that the things that Mary sings about haven’t yet come to be. We still have people in our world who want to
claim the throne of the empire and govern the world through fear and
oppression. We still have a small number
of elite and a growing number of people living in poverty, both here in Canada
and on a global scale.
You can remember
things that have happened in the past; but is it possible to remember things
that will happen in the future? Are any
of you fans of science fiction or time travel books and movies? I think that there might be a loose
comparison there for Mary’s verb tense issues.
Picture a character in a book or a movie who travels back in time by two
hundred years. This character can
remember things that happened to her in her childhood, even though they aren’t
going to happen for almost 200 years.
She is remembering things in the future.
Now I’m not saying
that Mary has been time traveling, but she does seem to be remembering forward. She is seeing the world from God’s perspective
– from a perspective outside of time where all times are seen simultaneously. She, with her prophetic voice, notices what is
wrong in the world that she is living in, and compares them with God’s vision
for the world. She sees clearly what God
wants for the world, she trusts that this vision is going to be realized, and
she speaks as though it has already happened.
And our time travel, verb-tense-shifting
becomes even more fun when you consider that God’s vision for the world had
already begun at that point in time. As
Mary proclaims these words, she is already carrying within her a foetus that
would be Jesus Christ, fully God and fully human.
One of the titles
sometimes given to Mary is the Greek word, “Theotokos,”
meaning “God-bearer” or “She-who-gives-birth-to-God.” Mary is carrying God within her body, and in
a few short months, she is going to give birth to God in the messiness of hay
and amniotic fluid. She is going to
raise God-in-human-form in her family in a remote village in a remote province.
I believe that this is
the start of the overthrowing of the power structures of the world that Mary
sings about. God has chosen someone from
the very margins of society, someone with no power, to be the temple, the home
of God – the body of a woman, from a poor family, in a geographically remote
location. For 9 months, the same God who
created the heavens and the earth is going to rest within the body of a
marginalized woman, and then throughout his childhood this same God is going to
be nurtured by this same woman.
God has
started to lift up the lowly.
God’s work is not done
yet. Mary sings as though she is
remembering forward. There will come a
time when God’s work is done and we will be able to remember its completion in
the past. But we’re not there yet. We are still waiting.
Mary’s “yes” to God
transformed her body and gave her the voice of a prophet. Mary sang a song about God’s topsy-turvy
kingdom where the power structures are not only reversed but are completely
destroyed – Mary sang as though this topsy-turvy kingdom was already here. And indeed, that upside-down kingdom where
the powerless and marginalized are raised up began when Mary said “yes” to God.
And so I ask you to
consider – just as God called Mary to a specific task in God’s overall kingdom,
God calls each of us to a specific task or vocation. How can you say “yes” to what God is calling
you to? How will our “yes” fit into
God’s vision for the world, where the powerful are brought down from their
thrones and the marginalized and powerless are raised up? How can we individually, and we as a group
say “yes” to God?
Just as Mary’s body
was home to God for nine months, our bodies are the home of the Holy
Spirit. God dwells within us too. How are we allowing ourselves to be
transformed, as Mary was transformed?
Let us pray:
Holy God,
send your Holy Spirit to us.
Give us the courage to
say “yes”
when you call to us,
so that we might be
transformed
into who and
what you call us to be.
Help us to sustain our
trust and our confidence
that the world that Mary sang about
is coming,
and that some day,
your kingdom
will come
and
we will be fully and forever
in
your presence.
All of this we ask in
the name of the one
who was carried in Mary’s body.
Amen.
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