24 December 2017

"Mary's 'Yes'" (Sermon for Advent 4)


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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