The Fourth Sunday of Advent, December 20th, 2009
The Rev. Dr. Katharine C. Black, preaching
Micah 5: 2-5a
The Magnificat - Luke 1: 46-55
Hebrews 10: 5-10
Luke 1: 39-55
This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it. AMEN.
While Advent 3 is always John the Baptist's Day, 4 Advent is always our Lady's. That makes sense: get to know someone's mother before her child is born, introduced, and welcomed.
Supposing, as was quoted in some preaching materials I read, Mary had said, "If Gabriel had come to visit me, I'd tell him 'OK, but you're the one who has to tell my parents.'" There is something to that simple, teenager's, ironic way to look at Mary's story. She is young, willing, good, and hears God. She responds with her whole being, yet from our vantage point she did get into trouble. She got pregnant and her society and times weren't much more forgiving than ours. More than that, she followed her son as he wandered and preached, outside the bounds of her time's practices. She was left sorrowing, at the feet of her crucified son, left to be looked after by one of his friends. Gabriel didn't spell out the rest of the story for her, and her story is never simple.
Instead, though, hear her hymn, this greatest Christmas Carol ever written. First she praises God and acknowledges God's saving gift to her. She gives thanks for God's mercy and God's strength. She praises God for scattering the proud and casting down the mighty from their positions of power, importance, and security from danger. God has praised the weak and lifted up the lowest of the low. He has seen Mary up close, and done great things for her. He has come to the help of his servant Israel, in remembering the promise of mercy, the one God made to our forebears, Abraham and his offspring, the promise to be merciful forever. Sung or said, translated formally or paraphrased, Mary's song praises and glorifies God, because of God's choosing and because of her baby.
The beginning of this song, "my soul magnifies the Lord," has a rhetorical largeness. She is not saying that she makes God bigger, not magnifying the Lord, in that way, but in her person saying "yes" to God and doing God's will, she makes clear and visible an aspect of the enormity of God's love and work. In examining Mary and her service closely, it is possible to extrapolate somewhat to the enormity of God's work. Looking closely at Mary doesn't make her large, but in contrast both shows clearly and precisely an aspect of God in action, while it also indicates or suggests how infinite must be God and God's works.
She describes God's work to be unexpected for anyone who is ruling, being powerful. She says that God's power lifts up the poor, and feeds the hungry with good things, like food and hope. God pushes aside the rich. God sides with the weak, not the strong. God is faithful, and not quixotic in God's power. God sticks to promises, in ways the powerful have not been expected to have to be faithful. Even with Romans occupying Israel, God is and will be faithful to God's promises to Israel forever.
This hymn of praise shows or sounds that God overturns the power structure. This dramatic message is said in such a poetic way that its radical strike for justice as well as mercy sounds acceptable as a simple hymn of praise. Instead Mary names God's work as an overturning the predictable and valuing the small. When her son grows up and says that God blesses the poor in spirit, for theirs is the reign of God, and the hungry, who'll be fed, and the sorrowing, who'll be comforted and more, it might be possible to imagine who taught him those truths. When Jesus named a list of those whom God blesses, he was repeating his understanding of those whom Mary had said already said God blesses. Jesus had grown up learning from his mother, and understood praising God as she praised God. Parents do teach their children, so Mary's song of praise is also a preview of what Jesus will learn, know, and do. In Mary's voice these radical ideas about overturning power structures and providing justice and mercy for the least of God's people was uttered in a hymn of praise. Jesus learned and preached them widely and publicly. From Mary to Jesus, from Jesus to the present, these ideas continue to call to for justice and peace, as well as being a guarantee of God's promise to achieve those ideals.
Mary said that God's work was this overturning power and working in behalf of the weak, but she said it to her cousin in a confined and private setting. Jesus shouts the same call to action publically and throughout an occupied Israel. Mary is seen as pious and quiet, while Jesus is known to be one who challenges the existing order, threatening to overturn it. When Jonathan Daniels heard Mary's song and grafted it into his person, he changed from being just a person studying for ministry, into a freedom marcher, a civil rights worker, and a radical Christian. Jumping into a bullet to protect young Ruby Sales was his action-way of lifting up the lowly. For a Christmas carol to so radicalize a person then or now continues to be the power in Mary's song.
We also hear Mary's song as a personal claim to say Yes to God, even as the person each of us is. When each of us tries to do God's work, or say Yes to God, we are claiming that God is saying Yes to us, just as we are. We are each big enough to fulfill God's promise in work, in person, in our lives. Here's a light-hearted version of this idea sent around this Advent season by Weston Jesuit's Dean.
God Says Yes To Me by Kaylin Haught
I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic
and she said yes
I asked her if it was okay to be short
and she said it sure is
I asked her if I could wear nail polish
or not wear nail polish
and she said honey
she calls me that sometimes
she said you can do just exactly
what you want to
Thanks God I said
And is it even okay if I don't paragraph
my letters
Sweetheart God said
who knows where she picked that up
what I'm telling you is
Yes Yes Yes
From The Palm of your Hand, 1995, Tilbury House Publications
Mary is the model for each of us to say Yes to God. We often think of her as solitary and quiet, but it is she who sings out God's praises while she is describing a way to upsidedown the social order. Even when she is seen as a statue in a church, here or elsewhere, the statue is the place most likely to have someone nearby, talking to and praying to and with her-not solitary. More than a model, she is often a companion and a comforter too. Remember the old image of her leaning over the gates of Heaven with her long hair being used as a ladder or scrambling net to get up to Heaven around or over the gates. Protestant churches and many Christian feminists often either ignore Mary or feel awkward about her, as her being "too Catholic" or too "docile." Of all the people in the Gospel stories she is the most durable, lyric, and present. She has the most difficult role, because she alone knows the truth of the mystery of the birth, and is the most likely to understand from that initial moment with Gabriel that her life with Jesus would be puzzling and hard. She travels with her son and is there even at his death, and keeps on traveling with his friends. She does not retire to a place of mourning, but continues to proclaim the greatness of the Lord, and the wonders of her son. She is closest to the glory of her son.
Here's a 14th C collect from the Mirror of Our Lady, articulating the grace of eternal joy, she offers us: Lord God, we beseech thee grant us thy servants to joy in perpetual health of soul and body and by the prayer of blessed Mary always Virgin, to be delivered from this present heaviness, and perfectly be filled with endless gladness, through thy son our Lord, Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns, God with thee, in unity of the Holy Ghost, without end.
Mary has inspired more art than other figures in the accounts of Jesus. She continues to lead people not only to her son, but also to a dialogue with God, and God's promise of justice. She leads us both through her story, actions, and words, but also through the myriad of artists' work with and through which we can understand more of her mission. For many of us, it is far easier or more accessible to talk to Mary, than her fierce, bloodied son. We share her question of "How can this be?" about so much her son and his life. We trust that as she questioned, listened, and kept on keeping on, in light of her son and his mysteries, we can too. If God trusted her as a young, weak, woman, God may well ask something of each of us too. If her work to do as God asked was acceptable, ours might be too. If God's workers were all powerful leaders, many of us would never feel we could qualify as such a worker, but Mary says God lifts up the lowly, freeing us to give that work a try.
Even in the paintings and other representations Mary spans broad inclusiveness. Early paintings had her in dark red, while later artists chose pious or workers' blues. She is seen in the colors of celebration but also of martyrdom. There is a whole pilgrim trail of beautiful simple black madonnas, and every culture pictures Mary as one of their own, either as a girl or adult woman, but one looking just like one of their own, while Jesus stays more symbolically portrayed in a pretty consistent looking image. As God invited Mary to serve God and the whole world, so Mary extends that invitation and possibility to us for close conversation with the Holy One. While we cannot produce the living Christ in person, we can incarnate with Mary to do his work, to serve his people, to feel God's trust and hope, to be God's hands and feet, eyes and ears, mind and heart in the world. Mary shows us the way: listen, ponder, trust, and act just as we are for all God's people for justice and mercy. Even when that path's work gets tough, the closeness to Jesus is life lasting, God with us. She shows us that way, and it's Good News.
~ Katharine C. Black 20 December 2009
