Mary said, “With all my heart I glorify the Lord! 47 In the depths of who I am I rejoice in God my savior. 48 He has looked with favor on the low status of his servant. Look! From now on, everyone will consider me highly favored 49 because the mighty one has done great things for me. Holy is his name. 50 He shows mercy to everyone, from one generation to the next, who honors him as God. 51 He has shown strength with his arm. He has scattered those with arrogant thoughts and proud inclinations. 52 He has pulled the powerful down from their thrones and lifted up the lowly. 53 He has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty-handed. 54 He has come to the aid of his servant Israel, remembering his mercy, 55 just as he promised to our ancestors, to Abraham and to Abraham’s descendants forever.” (Common English Bible)
“The Nativity Scene:
Still Life Comes Alive in Advent,” Week Four
The
image is one that we might see fairly commonly—something you may well have seen
yourself recently. A young couple—he in
work clothes, winter coat, and baseball hat, she in jeans, hoodie, and
toboggan—are outside store trying to use a pay phone. She is also pregnant.
But
you begin to pick up on things—the inn across the street is called “Dave’s City
Inn.” The storefront has advertisements
for “Star Beer” and “Good News” candy.
The aforementioned inn’s no vacancy light is on, and its movable type
marquee is advertising its “new man ger,” as though it was supposed to say “new
manager,” but the removal of that second “a” created an entirely different word
altogether. And the pregnant teenage
girl? Her hoodie says “Nazareth High
School.”
As
you may have surmised by now, this young couple are meant to be Joseph and
Mary—“Jose y Maria” is in fact the title of the piece by artist EverettPatterson, which he drew last December but has gone viral this December as an
image of what the Holy Family might look like today.
And
in Mary—Maria’s—expression, there is a veneer of worry or apprehension, but
there is also a steely determination that she will get through this…and that
comes from a place of genuine courage that we will be talking about today as we
wrap up our Advent sermon series.
This
has been a sermon series for the church season of Advent, what we colloquially
think of as the “Christmas season,” but in fact the Christmas season in the
church traditionally refers to Christmas Day and the eleven days afterwards
between it and the Epiphany—the day the Magi arrive in Matthew 2 to worship the
newborn Jesus and present Him with the gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Advent, rather, is much like the pre-Easter
season of Lent in that it is meant to be a season of preparation—of preparing
for the death and resurrection in the case of Lent, and preparing for the birth
(“preparing the way for the Lord, (to) make His paths straight,” as John the
Baptist puts it, by quoting the Old Testament prophets) in the case of Advent.
This
Advent season, did this by going one by one through the figures in the nativity
scenes that we all know and love—the setting of Jesus in the manger surrounded
by His earthly parents, Mary and Joseph, as well as the shepherds and the
angels who herald His birth. We began
with the angels, then we moved on to the shepherds, in their role as the first
human heralds of Christ’s birth, and we heard from the adult Jesus in John 10
on the role a good shepherd must embrace.
Last
week we begin talking about Jesus’s earthly parents, beginning today with
Joseph before wrapping up the series next week (already?!) with Mary. While Matthew’s Gospel focuses on Joseph in
telling the Christmas story, Luke’s Gospel focuses on Mary, and that is where
we arrive today, and specifically, on the song that Mary sings after both the
archangel Gabriel and her cousin Elizabeth have spoken to her to confirm that
the child she is carrying in her womb is indeed the Messiah.
In
response, Mary sings what we now know as the Magnificat, so named because of
the song’s first line: My soul magnifies the Lord. It is a song that echoes the song of the
prophet Samuel’s mother Hannah in 1 Samuel 2, after she gives birth to the
future prophet and judge over all of Israel.
I have to think that Mary chooses this song on purpose because she knows
exactly what she is up against.
Consider that childbirth in Biblical days was at best a coin flip,
and at worst a death sentence. Consider that an unwed mother was shunned in the
society of the Ancient Near East so badly that even if she survived childbirth,
she was likely to die from lack of shelter. Gabriel has not inspired Mary with
a divine charge so much as he has assigned her upon a suicide mission, and her
response is not to curl up in fear, or to react in anger to God’s messenger,
but to praise God again and again.
And in the midst of this praise, she utters this often
misinterpreted line—“for He has looked in favor upon the lowliness of His
servant.” It would be a mistake to simply believe that Mary is referring to
humbleness, or modesty, or meekness when she is speaking of being lowly, for
the Greek is fairly clear—she is talking about societal lowliness, about
cultural lowliness. In other words—she knows. She knows that in carrying God’s
only Son, she will, on the surface, at least for a time, fail to outwardly live
up to the demands of respectability and honor that her world demands of her.
She knows what is at stake, and she sings anyways. She sings of God’s promises
and blessings for those as lowly as her, and in doing so, she gives words and
voice to anyone and everyone who longs for a better world, for their deepest
desires, their most heartfelt wants and needs, are being sung in the voice of a
teenaged girl.
One of my favorite Christmas songs used to be the song “Mary Did
You Know?” Now, it really is a beautiful song, but one that, over the course of
writing this sermon, I realized was asking the wrong question. Because just as
Mary knows the risks of what she is about to do, she also knows the great joys
that will come from what she is called to. It’s right there, in her
Magnificat—blessed be the Lord who has done mighty deeds, who lifts up the
humble, who feeds the hungry. She knows!
Which makes the whole song just come across like one big mansplain
to the Mother of God about what it is she really has already knowingly and
decisively signed up for:
“Mary, did you know that your baby boy would one day walk on
water?”
“Yep.”
“Mary, did you know that your baby boy would save our sons and
daughters?”
“Sure did.”
“Mary, did you know…”
“YES, I KNEW, AN ANGEL LITERALLY TOLD ME SO.”
It’s a perfectly nice song, but it really should have been shorter
than a 15-second commercial:
“Mary, did you know that your baby boy would give sight to a blind
man?”
“Yes.”
And scene.
It may sound unduly harsh of me, parsing a perfectly well-meaning,
perfectly lovely Christmas song like this, but I think it diminishes the sheer
courage with which Mary knowingly said “yes” to God.
It doesn’t really do justice to the person Mary was, and that who
she was, well, it was why God had chosen her to begin with: because she was and
would always be the woman to stare the hardships she faced dead-on with a
courage that we ourselves may honestly scarcely know, because courage is not
the absence of fear or apprehension, it is plunging forward in spite of, or
acknowledging, that fear and apprehension.
That is why I love this portrait of Mary as a Maria by Everett
Patterson—to me, it so masterfully and poignantly combines both, the fear and
the bravery, the apprehension and the courage, and the steadfastness amid being
forced to travel while eight or nine months pregnant to still see through that
which she had been called to do by God.
She knows what will happen, and she knows why it must happen.
So…yes, Mary knows that her son will save all humanity, because
she knows that there is no redemption without grace, no arrival without the
journey, no action by God without a reaction from the world, and no love, no
true love, without any risk.
Because it is a simple matter to love your family, and your
friends, and your neighbors. It is an entirely different calling to actually
love the rest, to love a Joseph and a Mary who look like a Jose and a Maria, to
love a Syrian refugee, to love a shelterless addict, to love, dare I say, the
real versions of ourselves that we see in others, not the idealized versions of
ourselves that we think we are.
In that same way, Mary is the real deal, the genuine article, not
the varnished, marbleized lady we may make her.
She is still human, so her praise and her hope comes from a God who
proffers a genuine reversal of circumstances—not just an uplifting of the
humble like her, but also a humbling of the proud who would otherwise live to
keep her down because she is a woman, because she is an Israelite, because she
is who they could never hope to be—a genuinely radical vessel of God’s love.
This Magnificat, when you think about it coming from a young,
young girl, is a song not simply of tribute for past deeds, but of anticipation
of even greater works to come. Even in the days of the Bible, God did His
wonders through men and women, through Moses, and Elijah, and Mary.
Now, God relies upon us to do His wonders. So let us go forth and do those wonders in
God’s name. Because we too know that we
must. We know, as Mary did.
Mary, did you know? Yes,
she did. She absolutely, positively did.
We’re down to just five days left.
Stay devoted, friends.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
December
20, 2015
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