Fourth of Advent (Year C)
Homily delivered at Trinity Parish Ashland (Oregon)
20th December 2015: 8:00 a.m. Said Eucharist
Homily delivered at Trinity Parish Ashland (Oregon)
20th December 2015: 8:00 a.m. Said Eucharist
The Rev. Dr. Anthony Hutchinson, SCP
God, give us hearts to feel and love,
Take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh.
Amen.
Today, the fourth Sunday of Advent
and the Last Sunday before Christmas, is Mary Sunday. The Lectionary Readings are about the Incarnation
of our Lord, and in these stories, Mary plays a leading role.
The early undivided Church taught
that how we talk about and relate to Mary is part of how we talk about and
relate to the person of Jesus Christ. All who desire to follow in the tradition
and fellowship of the early bishops, successors to the apostles, should take
note. The Councils of Ephesus (431 C.E.)
and Calcedon (451 C.E.) in the early fifth century both recommended referring
to the Mother of Jesus as the Theotokos,
“the one who gave birth to the one who is God,” that is, the One who gave birth
to God Made Flesh.
They defined this in reaction to a
minority group of bishops who felt it was wrong to call Mary the
God-bearer. They preferred to call her
the Christ-bearer, arguing that God is eternal, outside of time and space,
without parent or origin. But the vast
majority of the bishops determined that understanding Mary as the Mother just
of a human part of Jesus rather than
of his whole being and person profoundly misunderstood the nature of Christ. Jesus was not a 50%-50% hybrid of Divinity
and Humanity, but was both 100% human and 100% God. Because these two natures
were perfectly united in the one person of Jesus, it was only right that Mary
be referred to not only as Mother of the Man Jesus, but also as Mother of God
Incarnate. The defeated bishops separated themselves from the main body of
Church, ultimately fled the territory of the Roman Empire and went East. Missionaries from the Great Church of the
East they founded were those who took the Gospel to Persia, India, and
ultimately, China, in the fifth through the seventh centuries.
But the main body of the Church
remained firm in its worship of a Jesus who was both truly God and truly human,
and devotion to a Mary who was the one who bore God. As a result, Roman Catholic, Eastern
Orthodox, Old Catholic, Eastern Uniate, Lutheran, and Anglican traditions all
retain the usage of the term “Mother of God,” or “God-bearer.”
Such devotion is rooted in scripture: the Gospel of John portrays Jesus on the cross giving charge of his mother to the ideal disciple, saying he is her child and she is his mother. Most of the words of the great Marian devotional prayer of the West, the Ave Maria, come from the New Testament, most of them from the infancy story in the Gospel of Luke.
Such devotion is rooted in scripture: the Gospel of John portrays Jesus on the cross giving charge of his mother to the ideal disciple, saying he is her child and she is his mother. Most of the words of the great Marian devotional prayer of the West, the Ave Maria, come from the New Testament, most of them from the infancy story in the Gospel of Luke.
In the Lucan story, the Angel
Gabriel greets her with the words, “Hail Mary, full of Grace, the Lord is with
you.” He declares to her she will become
pregnant with a holy child who will bring about the great setting of things
straight hoped for by Israel’s prophets.
She asks how this can possibly be, since she has never been with a
man. She obviously knows as well as we
do about the birds and bees. The angel
replies that it will be a pregnancy without any man involved—God’s power alone
will do. Despite the dubious credibility
of such an announcement and all the trouble such a pregnancy obviously will
entail, Mary focuses on what the angel says this baby will be and do. So she accepts the angel’s saying, replying
“Behold the Lord’s handmaid, may it happen to me just as you have said.”
In the story, she conceives by the action
of the Holy Spirit alone. Then what we read in the Gospel today: she hurries
off to visit her cousin Elizabeth, who the angel had told her was also
pregnant, similarly in decidedly odd circumstances, given her previous
sterility and advanced age. After the
baby leaps in Elizabeth’s womb for joy at the sight of Mary, Elizabeth says to
her, “Blessed are you among women and blessed is the child in your womb,” Mary
then replies with what we recited instead of a psalm today: the great Canticle of fierce joy and hope,
the Magnificat, where she trusts the angel’s word enough now to speak about the
salvation of Israel’s poor as if it has already happened.
Mary here is not meek and mild. She is not submissive to anyone but the God
who beckons her. She doesn’t need a man
to have a baby. She doesn’t follow what
society expects of her. In fact, she prophesies the overturning of the whole
social order, proclaiming that the lowly will be lifted up, the rich turned
away empty. She doesn’t ask permission.
This young Jewish girl, probably 13
or 14 at most, is unafraid to say yes to the new, the strange. She is open to the wildness of a God who does
surprising acts. She is willing to
offer herself, her body, her reputation, her life, to see through the wonderful
things God has in store, whatever they may be.
Submission in
our culture has bad, bad overtones: victim, doormat, tool.
Mary’s submission is not that. It is not to the system, but to the Unseen
Love that drives the world. It is
joyous, and it is fierce. She is joyous and she is fierce.
It all comes down to heart. If we insist that God do things the way we want or that we find comfortable, we do not, with Mary, sing “my soul proclaims
the Greatness of God!” We sing bitterly,
“I did it my way.” We take offense at this or that, even at Jesus or Mary. Farewell to the fierce joy of following a
living God, a God of surprise, of wildness.
The prophet Mary stands before us, with her fierce and joyful
song, her example of putting everything on the line for the love of God and
Good. Blessed among women, she says “yes,”
“yes,” “yes,” to God, before even knowing what God has in mind.
“All generations will call me
blessed,” Mary sings, but what a harsh blessedness! Joyous moments, to be sure, but also a life
involving fierce pain, humiliation, terror, and the bitter loss of her
child.
But the joyous truth behind “all
generations will call me blessed” is even greater than she suspects: resurrection on the third day, a recognition
that Christ was fully God in fully human form, and that this young Jewish girl
was in fact the means of God’s incarnation, the Theotokos, the God-bearer, the
Mother of God.
The Magnificat is a song of
fierce joy, of shared blessing and our common lot. Yet its words hint at the passion of Jesus,
in both senses, foreshadowing Jesus’s commitment and his sufferings. Mary empties herself as Christ empties
himself when he says, “Now my soul is in
turmoil, and what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it was for
this very reason I came to this hour. Father, glorify your name! (John 12:27-28). Jesus’ emptying himself is not a
hierarchical obedience but a total surrender, one coming from his deepest
heart’s passion. It expresses who he
his, both God and human being. And he
learned such passion, such fierce joy, from his Mother.
Sisters and brothers, this week let
us pray, like the Blessed Virgin Mary, the God-bearer, to accept the wild and
surprising spirit of God in our hearts and very bodies. Let us accept God’s blessings, whatever they may
be, and have God lead us to the surprising deeds needed for his reign to
come. May we not let new things or the
unexpected trip us up. Let us share, in
our actions and in our words, the glories and beauty of a God who turns the
world on its head, who has done wonderful things for us, and never forgets his
promise of mercy. Let us be like our sister Mary, Mother of God, joyous and
fierce, bearing God in our lives.
In the name of God, Amen.
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