Fierce and Joyous (Advent 3A)

Yolanda Lopez, Portrait of the Artist as the Virgin of Guadalupe

 

Fierce and Joyous
Isaiah 35:1-10; James 5:7-10; Matthew 11:2-11; Canticle 15
Third Sunday of Advent (Year A)
Homily delivered at Trinity Parish Ashland (Oregon)
15th December 2013: 8:00 a.m. Said, 10:00 a.m. Sung 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 is Gaudete Sunday, “Rejoice Sunday,” when the priest wears rose and we begin to settle into the joy of our rapidly approaching redemption.   Joy is what our faith is all about.   God is crazy about you and me, and that makes all the difference.  The faith we have in God taking on everything it means to be human in the conception and birth of Jesus is at heart a message of “gladness, of great joy.”  It seems at times to be too good to be true, yet even so, the angels simply had to break into song that night.  Joyous song. 

Today’s Gospel reading hints at the underlying message of joy at the coming of the Lord.  St. John the Baptist sends a message from prison to Jesus and asks bluntly, “are you the one who is to come?”  Jesus’ reply is a message of joy, not of condemnation or judgment:  “the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the poor have the good news brought to them,” and you ask me am I the one who is to come?  “Blessed is the one who takes no offense at me.” 

This last phrase is curious:  it uses the verb skandalizethsai, “allow oneself to get tripped up, hit a stumbling block, to be scandalized.”   In modern parlance, it means, “happy are you if you don’t let me annoy or anger you.”

If you take offense at Jesus, or at any of the thin places in our lives where God and the unseen world is close, or any of the people who are working God’s blessings and will in our life, you stop seeing the good things, the blessings of God about you, and you stop rejoicing.   Dissatisfied with blessing, you cut yourself off from the fount of joy. 

But rejoicing and giving thanks is the opposite of this.  It opens our eyes further to the good things and people about us, and brings further joy:    “Happy are they who take no offense at me.” 

We sang a joyful Canticle today instead of a Psalm.  It is the Song of Praise on the lips of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Luke’s Gospel, the Magnificat.  The Lectionary gives us a choice to use it today because it is so joyful, and because it points forward to next week’s Sunday before Christmas, or Mary Sunday. 

Mary is a model for the joy and acceptance that connects us with God, Jesus, and all good. 

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.” 

He Qi, The Visitation

In the story, she conceives by the action of the Holy Spirit alone, and then 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 the Canticle: 

My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord,
my spirit rejoices in God my Savior;
    for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant.
From this day all generations will call me blessed:
    the Almighty has done great things for me, and holy is his Name.
He has mercy on those who fear him
    in every generation.
He has shown the strength of his arm,
    he has scattered the proud in their conceit.
He has cast down the mighty from their thrones,
    and has lifted up the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things,
    and the rich he has sent away empty.
He has come to the help of his servant Israel,
    for he has remembered his promise of mercy,
The promise he made to our fathers,
    to Abraham and his children for ever.

Note here that she trusts the angel’s word enough now to speak about the salvation of Israel’s poor as if it has already happened. 

Sara Miles has written the following about the Blessed Virgin,

“Mary, Mary, Mary. Gentle virgin, meek and mild. For centuries, the church has tried to portray Mary as submissive, and thus paradigmatic for female lives on earth. The church has suggested, not subtly, that just as Mary turned over her will to God, so should women turn over their wills to God’s representatives on Earth: that is, to serving the church and its officials.

“This archetype of Mary glosses motherhood––the fiercest, most powerful and passionate occupation known to humans––with sentimentality. It bathes a revolutionary risk-taker with the glow of goodness and docility. It twists Mary’s obedience to God into the suggestion that the weak owe obedience to powerful humans: priests, husbands, masters, rulers.

“But … Mary sings a new song[, t]he Magnificat … It is, of course, profoundly unsettling news: Mary doesn’t need a man to have a baby. She isn’t going to follow worldly social norms. 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 of kings or family to step off the precipice into unprecedented experience. Her proclamation that God is at work in her body shows us, even before Jesus does, what it means to truly submit––not to the world but to God.”

This young Jewish girl, probably 13 or 14 at most, is unafraid to say yes to the new, the strange, not that she is submissive, meek and mild, but because 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. 

We don’t like the word submission in our culture.  Apart from its use to describe a sexual kink, the word is usually pejorative, describing the desperate act of a coerced person becoming a tool of the system or the Imperium.  It is about putting oneself at the mercy of the Powers That Be. 

We want independence, autonomy, and freedom.  Do your own thing; follow your bliss; to your own self be true.  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. 

Walter Wink describes what is at issue here, when he discusses how Jesus teaches and shows us to fight the Powers of Evil without violence. This is far from resignation to oppression, “passive aggressive” attitude, or even “passive resistance.”  It is an active engagement to undermine and subvert the institutions and culture of wrong and their manifestations in daily life.  Jesus’ “Third Way” is not simply giving up and allowing evil to have the ground, or stooping to the enemy’s level and fighting back with all the violent and coercive weapons in Evil’s quiver.  Rather, Jesus tells us to let our hearts be untroubled, confront the Powers, and don’t give up.   Turn the other cheek so that an arrogant abuser must slap with his palm rather than the back of his hand.  Go the second mile and force the Roman occupiers to violate their own regulations.  Puncture the propaganda of the religious authorities with images like whitened sepulchers, spawn of vipers.  Stand silent before Herod; question Pilate’s authority.  Accept death on a cross with prayers for your torturers. 

It all comes down to heart.  If we are picky and choosy, and peevish, 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, let Jesus or Mary become a stumbling block or scandal for us.   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 deeds needed for his reign to come.  May we not let surprises 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 joyous and fierce. 

In the name of God, Amen.