Not Meek, Not Mild (Advent 4B)

Not Meek, Not Mild
2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16; Canticle 15; Romans 16: 25-27; Luke 1: 26-38

Fourth Sunday of Advent (Year B)
Homily delivered at Trinity Parish Ashland (Oregon)
21th December 2014: 8:00 a.m. Said Eucharist

The Rev. Fr. Anthony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

God, give us hearts to feel and love,

Take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

It is fourth Advent, Mary Sunday.  We are close enough to the holidays that some of us begin to feel overwhelmed, or down because we miss those we love who are no longer with us.  Or we are just lonely. 

It is important to see in today’s stories about Mary this:  she did not get what she expected.  She did not get the best deal at all.  But because of the hope in God she has, she accepts God’s wild and unexpected plan.  At least she says she’s hoping that it turns out the way the angel says it will. 

There is a wonderful poem about Mary:   

First Miracle

Her body like a pomegranate torn
Wide open, somehow bears what must be born,

The irony where a stranger small enough
To bed down in the ox-tongue-polished trough

Erupts into the world and breaks the spell
Of the ancient, numbered hours with his yell.

Now her breasts ache and weep and soak her shirt
Whenever she hears his hunger or his hurt;

She can't change water into wine; instead
She fashions sweet milk out of her own blood.

[A. E. Stallings in Poetry January 2012 p.298]

God is crazy about you and me.  He made us, redeems us, and sustains us.   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: an angel from the presence of God, comes to a thirteen year old Jewish girl art her prayers and says God is going to act in a definitive, unalterable way, a surprising way, one that will bring all happiness and joy.

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, in response to this annunciation. This is why we call today Mary Sunday. 

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

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, 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.  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. 

It is important to see what this story is not saying.  One—it is not saying that human sexuality is corrupt and that thus only a virgin could bear the One from God.  That would be a form of saying that Jesus was not fully human.  Mary here is seen as humanly self-sufficient: she does not need a man to fill her calling as mother.  Two—it is not saying that Mary is a model of subjected women who need to know their place.  The idea of gentle virgin, meek and mild is not in this story.  Mary here is fierce, joyous, and submits to God in thankful relief and wonder, not in timorous and abject humiliation.

This young Jewish girl 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. 

Mary’s submission is not to the system, to the hierarchs, the powers.  It is, rather, to the Unseen Love that drives the world.  It is joyous, and it is fierce.  She is joyous and she is fierce.  Not meek and mild. 

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, Mother of God, 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.