Our Lady (Advent 4C)

Our Lady
Micah 5:2-5a; Hebrews 10:5-10; Luke 1:39-45; Canticle 15

Fourth of Advent (Year C)
Homily delivered at Trinity Parish Ashland (Oregon)
23rd December 2018: 8:00 a.m. Said, 10:00 Sung Mass

The Very 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.

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 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.” 

So 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.   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 … 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.  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.

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 in or 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 about limits on abusing the local populations.  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 even 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. 

 

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: not a hierarchical obedience but a total surrender, one coming from the deepest heart’s passion.  Jesus learned such passion, such fierce joy, from his Mother. And as she stood at his cross, he put her under the care of the Beloved Disciple, and the Beloved Disciple under her care: “Behold your child! Behold your Mother!”   This is why many of us call her our Lady, just as we call him our Lord. 

Sisters and brothers, this week let us pray, like the Blessed Virgin Mary, the God-bearer, Mother of God and of all beloved disciples, 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 share in this fierce joy, and let our souls, along with our Lady, magnify the Lord with joy.

In the name of God, Amen.