Why the Virgin Mary matters...

NOTE:  Here are my worship notes for the Fourth Sunday of Advent: December 18th. It builds on last week's conversation about why John the Baptist matters and is indebted to Luther Pearce, Karoline Lewis and Stanley Hawerwas.

Today I want to give the Virgin Mary – the mother of our Lord Jesus Christ – as much space and freedom to be her full self as I possibly can – and that’s going to take some real effort and commitment from all of us.  You see, only a few of us have grown up knowing Mary as the Theotokos – the Mother of God – as she is named in the mystical Eastern Orthodox tradition.

More of us, and I’m thinking mostly of those from the Roman Catholic world, are intimate with Mary through the Liturgy: how many here today know and still sometimes pray to her in the Hail Mary?

Hail Mary, full of grace, blessed art Thou among women and blessed is the fruit of Thy womb Jesus; Holy Mary, Mother of God, prayer for us sinners now and at the time of our death. Amen.

Clearly you know more about our Lady than the rest of us Prods, right?  After all, growing up in the Reformed realm of New England the only thing I was taught about Mary was that she had a few important lines in the Christmas story – essentially as a vessel through which Christ came into the world – and that our religion – the one and only true religion – didn’t pay her any more attention because we weren’t like those pagans down the street with all their smells and bells and graven images.  And I came of age after Vatican II and a new flowering of ecumenism in the 60s, right?

I’m not kidding: we Protestants were taught precious little about the Virgin Mary – and were proud and determined to keep it that way! It is as if our ignorance was some type of spiritual virtue, right?

So we have some work to do when it comes to the Virgin and what she has to share with us as Advent gives birth to Christmas.  And while I don’t have any illusions that we’ll be able to resolve all of the questions she raises today, I do hope to consider three key insights that matter to us as 21^st century people of faith, ok?

First, let me touch on what it means to be the favored one of the Lord:  why that is important for Mary and why it matters to each and all of us.

Second, let me suggest that Mary is to Christians what Abraham is to Jews: a model of fidelity and humility in the face of truly impossible realities.

And third let’s explore together how Mary’s story gives shape and form to what it means to wrestles with and question God’s grace before embracing it; what preacher Karoline Lewis calls the movement from denial to discipleship, ok?

And to do that I want to ask you to pray with me:  Lord of heaven and earth, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of each of our hearts be made acceptable to you through the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit as one God, now and always. Amen.

Now if we’re are going to let the story of the Virgin Mary speak to us today in all its power and wisdom – regardless of our theological heritage – God is going to have to break down some impressive barriers – especially when it comes to listening for and truly hearing the Sacred as it takes up residence in the words of the Scripture.

Old timers have heard these stories read over and over again – recent arrivals may not yet know why we even bother with so many Bible readings – and many of us in-between find our minds wandering to all the other things we need to accomplish to get ready for Christmas. There’s shopping to be done – fears about finances – children to cart here and there or loved ones to care for, right? There’s cleaning – and cooking – and work and worry: how in the world can we hear God’s call to us in Mary’s story that we are beloved and favored in the midst of all this clutter?

Well, about a hundred years ago, when I was first starting ministry, I got a clue in something that brother Eugene Peterson wrote concerning Psalm 40 and it keeps haunting me – especially now – in relation to Mary. He wrote that there is a brilliantly conceived metaphor that just might help us out when the Psalmist sings: “I waited patiently for the Lord who stooped and heard my cry.” This prayer/poem tells us that in patience not only did the Lord fill this soul with a new song – a song of praise that resonates with Mary’s radical obedience – but that by faith God has actually carved out a whole new set of ears in her head so that she can now actually hear the word of the Lord.

“It is puzzling,” Peterson writes, “that no translator renders the sentence into English just that way. They all prefer to paraphrase at this point, presenting the meaning adequately but losing the metaphor by saying: "thou hast given me an open ear” or even “you have given me ears to hear.” But to lose the metaphor of the text in this instance is not to be countenanced; the Hebrew verb is "dug."  Thou hast dug me new ears!”

It gets better as he continues saying: “Imagine a human head with no ears. A blockhead. Eyes, nose and mouth, but no ears. Where ears are usually found there is only a smooth, impenetrable surface, granitic bone. God speaks. No response.”  In Psalm 40:

This metaphor occurs in the context of a bustling religious activity deaf to the voice of God: "sacrifice and offering thou dost not desire…burnt offering and sin offering" (40:6). How did these people know about these offerings and how to make them? Well, they had read the prescriptions in Exodus and Leviticus and followed instructions. They had become religious. Their eyes read the words on the Torah page and rituals were formed. They had read the Scripture words accurately and gotten the ritual right. But how did it happen that they had missed the message "not required"? There must be something more involved than following directions for unblemished animals, a stone altar and a sacrificial fire. There is: God is speaking and must be listened to.

But what good is a speaking God without listening human ears? So God gets a pick and shovel and digs through the cranial granite, opening a passage that will give access to the interior depths, into the mind and heart. Or—maybe we are not to imagine a smooth expanse of skull but something like wells that have been stopped up with refuse: culture noise, throw-away gossip, garbage chatter. Our ears are so clogged that we cannot hear God speak. So God, like Isaac who dug again the wells that the Philistines had filled, redigs the ears trashed with our audio junk.

                             Working the Angels

Could it be that to hear the word of the Lord in the story of Mary, we’re not asked to turn off our minds or hearts – we can bring a 21^st century sensibility to the text with all our doubts – but we do have to shut down some of the clutter and flurry of this season? It is not coincidental, you know, that the ancient church fathers and mothers used to teach that the organ through which Mary conceived Jesus in the Spirit was the ear.

Our calling to cultivate the counter-cultural commitments of Advent – with its watching and waiting, its patient prayer and refusal to impose any expectation upon God – is one of the ways we allow the Lord to dig for us new ears to hear. “More and more,” writes Fr. Ron Rolheiser, “21^st century people are finding it more difficult to dwell in a universe inhabited by unseen presence of God… Our world has been reduced to what is physical, what can be measured, seen, touched, tasted and smelled. That means we’ve become mystically tone-deaf for all the goods that matter are in the shop window."

And because this is true – because we’re cluttered and hassled – overwhelmed and afraid – clogged-up with cultural garbage, emotional anxieties, economic insecurities and political madness until we can longer hear the word of the Lord – this is why the Virgin Mary matters to us: God notices her!

Think about that – God notices her and favors her and fills her with blessing – not because she is powerful or important. Not because she has yet earned her place in the pantheon of the saints. And certainly not because she has become a wise and learned teacher.

Who was Mary when the angel Gabriel visited her?  A teen age girl without pedigree – nobody special – nobody anyone in their right mind would have noticed – or favored – or blessed.

Hmmmmm… are with me here?  Are you beginning to sense why Mary matters to us? She shows us that God’s love is NOT earned or purchased – it is not conditioned by what we’ve accomplished or what we have already proven. God loves us… because God is love. How did old Jeremiah Wright, President Obama’s wild man preacher use to put it? “The Virgin Mary should make it clear to us all that the Lord can take a no body and turn her into a somebody who can tell anybody that everybody matters to the Lord our God.”

You matter – you are favored – you are the beloved of God because THAT is who God is amen!?!

That’s my first insight for today: the Virgin Mary matters to us because she is favored by the Lord our God just as she is – how does the old hymn put it – just as I am without one plea?!

The second insight about why the Virgin Mary matters to us comes from the theologian Stanley Hawerwas.  Our old friend, Luther Pierce, one of the finest Yankee preachers and men of faith I have known, wrote to me earlier this month from his new home in Florida after we confirmed that Amy-Jill Levine was going to be with us: “Some guys have all the luck!” he said. “Imagine getting Amy-Jill Levine on short notice. Congratulations. She is booked to come to the United Church of Gainesville in 2013 so I hope I'm still alive to see her in person. She is Judaism's great gift to Christianity.”

He went on to say: “I see you're preaching on Mary later on this month and I recently read Stanley Hawerwas' book, "Cross-Shattered Christ: Meditations on the Seven Last Words of Jesus." In recent years, I have tried to move away from the old Protestant prejudice about Mary… and Hawerwas helps when he equates her to Abraham for both replied to God:  Here I am, Lord.”

Once again my octogenarian mentor is light years ahead of me in his thinking and helped me go deeper because I’ve never really seen the connection between Mary and Abraham, have you? But it is clear:  Mary trusts what some have called the impossible possibility of the Lord just like Abraham. 

So in a popcorn fashion – real quick – without too much thinking: what do you remember about the story of Abraham and what this means for faith?  (He left his home without knowing where he was going to end up – he was an ancient man married to a barren woman that God promised a child – he trusted God when it came to the sacrifice of Isaac, etc.)

Can you see the parallel with the Virgin Mary? Hawerwas writes:  “Drawing disciples into the church, Mary shares her faith, making possible our faith... Mary, the new Eve, becomes for us the firstborn of a new reality, a new family that only God could create. (What’s more) when Christians repress the role of Mary in our salvation we are tempted to also forget that God remains faithful to his promises to his people the Jews. Our Savior was born of Mary, making us, like the Jews, a bodily people who live by faith in the One who asks us to behold his crucified body." 

Mary shows us in her flesh and blood what faith looks like – and this is the second insight for today.

And the third: Mary brings the totality of herself to God – all her questions and doubts along with her trust – and that ought to be good news for those of us with questions and doubts, too.  Sometimes the Holy Virgin is sentimentalized in piety and even the Bible can obscure the depth of her character.  Take, for example, what we read in today’s story about what happens after the angel Gabriel greets her with the words:  Hail, o favored one.”

The text tells us she was perplexed – she pondered what this meant in her heart – which is sometimes interpreted as Mary simply accepted what God dished out to her like a good little girl. “Trust and obey” as the old Baptist song puts it, “for there’s no other way.”

But that isn’t what is happening here: she is bewildered – completely knocked out by what is taking place – and can’t really make sense out of it. New Testament scholar, Karoline Lewis, puts it like this:  Mary has to acknowledge the impossible possibility of God.  Why me?

Why am I favored? How can the Lord be with me? After all, dhe knows her place. She knows who she is. And this should not be happening. She's a she, a teenager from the wrong side of the tracks. And then, to make matters worse, Gabriel tells her the big news that she's going to be pregnant with a son, but not just any son, the Son of the Most High, no less, from the lineage of David, with a never -- to -- end kingdom. OMG "How can this be?"

Do you grasp what’s going on?  Mary expresses and owns her incredulity: this is wacked – out of control – how can this be happening to me? I guess what I’m trying to say is that Mary isn’t automatically obedient and compliant, ok?  And if that is true for Mary – and Abraham – and Sarah and St. Paul and Luther Pierce and James Lumsden and Rick Floyd and so many, many others…

… can you see how this might be good news for you? In time – in trust – amidst all the questions and fears that didn’t go away even at the foot of the Cross – Mary shows us something about what it looks like to go from denial to discipleship.

There is more going on, beloved, than we understand or grasp.  We aren’t just who we think we are – God is calling us to become some body – somebody like Mary who brings Christ to birth in the most unlikely place.  And that's the good news for today with those who have ears to hear.