Preparers of the Way: Mary
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, December 11, 2011
Many modern philosophers, social observers and commentators suggest that there is within the world and in human existence an inherent equilibrium: that there is a balance in life between the good and the bad and between the dark and the light. If you think of the character of Justitia, that we often see with the scales of justice depicting even balance on both sides, the notion is that justice is equal, that there is two parts to the scale. Based on the traditions of many Greek goddesses that even preceded Christianity, there is this assumption that there is an inherent balance to the way life operates.
You hear that all the time, this notion of balance between good and bad has become very much in vogue. It was actually sent to me as a rather humorous suggestion not long ago that ministers (clergy), in their lives, receive good news and bad news. hen I read this, I thought, I just have to share this with the congregation on Sunday morning! This is how a dialogue goes on good news and bad news for clergy:
Good news! The UCW voted to send you a “Get Well” card; the bad news is it passed 31:30.The good news, The church board accepted your job description the way you wrote it; the bad news, they just formed a Search Committee to find someone capable of filling the position. Good news! Your stand on nuclear disarmament has won the respect and admiration of many, many people; the bad news, none of them is remotely connected to your church! The good news, you have finally found a choir director who approaches things your way; the bad news, the choir mutinied! The good news, 70 junior high school students showed up for a learning evening on Thursday; the bad news, the meeting was on Wednesday!
This one I really like:
The good news, your women's softball team won their first game; the bad news, they beat your men's softball team!
And, one that I find deeply disturbing:
The trustees finally voted to add more church parking, good news; they want to black top the front lawn of the manse to do it - bad news!
All I can say is I live in a condominium, so “Ha!” Good news and bad news. I hope no one was trying to send me a message!
Good news and bad news:life is like that, isn't it? When we get some good news, it is followed by bad news. When we look, for example, at the story of the Annunciation from The Gospel of Luke, it seems that in many ways it is also good news and bad news.
The Annunciation is what we call the announcing of the birth of Jesus to Mary, and I think a lot of people get confused about the language about Mary. For example, one hears about “the immaculate conception” and many people think that is similar to this very story, when in fact “the immaculate conception” is about the birth of Mary, not the birth of Jesus.
The Annunciation is the biblical story. It is the story of the angel coming to Mary and announcing that she is going to give birth to Jesus. In many ways, it is good news. She is going to give birth to the Son of God. But, it is bad news, because she is going to do it as a virgin with all the issues surrounding that. There is the good news that she has found favour with God; the bad news is that she is terrified and frightened when she receives this news.
It appears then that the Annunciation is in fact a balance between good news and bad news. Well, I would like to suggest to you this day that we recast our thinking about the Annunciation. I think it is all good news! The entire story that Luke crafts so carefully for us is a very powerful statement about good news.
I want you also to debunk this morning some old ideas that might be haunting your mind. As I go through my message today, I want you to have an open mind and to think long and hard about this incredible story from The Bible, because it is in fact in many ways one of the most profound statements of faith that you will ever find.
I have to predicate everything on one main idea, and this is what I really want you to take home today, and if you are listening on the radio, to dwell upon over the next few days: mainly that this story of the Annunciation of the angel to Mary of the birth of Jesus is in fact a statement that: God has done something new.
Luke goes to great length to show that the real protagonist of this story is not Mary. It is not about Mary. It is not about the angel. It is not about Joseph. It is not about all the other characters that surround it, like Elizabeth and John the Baptist. In fact, the protagonist, the central character is the Annunciation is God.
When you understand that God is the central character in all of this, it casts the entire story in a different light. It might seem obvious to us that the story is about God, but often in our thinking, and so much of the things I have read about it, you would think otherwise. This story has been picked apart and pulled and stretched into so many different ways, forgetting the protagonist, the central character, God.
Look at the language that is used here. The Angel Gabriel came because, as the Scriptures tell us, God sent him. Mary is told, “The Lord is with you.” Mary is told, “You have found favour in the sight of the Lord.” At times, when she was worried she was told, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you.” Also it is reaffirmed “ With God, nothing is impossible.”
So you see, even in these few verses is crammed an incredible statement about God's initiative. The story is about God. You can even see that in the echoes that are in this incredibly rich text: echoes that have been woven through time, and have continued to vibrate from The Old Testament.
Echoes, for example, of Sarah, who as the wife of Abraham gave birth to Isaac, and it was Sarah who believed that God, even though she was old and barren, could still give her a child. She declared that “what is impossible with man is possible with God.” The echoes of Sarah are in the story of the Annunciation.
Echoes of Hannah are in this story too. Hannah, who was the mother of Samuel, for in I Samuel , you read about how she was in awe of giving birth to this man who would be so great, Samuel. In her words, she glorifies God, she praises God, she acknowledges that God had been involved in the very birth of Samuel, and those echoes you can hear in Luke's Gospel and the announcement of Gabriel to Mary that she is going to give birth to this great child.
What I am suggesting to you is that the birth of Jesus and the Annunciation of that birth are consistent with the way that God has operated throughout The Old Testament and into the New. It is not as if God has suddenly appeared on the scene, that somehow something great and miraculous has happened. God is always at work, and always has been at work, and always will be at work. God has acted uniquely in willing to be incarnate in his Son through Mary, but still it is consistent with the way that God does things.
God is consistent with the way that he has operated throughout time. God is not as they say in literary circles the deus ex machina, the character who just appears on the scene briefly to make sense of a story: God is the very story itself here. The story of the Annunciation is the story of God's activity.
The problem has been though that certainly over the last two hundred years we have got caught up in this, this shibboleth, this ridiculous debate, about the Annunciation, particularly as it relates to the virgin birth of Jesus. It is not the virgin birth anyway, as has been corrected many times. It is the virgin conception; not the virgin birth.
Be that as it may, it has become a shibboleth, a silly argument. For some it has become a test of whether or not you really believe. If you believe in the virgin birth, then you are a real believer, and you are being true to Scripture. Likewise, on the other side of the argument, the silly argument that suggests that it is impossible for such a thing to occur, as if somehow there isn't more to life than we can see, and that if you believe in the virgin birth, then you have lost your mind, and sold out your intellect, and jettisoned your reasoning. It is as if these two sides of an equally bent coin are right. They are not! There is far more to this than meets the eye!
This is because the central character is God! That is why it is different. A New Testament theologian, one who I have come to respect immensely, as have David and Jean and others, is N. T. (Tom) Wright, who is now the Bishop of Durham in England. In writing on this subject, he also believes that these are ridiculous arguments. This is the argument he makes, and I find it winsome. He wrote in The Christian Century, a decade ago:
No one can prove historically that Mary was a virgin when Jesus was conceived. No one can prove historically that she wasn't. Science studies the repeatable; history bumps its nose against the unrepeatable. If the first two chapters of Matthew and the first two of Luke had never existed, I do not suppose that my own Christian faith or that of the church to which I belong would have been very different, but since they do, and since for quite other reasons I have come to believe that the God of Israel, the world's creator, was personally and fully revealed in and as Jesus of Nazareth, I hold open my historical judgement and say ”˜If that is what God deemed appropriate, who am I to object?'
What Bishop Wright is asking us to think about is to maintain an open mind: an open mind in the same way about the Annunciation of the birth of Jesus that we have about everything else that God has done.
After all, if we believe that God is the creator of the universe ex nihilo, out of nothing, if we believe this God called Abraham and Sarah and gave them a lineage, if we believe that God set free the Israelites from the oppression of the Egyptians, if God is the giver of the law, if God is the inspirer of the prophets, if God gave super powers to Elijah. If God, who had done all these things, is the very same God who is at work in the Annunciation of the birth of Jesus, it is not as if something miraculous and strange has occurred, but is in keeping and consistent with how God acts.
The key is, do we believe God is the centre of the story? If he is, it changes our whole orientation towards it, for if this God willed to become incarnate in his son, Jesus, if he decided he would reign over the House of David, if he would in fact be in charge of the family of Jacob, if he would have a kingdom that would never end, if he is all those things, if he is the one who is crucified and raised on the third day, then we look back from that to the birth of Jesus and we think, “It was consistent with the way that our God works.”
What about Mary, is Mary important in all of this? If we acknowledge that God is the centre of the story, if we are prepared to accept that God is the initiator and the power and the source of everything that happens, what about Mary? Was her role important? Oh, by all means, for Mary was chosen by God. She was the one appointed to be the mediator, the one who brings the presence of Christ the Lord into the world. It was she who received the power of the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit rested upon her.
Now, some have suggested that Mary was in fact a passive character in all this. After all, what choice did Mary have? Not a lot! God has been upon her, the Spirit had moved within her, she had conceived a child. It did not appear to be something that either she gave free consent to or not. It seemed that she was carried along on a wave, having been chosen by God, and that human action and that human agency seemed to have little or no impact on the story at all.
In fact, one could even suggest that Mary was so terrified of all of this that she did not know what to do. I have often wondered why she was frightened. Actually, I received a very salient lesson about this just a couple of weeks ago. As many of you know, I was present at the very first rabbinical Yeshiva School convocation here in Toronto at the University of Toronto. It was a marvellous event: the first time that a school like this has been founded to teach rabbis.
At the reception I happened to be standing by a rabbi who had come from a long, long way away to participate in this convocation. He didn't know who I was. Frankly, I didn't know who he was, although afterwards I looked up his CV, and I must admit I am mightily humbled when I think of what a great man he is. Nevertheless, we were standing at the table, and on the plate in front of us there was one cupcake left.
Each of us stood there looking at the other, wondering who would be the first to go and grab that last remaining cupcake. I think he was thinking that the very foundations of Judaism were on the line: that if he grabbed it first, I would think less of his faith. Trust me, I was thinking that if I grab that first, Christianity wouldn't look very good. So, we danced around it and just let it sit there for a few minutes.
I thought one of us would suggest something biblical, maybe that we cut it in half, for that seems to me the way that The Bible deals with justice. But, no, one of us unfortunately succumbed. I am sorry that he didn't get it and I did! Now, I feel great guilt because of it! But, we sat and we talked.
We each took our cup of tea and I took my cupcake, and we sat together, and I started to talk to him about the Christmas story. I said, “You know, I have had numerous discussions over the years with rabbis about the Christmas story, but I would like to get a sense from you, as a Jew, what the story really means when you read it as opposed to I as a Gentile.”
He was quite fascinating. He only had a minute or two, so it was a very brief synopsis, but I realized as he spoke just how incredibly Jewish the story of the birth of Jesus is. If you take it out of the context of everything that God had done in The Torah and The Old Testament, then you would never understand this story. If you try to look at it through the eyes of the “Enlightenment” mind in particular, you will never grasp the power of it.
There was one example that he gave that absolutely shook my world. It was the reason why Mary was so terrified. Why was it that she was so caught up in having to do this? He said it was because of The Book of Tobit. Now, The Book of Tobit is not in our Bible, but it is in the Roman Catholic Bible. It is part of the Apocrypha, as it has been called, and it is one of those books that is in the “inter-testimental” period between the end of The Old Testament, as we know it from Malachi to the beginning of The New Testament in Matthew. Tobit is one of these stories.
In The Book of Tobit, there is the story of an angel who appears to a woman about to be married. Just as she is about to marry her husband, the angel interferes, scares her and the marriage does not take place. Every time that this occurs, every time she is about to get married or betrothed, an angel appears and takes away the potential husband. He said, “I think that the Mary of The New Testament would have had this in her mind. It is quite possible that she was terrified of losing Joseph, of having an angel appear and do something dramatic.
Frankly, I had never ever thought of this before. I am sure others have in literature, but I hadn't. Seeing the story through the eyes of the rabbi gave me a sense of the richness and the depth of what is happening: not only the Sarah identity, not only the Hannah identity, but the whole sense in which the story of the Annunciation of the birth of Jesus is rooted and grounded in God's historical activity over thousands of years.
When you conceive of the Christmas story through the eyes of its main actor, God, you can see Mary in a whole new light. But what did Mary have that was so great? What she had was a willingness to be available for God. The climax of faith in all of this is she says, “And I will serve the Lord.” Mary, though carried away by all the events, nevertheless still has a statement of faith.
It still required her faith and her availability.“ I will serve the Lord.” Mary made herself available. She made herself humble before God, and she did it in the most profound way. I love Mary for it, because Mary is you and Mary is me.
God does great and wonderful and mighty things, but are we available to be used and to serve? Are we willing to give of ourselves and to acknowledge God's sovereignty over our lives? Are we willing to respond to the call to serve him and to love others? Are we willing, like Mary who had, as the rabbi said to me, “a great love for her people who were living in darkness” and understood that the birth of this child was going to do something radical? If we had the kind of love for the world that Mary had, then her faith becomes our faith. Mary becomes us and we become Mary.
There is one last thing that she had, and I think this rises above all of it: she had a sense of awe. You can see it in the beginning of The Magnificat, where she glorifies the Lord for what he has done. The Lord has done marvellous things. She is in awe of the wonder and the majesty of God. Isn't that what Christmas is all about? Isn't it in awe that this God can do these things?
I was thinking this last week, and shared this at the homecoming service, about what I wanted for Christmas this year. I must say my list is not particularly pious! I thought that what I would really like this year is a very expensive electric motor car. I thought that if I had this, it would be good. So, I have written Santa. I have asked for it. It only costs $150,000 - a mere drop in the bucket really - and since I have been good all year - nobody else agrees with that, but I believe I have been good all year, I think I should have it.
This car is called the Tesla. It does 150 mph, 0-60 in 3.9 second, has 0 emissions, is easy to park, and goes extremely quickly around corners. Absolutely essential for ministers when we are out visiting! And so, this is my request. And, as I started to look into this guilt-free, non-emissions bearing car, I wondered to myself why it is called a Tesla? Well, I didn't know this, but Tesla was in fact a great physicist in the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth century.
The car is named after the man, Nikola Tesla, who was a Serbian who moved to the United States. It was he who discovered and developed alternating current. Where Edison was direct current, Tesla was alternating current. Tesla is considered one of the greatest engineers and physicists of all time. He was the one who developed the electric motor. He is the one who came up with the whole notion of being able to draw power from electricity to motorize things. He was an amazing person!
When he died, thousands turned up at St. John the Divine Church in New York to remember him. He was an odd duck in many ways, a little strange, very eccentric. But there was one thing that he did that perhaps was not so eccentric but very faithful: whenever there was a thunderstorm, he would sit on a mohair cushion by his window in his New York apartment, and whenever a bolt of lightning came down or went across the sky, he applauded.
He applauded because he realized the power of nature and the power of the God who had made things. At times in his life, he had adopted Hinduism; at other times, Christianity. He was a man, who looked at the whole of life and the whole of the world as something that was in God's hands, and he recognized that while he might make certain discoveries, they were discoveries based on something that already existed. That is why he applauded God. That was why he was in awe of God. He recognized the source.
Isn't that what Christmas is about? Isn't that what makes it rich and powerful and meaningful and unique and different? It is to read the Annunciation and say, “God has done something new here. God has done something great here. God has done something consistent with the way that he acts here. God has used Mary in a powerful way, and Mary has responded by serving and being in awe.” What an incredible story this is! What an awesome God we serve! Mary would say, “Amen.”Amen.