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Hail Mary!December 24, 2006 Fourth Sunday of Advent “My soul magnifies the Lord. My spirit rejoices in God my savior… Mary’s song. A song of hope and rejoicing. A song of vindication. A song of justice and the world made right. A song she learned from scripture, where it is recorded that her forebear Hannah sang an almost identical song centuries earlier. Hannah and Mary danced. They wept with joy. They realized that with God anything is possible. Might and power will no longer count for everything. The rich will be brought low. The hungry will eat their fill. Justice shall prevail. Good news, indeed! But how is that Good News on Park Avenue? How is this song something most of us can celebrate? How can we worship a God that, from the sound of it, intends to undo most of what we’ve worked for? Place, respectability, security. That’s my dilemma this morning: how to preach this song of Mary as Good News without ignoring what it actually says, without spiritualizing it so that it doesn’t ultimately make demands on us. And, if you happen to be hesitating as to whether you’re rich or not, hoping you’re excluded because you fall somewhere in between on the rich/poor continuum, this isn’t your lucky day. By the world’s standards if you have one good meal a day, have access to any form of health care, and can depend on law enforcement to protect you, then you are rich. I’ve been in places where this song is Good News. I remember well the small Methodist Church high in the Andean mountains of Peru, where the congregation who sang this song sang as if they believed it and were claiming it for themselves. I remember another church just outside of Mexico City where they sang this song and clearly read themselves into the story. It was a song of hope and song of revolution. The congregation could taste redemption in its words. It’s a bit disorienting to hear this song in that context. I remember at the time being swept up by the emotion of the moment. I sang out passionately, and I believed every word I was singing. But later, it would hit me that I was unsettled by this song, I didn’t know if I agreed with it. I wanted to do everything to help the poor and to make this world a just place that reflected God’s intentions, but at the time I didn’t think I should have to pay a price for it. Later, I would note how awkward it was when we read or prayed that same song in this context. Celebrating communion a few weeks ago, I thought to myself as these words of Mary were spoken in the liturgy, “Hmm…I’m not sure how I feel about that. I wonder how that will square with my comments later when I say that this is an open table where everyone is welcome, and where the rich won’t be sent away empty and the poor won’t get their fill, their equal portion for sure, but not their fill.” Which brings me back to that nagging question: How is this Good News on Park Avenue? Here’s what I think – this is Good News for us because it reminds us that the world is not as God intends. It is God’s way of removing the barriers we have put up to protect ourselves from what we know to be true. And, with these barriers in jeopardy, we find the opportunity to respond: to finally become the people God lovingly created us to be. Isn’t that what Mary did? That’s why she is so revered throughout the world. That’s why “Hail Mary, full of grace…” is the most recited prayer the world over. Mary could have taken the experience with the angel who told her she would bear a child and dismissed it as a bad dream. She could have refused to take part, and Luke goes to great lengths to show how Mary questioned and even doubted. Luke tells us that Mary was greatly disturbed and pondered “How can this be?” And the angel reassured her, “Fear not, Mary. God is with you.” Rather than refuse or dismiss, Mary’s imagination was captured. Picture her: once she moved past the shock, past the fear of explaining a pregnancy to her parents and to Joseph, once she moved past the joy and excitement of a first baby, she quickly realized the potential of the whole experience. Rather than being a cause of shame, or pride, or fear Mary interpreted the news as an occasion for hope. And then she did what most of us do, she daydreamed about the future: she daydreamed of when the world would be rightly and justly ordered; she daydreamed of when the poor would be well fed and cared for; she daydreamed of when arrogant, power-abusing rulers would be dethroned and humble ones would take their place. Mary saw the future filled with possibility and promise, not just for herself, but for all of God’s people. And that very day, she decided to play a small role in making it all come true. She stepped into her fullness and the world has not been the same since. What a remarkable response. It’s humbling actually, that she could respond in such a selfless way to an event that would potentially devastate her life. That visit from the angel was likely not something she envisioned. I doubt she ever thought to herself, “Maybe one day I will bear the Messiah.” I would venture a guess that the news the angel brought her had little, if anything, to do with the life she longed for and dreamed of. Mary’s genius was that she was able to move beyond her picture of how life was supposed to be and welcomed something new, something different and unexpected, something hopeful into her life. Thus she literally became the bearer of hope. She made room for God and it changed her. Imagine that. It transformed how she saw the world and how she understood her purpose in the world. Oh, that we would have such courage. But it’s that courage, in fact, that God’s intends us to have. J. Neville Ward, the late British Methodist minister and someone with great devotion to Mary, has said, “The normal way in which Christian faith becomes real [for all of us] is first the announcement of the Good News, that you are greatly favored, that the Lord is with you and means to make the present substance of your life the bearer of his love and truth, and then, [it is] your decision to see how it goes when life is lived in terms of that annunciation.” [1] That’s why this is indeed Good News on Park Avenue. As I have thought of those congregations in Peru and Mexico, what they were singing about and hoping for was not so much to assume the place of the world’s elite. What good would that serve? What they were singing for, what Mary was singing for, was for a world where each and every one of us lived our lives as the bearer of God’s love and truth; as ones pregnant with the hope of God within us. And if we did, in fact, live life that way wouldn’t it change us? Wouldn’t what we value have to be reconsidered? Wouldn’t who we love have to be redefined? Wouldn’t who we actually see and take note of have to be refocused? If we lived our lives as the bearer of God’s love and truth, wouldn’t the vision we have cast for our lives have to be recast? Wouldn’t our purpose in this world have to be reevaluated? A group of people seriously engaged in this type of soul work can change the world. And that’s why Mary’s song is Good News in Peru, in Mexico, and on Park Avenue. Make no mistake; it is not a coincidence that Mary was pregnant when she believed enough to sing these words. Bringing this new day into being will require that each of us step into our fullness and that may feel like the work of a woman laboring to bring new life into the world. It will exhaust us. It will scare us. We may say we want it to stop. It will hurt like hell. It will make us sweat and cry. It will require more of ourselves than we have ever given. It will feel impossible. But, oh, the beauty on the other side. The unsurpassing joy. It cannot be contained, it cannot really be described. It can only be lived. [2] You see, friends, the flip side of this challenge is a deep, abiding joy. That’s the life God desires for us. That’s the Good News Mary understood and helps us to accept. Thank God for Mary. Ave Maria! Hail Mary! Full of grace, God is with you. Blessed are you and blessed is the fruit of your womb. Previous sermon: Listening Hard, or Hardly Listening? • Next sermon: Christmas Letters All past sermons |
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