2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16
Luke 1:46b-55
Romans 16:25-27
Luke 1:26-38
At this point in the world’s history, every minute of every day, about two hundred fifty women discover they are pregnant. It doesn’t sound like much until you realize that’s fifteen thousand women an hour. Certainly, every situation is different, some of those women are rich, some poor, some married, some not, but it is also one of the most common situations imaginable.
The new life emerges as a consequence, intended or not, of intimate contact, when two beings come together as closely as they can possibly come, when they in essence become one, and all of these encounters are in one way or another a consequence of desire. Of course, in our sinful and broken world, the desire may be more on one side than the other, and many many women have in one way or another been forced to accommodate a man’s desire, whether they shared that desire or not.
In Mary’s day and in her culture, a woman rarely if ever had much of a choice in who would father her children, or even whether to have them or not. Marriages were arranged, and women then and for centuries since have been required to submit. And so it is very interesting that the angel, while never directly asking her if she was willing, seems at the same time to be awaiting her decision.
Scholars argue about how likely this story was to be historically true. Many biographies in that time included such birth narratives, in which the gods have something to do with the hero’s birth and fated him (it was always a him) for the particular greatness he achieved. Some even think that the audience always took such stories with a grain of salt, as a literary technique for introducing the essential character of a famous personage.
Others argue that someone during their time with Jesus and his and his mother, told this story of his beginning. We cannot know.
But whether it really happened or whether Luke made it up, it is a gripping story that has much to teach us. And one of the most striking lessons is that, in this story, Mary seems to have a choice about whether to accept her body’s role in the story of salvation. Whether it really happened or not, the story is about a choice made by a poor, unwed teenage girl, an utter nobody in the great Roman Empire. In the rigid hierarchies of that time, one couldn’t get much lower.
And yet God, the creator of the universe, the only truly worthy ruler over humankind, doesn’t command this lowly girl to carry this child, but gently proposes it, assuring her of his power to protect her and the baby, and to direct his steps toward a great destiny, and then waits for her decision. Luke creates this moment of amazing tension, a choice that is at once of an entirely private and intimate nature, and at the same time, one of world-transforming moment.
Every woman in this room who has born a child knows the flood of emotions that come with the discovery that a new life is blooming within her body. Joy wars with terror, hope with worry, restful peace with unbearable anticipation, and above all, an overwhelming desire to love and nurture this mysterious new being she doesn’t even know.
Luke’s genius is in revealing that this oh so common experience, this thing that happens to fifteen thousand girls an hour all around the world, is a perfect image of the invitation into the way of Jesus Christ, and of that terrible and wonderful moment of truth when we understand that we who are nothing much at all in the grand scheme of things are being asked to make a choice that is at once both as intimate as intimate can be, inviting God to dwell within our bodies, and one that might very well play a role in the saving of the world, when our bodies then act and speak in his will, and not our own.
And so the question comes down to Mary and to us: who is she? Who am I? And who are you? Our choices and actions reveal the answer.
In this case, as we learn when soon after Gabriel visits her, Mary rushes to visit her elder cousin Elizabeth, a woman formerly barren who now bears the child that will become John the Baptist, the herald of Christ’s coming. Elizabeth reveals something about Mary we didn’t know when we heard Gabriel’s offer and her remarkable choice to accept it.
Elizabeth says about Mary: “blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the Lord.” The translation is accurate and therefore a bit perplexing.
Mary believed Gabriel’s promise.
There’s a famous contemporary Christmas song called “Mary, Did You Know?” Each verse lays out the story of Jesus, casting her as an unwitting vessel of something she didn’t understand. The song was written by a Protestant male, so it is unsurprising that he would think he had to mansplain to Mary what she clearly already knew.
The Mary of Luke’s account goes into this thing with her eyes open. She certainly doesn’t know just how God is going to lead her son to this great destiny, but she knows very well what that destiny means, because she sings it to Elizabeth in answer to her blessing. She understands that the creator of the universe has looked with favor on her, and she sees beyond her own small role to the hope that she has as a poor Jewish girl in the midst of the great and powerful Roman Empire, a hope that her people would be delivered from bondage, that all the oppressive empires of the world would be brought down, and that people like her would finally get a fair break.
A Duke Divinity grad student is quoted as saying: “…every discussion of ‘biblical womanhood’ should include the fact that in Luke I, two pregnant women celebrate their new motherhood by passionately discussing the coming overthrow of every earthly empire.”
One of the divides we see in the church today is that some Christians see faith as a private, intimate, individual thing, one that must be pushed upon people in order to save them, and ignore or even become hostile to its wider implications for justice and peace in the world, while other Christians care only for social justice, and desire to force their views on those they think don’t care, but then reject the personal and intimate relationship with Jesus Christ necessary to accomplish it.
But both intimate relationship and public justice are working in Mary’s choice. To many they seem irreconcilable opposites, but they have one thing in common: love. God desires to join with each and every one of us as intimately as lovers who become one in order to bring forth a new life. And God desires also to join with all of humankind, to guide all his beloved children to abundant life and peace. The creation of life is both kinds of love: intimate and private, and at the same time, the public love that expresses itself in justice.
But what both sides of the divide don’t understand is that our desire for God, like the great desire in Mary that is revealed in her magnificent song, is the essential other side to God’s desire for us. James, a controversial letter the reformer Martin Luther would rather have excluded from the Bible, says in chapter four, “come close to God and God will come close to you.” I think Mary’s story is a more accurate picture: “God has come close to you; come close to him.”
I received a wonderful bit of good news yesterday in the wake of our collective grief in the loss of Floyd Ward, and in all the losses of the Ward family this fall. Someone confessed their faith to me, and asked to be baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Just after I said goodbye to man whose life reached far beyond his own to lift up many, God immediately awakened a new disciple for his mission.
In very early writings about the Lord’s Supper, it was said that the bread and wine was indeed bread and wine when we drink it, but through faith as it enters our body it becomes the Spirit of Christ, infused into our very flesh, transforming us, body and soul, from mere humans to, as John the Baptist proclaimed, “children of God.”
It’s only one view of the eucharist, but I think a very beautiful one. And it links to the reality of Mary’s journey, which Luke follows throughout the gospel to her final moment at the foot of the cross, witnessing her son’s slow death by torture. Mary, did you know? Of course she did. Unlike the men who had all fled, there she was, with steel in her spine, witnessing and still believing.
Mary chose to love. Mary chose to love God, and through the simple, oh-so-common love of a mother for her child, she chose to love all of humankind.
God loves you and desires you in the most intimate way imaginable. He wants to join with you, and together with you, to create a new person, a child of God destined to channel God’s love to the whole world.
What will you choose?
Luke 1:46b-55
Romans 16:25-27
Luke 1:26-38
At this point in the world’s history, every minute of every day, about two hundred fifty women discover they are pregnant. It doesn’t sound like much until you realize that’s fifteen thousand women an hour. Certainly, every situation is different, some of those women are rich, some poor, some married, some not, but it is also one of the most common situations imaginable.
The new life emerges as a consequence, intended or not, of intimate contact, when two beings come together as closely as they can possibly come, when they in essence become one, and all of these encounters are in one way or another a consequence of desire. Of course, in our sinful and broken world, the desire may be more on one side than the other, and many many women have in one way or another been forced to accommodate a man’s desire, whether they shared that desire or not.
In Mary’s day and in her culture, a woman rarely if ever had much of a choice in who would father her children, or even whether to have them or not. Marriages were arranged, and women then and for centuries since have been required to submit. And so it is very interesting that the angel, while never directly asking her if she was willing, seems at the same time to be awaiting her decision.
Scholars argue about how likely this story was to be historically true. Many biographies in that time included such birth narratives, in which the gods have something to do with the hero’s birth and fated him (it was always a him) for the particular greatness he achieved. Some even think that the audience always took such stories with a grain of salt, as a literary technique for introducing the essential character of a famous personage.
Others argue that someone during their time with Jesus and his and his mother, told this story of his beginning. We cannot know.
But whether it really happened or whether Luke made it up, it is a gripping story that has much to teach us. And one of the most striking lessons is that, in this story, Mary seems to have a choice about whether to accept her body’s role in the story of salvation. Whether it really happened or not, the story is about a choice made by a poor, unwed teenage girl, an utter nobody in the great Roman Empire. In the rigid hierarchies of that time, one couldn’t get much lower.
And yet God, the creator of the universe, the only truly worthy ruler over humankind, doesn’t command this lowly girl to carry this child, but gently proposes it, assuring her of his power to protect her and the baby, and to direct his steps toward a great destiny, and then waits for her decision. Luke creates this moment of amazing tension, a choice that is at once of an entirely private and intimate nature, and at the same time, one of world-transforming moment.
Every woman in this room who has born a child knows the flood of emotions that come with the discovery that a new life is blooming within her body. Joy wars with terror, hope with worry, restful peace with unbearable anticipation, and above all, an overwhelming desire to love and nurture this mysterious new being she doesn’t even know.
Luke’s genius is in revealing that this oh so common experience, this thing that happens to fifteen thousand girls an hour all around the world, is a perfect image of the invitation into the way of Jesus Christ, and of that terrible and wonderful moment of truth when we understand that we who are nothing much at all in the grand scheme of things are being asked to make a choice that is at once both as intimate as intimate can be, inviting God to dwell within our bodies, and one that might very well play a role in the saving of the world, when our bodies then act and speak in his will, and not our own.
And so the question comes down to Mary and to us: who is she? Who am I? And who are you? Our choices and actions reveal the answer.
In this case, as we learn when soon after Gabriel visits her, Mary rushes to visit her elder cousin Elizabeth, a woman formerly barren who now bears the child that will become John the Baptist, the herald of Christ’s coming. Elizabeth reveals something about Mary we didn’t know when we heard Gabriel’s offer and her remarkable choice to accept it.
Elizabeth says about Mary: “blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the Lord.” The translation is accurate and therefore a bit perplexing.
Mary believed Gabriel’s promise.
There’s a famous contemporary Christmas song called “Mary, Did You Know?” Each verse lays out the story of Jesus, casting her as an unwitting vessel of something she didn’t understand. The song was written by a Protestant male, so it is unsurprising that he would think he had to mansplain to Mary what she clearly already knew.
The Mary of Luke’s account goes into this thing with her eyes open. She certainly doesn’t know just how God is going to lead her son to this great destiny, but she knows very well what that destiny means, because she sings it to Elizabeth in answer to her blessing. She understands that the creator of the universe has looked with favor on her, and she sees beyond her own small role to the hope that she has as a poor Jewish girl in the midst of the great and powerful Roman Empire, a hope that her people would be delivered from bondage, that all the oppressive empires of the world would be brought down, and that people like her would finally get a fair break.
A Duke Divinity grad student is quoted as saying: “…every discussion of ‘biblical womanhood’ should include the fact that in Luke I, two pregnant women celebrate their new motherhood by passionately discussing the coming overthrow of every earthly empire.”
One of the divides we see in the church today is that some Christians see faith as a private, intimate, individual thing, one that must be pushed upon people in order to save them, and ignore or even become hostile to its wider implications for justice and peace in the world, while other Christians care only for social justice, and desire to force their views on those they think don’t care, but then reject the personal and intimate relationship with Jesus Christ necessary to accomplish it.
But both intimate relationship and public justice are working in Mary’s choice. To many they seem irreconcilable opposites, but they have one thing in common: love. God desires to join with each and every one of us as intimately as lovers who become one in order to bring forth a new life. And God desires also to join with all of humankind, to guide all his beloved children to abundant life and peace. The creation of life is both kinds of love: intimate and private, and at the same time, the public love that expresses itself in justice.
But what both sides of the divide don’t understand is that our desire for God, like the great desire in Mary that is revealed in her magnificent song, is the essential other side to God’s desire for us. James, a controversial letter the reformer Martin Luther would rather have excluded from the Bible, says in chapter four, “come close to God and God will come close to you.” I think Mary’s story is a more accurate picture: “God has come close to you; come close to him.”
I received a wonderful bit of good news yesterday in the wake of our collective grief in the loss of Floyd Ward, and in all the losses of the Ward family this fall. Someone confessed their faith to me, and asked to be baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Just after I said goodbye to man whose life reached far beyond his own to lift up many, God immediately awakened a new disciple for his mission.
In very early writings about the Lord’s Supper, it was said that the bread and wine was indeed bread and wine when we drink it, but through faith as it enters our body it becomes the Spirit of Christ, infused into our very flesh, transforming us, body and soul, from mere humans to, as John the Baptist proclaimed, “children of God.”
It’s only one view of the eucharist, but I think a very beautiful one. And it links to the reality of Mary’s journey, which Luke follows throughout the gospel to her final moment at the foot of the cross, witnessing her son’s slow death by torture. Mary, did you know? Of course she did. Unlike the men who had all fled, there she was, with steel in her spine, witnessing and still believing.
Mary chose to love. Mary chose to love God, and through the simple, oh-so-common love of a mother for her child, she chose to love all of humankind.
God loves you and desires you in the most intimate way imaginable. He wants to join with you, and together with you, to create a new person, a child of God destined to channel God’s love to the whole world.
What will you choose?
