Luke 1:26-55
A Sermon preached at Southminster Presbyterian Church
December 14, 2008
by Marci Auld Glass
There are times when we can jump into the biblical text without much trouble. We can relate to the characters or we understand their lives. But for most of us, I suspect that, even if we want to, we have a hard time putting ourselves in Mary’s shoes. Artists have tried.
Often when artists paint Mary, she’s serene looking. She’s got it all together. She’s in her 20s or 30s. She’s the kind of “Mother of the Year” to whom you would give the son of God.
Here is a painting by Fra Angelica.
Here is one by El Greco.
And here is one from a 16th century Icon at St Catherine’s Monastery at Mt Sinai in Egypt.
But Mary, in all likelihood, was still a teenager. Girls married very young at a time when the life expectancy was 40.
Unplanned, unwed teenage pregnancies, as difficult as they are today, would have been more than devastating for Mary in her culture. And, quite frankly, it doesn’t matter that the pregnancy is God’s—because while the angel told her that she was blessed and that she shouldn’t be afraid, the angel did not take out an ad in the Jerusalem Times to make sure that everyone else knew that.
“How can this be?”, she asks the angel.
How can this be, indeed.
I can only imagine what was going through her head when the angel showed up. “Greetings, favored one!”
“Who? Me? Favored by whom?” Can’t you just see Mary looking around, trying to figure out to whom the angel would be speaking in this dusty town of Nazareth.
Favored one? I don’t know how many years it has been since you were a teenage girl or might have known many teenage girls, but I suspect that “favored one” is not how they often see themselves. I certainly didn’t. I spent my entire teenage years wishing I were someone else, or had someone else’s car, clothes, hair, social life, personality, you name it. Hindsight is, of course, 20/20, but Mary wasn’t looking back at that moment either. There she was, in all of her adolescent glory, being told that the Lord was with her and that she was going to give birth to God’s own son who was going to reign over the house of Jacob forever.
Look at this painting of Mary, painted by Dante Rosetti in 1850, as she hears the news. She looks young here. And she looks scared.
And I have one last image of Mary for you today. This annunciation is painted by John Collier. It is one of my favorite paintings.
Here she is in front of her suburban home, wearing her saddle shoes, with her hair in a ponytail.
“Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you!”
What are the implications for us if God chose an unwed teenage girl to bear the son of God?
One that occurs to me is that here is our proof that God is willing to be vulnerable. Because Mary was vulnerable. There was a more than decent chance that this pregnancy could have resulted in Mary being stoned to death. God does not just have a preference for the poor and the weak. God became poor and weak. God came to earth and joined a family, entering into the struggles, the fears, the anxieties, the joys, the celebrations, and the gifts that go along with being family.
Another implication is that when we look around for God’s in-breaking into our world, where are we looking? Because I’m fairly confident that nobody in Israel 2,000 years ago was looking for the Messiah to come from a young mother in Nazareth. Many were looking for the Messiah to come in glory on the clouds with the heavenly host. Others were expecting a new King to be raised up from the people, leading a restored Israel to military might. So, if they were looking in the temple, looking at the White House, or looking at West Point, they missed their Messiah.
Where are we looking?
Mary seemed to have realized some of the implications in her own life. “Here am I, the servant of the Lord. Let it be with me according to your word.” She realizes she is a part of something bigger than herself. She realizes that ultimately, our lives are in God’s hands and not ours. “Let it be with me, according to your word.”
Then Mary set off “with haste” to her relative Elizabeth’s home. Elizabeth’s story is earlier in the chapter, but she is one of many women in the scriptures who was barren and who is granted a child by the Lord. She was “getting on in years” and her barrenness had caused her shame, so her pregnancy was a gift. And, apparently, Mary decides that the best way for her to appreciate and put her unplanned pregnancy into perspective is to go spend time with her barren relative. Because sometimes it takes someone else’s situation to put your own troubles in perspective.
As soon as Elizabeth hears Mary’s voice she proclaims, “blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.”
I can imagine, at that point, hearing a real, live person give validation to the words of the Angel must have caused Mary to collapse in a heap of relief. “I’m not crazy. I didn’t make it up. Elizabeth knows it too.”
Please note that Mary did not go off by herself when she heard the news from the angel. She went to a woman who’d been there. She found community with another woman affected by society’s tendency to judge women on their fertility, or their lack thereof. When things are tough, that’s what we do. Share our stories with others to help them navigate the difficult paths. And, we share our stories so we can help each other see where we see the Divine at work in each other’s lives.
This is something I would really like to move us all into doing. The more of your stories I learn, the more connections I see. The more of your stories I hear, the more intersections I see between this place and God’s work in the world. And that is the piece for us to work at. When we read scripture (which implies, of course, that we are reading scripture), where do we see our lives in the text? What connections do we make? How do we tell our stories to lead people to God’s stories?
Elizabeth does this. Her story becomes a way for Mary to know that she wasn’t crazy, to know that God was working in her life.
And then we get the Magnificat. This song of Mary reminds us of other songs by other women in scripture. Hannah at the temple after the birth of Samuel. Miriam after the defeat of the Egyptians at the Red Sea. The song begins with praise for blessings received. Even in the midst of an unplanned pregnancy, Mary searches for her blessings.
But then she goes on to make claims about God. And the claims she makes suggests to me that she realizes there are implications for more than her when God comes to earth as the child of a teenage girl from Nazareth. “God has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.”
We should note that, as far as we can tell in either the text or in our world, Mary is speaking of things that haven’t quite happened yet. Powerful people still seem to be on their thrones. The lowly still seem to be low. The hungry are still going to the foodbanks and, despite the worsening economy, the rich are not quite empty. We are reminded by her words that Advent is a time of preparing both for the birth of Christ and for his return. The blessings of which she speaks are a consequence of God’s New Creation, begun in the life of Jesus. But it is to the return of Jesus that we must look to see their completion.
As Christians, we are a people of hope. Hope that the promises God made to Israel have been fulfilled in Christ’s birth and will be fulfilled in Christ’s return. So, we live in hope that our work together as God’s people will make Mary’s song true for the people in our community.
We live in confidence because God chose to make his home far from the halls of power. If God’s story can intersect in the life of a teenage girl in Nazareth, we live in hope and confidence that God’s story will intersect in our lives too. We continue to wait in Advent in hope, confidence and excitement about how the Divine will enter into our lives. Thanks be to God. Amen
