Sermons

Prophetic Remembrance

John Wilkinson                            Third Presbyterian Church
December 24, 2006                    Micah 2:2-5a/Luke 1:26-55

Merry Christmas, almost.

To achieve a kind of Advent consistency, the case will need to go something like this: along with considering Mary in all of the ways that we consider her, we will need to consider her to be a prophet as well. And given the working definition – a prophet is one who hears the voice of God, discerns that all is not right with the world and does something about it – then Mary would certainly qualify.

And to identify Mary as a prophet, as we have done with names like Zephaniah and Malachi and Jeremiah and Isaiah and even John the Baptist, is also to insist that we, too, are prophets, closer to her story than we might want to believe, and closer to the possibility of her response than we might want to imagine.

We have heard this story so often that is has taken on a patina of familiarity. It shouldn’t. It is history-making and world-shaking, and we could not even consider the events we will recount this evening if we did not work through what we remember this morning.

Joanna Adams writes that through the ages artists have “tended to give Mary ruby lips, batting eyelashes and a demure manner.” (Christian Century, December 12, 2006, page 19) How wrong would that be?

Barbara Brown Taylor writes that “it is hard to remember that she was just a girl, with precious little experience with men or angels or the world.” (“Mothers of God” in Gospel Medicine, page 150) But that is who she was. And that is who God chose.

We miss so many things about her. Anne Lamott writes: “You’re not supposed to love Mary so much, if you’re not Catholic, but I do. I wear a picture of her inside a gold oval frame, on a thin gold chain…” Lamott says: “I wear Mary for two reasons: Because she helps me remember the song ‘Let It Be.’ And because I used to pray to her as if she were my mother when I was coming down off (drugs)… Mary is for me the feminine face of divine love. Knowing that I could call on a woman who had been loved for so long, stretching backward and forward through millennia, could trump my self-loathing…I have been hailing her all along, through my son’s birth and early childhood, right through to those teenage years …through my son’s reunion with my father, through health scares, through my mother’s terrible death of Alzheimer’s. (Plan B, pages 61-64)

If Mary can do that for one of us, then why are we so reluctant to allow her to do it for all of us?

I understand our Protestant hesitancy, and I am by no means proposing a fourth member of the Trinity. But as much as our history and tradition have allowed us to get worked up over certain things, that same history and tradition should get us out of this one. Regarding Mary, we should get over it, and with hope and joy enter this story, relying on it, leaning into it, allowing it to find root and take wing.

A small town. An angel. An unexpected conversation. An odd conversation.

Again, Barbara Brown Taylor writes: “The angel did not ask her if she would like to be the mother of God; he TOLD her…the angel did not ask her how that sounded to her and whether she would like to try out for the role; he told her… ‘How can this be?’ she asked him. She wanted to know exactly whose idea it was and exactly how it would happen. She wanted to make sense out of what made no sense: that God had decided to surrender himself to flesh and blood but that he needed her help, needed her surrender as well in order to make possible his own. ‘How can this be?’ Mary asked, and that is all she asked, but there are several other questions I believe I would have asked,” says Taylor, “such as: Will Joseph stick around? Will my parents still love me? Will my friends stand by me…? Will the pregnancy go all right? Will the labor be hard? Will there be someone to help me when my time comes? Will I know what to do? You say that the child will be the King of Israel, but what about me? Will I survive his birth? What about me?” (151-152)

This morning’s events unfold in stages, as Luke tells us, though so much remains untold. There is that curious angelic conversation. There is that brief sabbatical to visit cousin Elizabeth, to confirm everything and to provide, it seems, a little breathing space before the more labored breathing happens.

And then that song – what we have come to call the Magnificat, capturing Mary’s moving response and God’s vision. Each point in the drama has its prophetic moments – the consent to the angel, the solidarity with one also experiencing an unexpected pregnancy, and the magnificent, magnifying words. All prophetic. All very human as well.

“The Nativity Story” is the second recent Hollywood film depicting biblical events. This one received much less attention…probably because it was not directed by Mel Gibson. I would commend it to you. You will be inspired, to be sure, but one of the things that will inspire you is how real it all seems, how difficult, how human.

Artists and hymn writers, preachers certainly, cannot quite capture it. We grasp it best when we simply live our lives, day-to-day, with every peak, every valley, every joy, every difficulty.

That is what incarnation is all about. Mary knew it. Her fellow traveler Joseph knew it. And we live and breathe this story not to experience life through it, but to let our fully-experienced life be blessed by it, blessed by incarnation, moment by moment and day by day.

Throughout Advent, we have insisted that the prophets were anything but super-human. But we have insisted that they were human. That is our call as well this day.

Theologian Cynthia Rigby writes that Mary “reveals what it means for us…to bear God to the world. What does it mean to say that Mary—and we—are the bearers of God? It might have been tempting for Mary,” Rigby writes, “and it might be for us, to exempt ourselves from the mission to which we are called. ‘Sorry, Gabriel,’ we might say, ‘I'd like to ... but it's simply not within my power.’ So often we miss out on participating in the grace-full work of God because—unlike Mary—we refuse to acknowledge its impossibility. Instead, we work to make it manageable.” (“A New Look at Mary,” Presbyterians Today, April 2004)

Advent is not about manageability. Christmas is not about manageability. Incarnation is not about manageability.

If we are to be the prophets and God-bearers that God has called us to be, then we overhear Gabriel saying "Nothing will be impossible with God" and nod our heads up and down with Mary, and with her words say, "Here am I, the servant of the Lord."

It is not too late too wish; it is never too late to dream. So here is our Christmas list, our prophetic, incarnational, last-minute Christmas list, inspired by an angel, edited by a young woman, what we want for Christmas:

* We want to be risk-takers, Cynthia Rigby writes, poets, philosophers, creative agents in God’s creativity, more than passive vessels and bystanders.

* We want, with Mary, in a broken and fearful world, to be courageous. We want to face whatever pain we face, whatever emptiness, whatever heartbreak, whatever disappointment, with courage and hope. We may be afraid, but we will not let that fear be an ultimate barrier to our joy. Anne Lamott writes that “Mary was anything but weak,” and we seek her strength to face what we are called to face. (page 72)

* We want to be evangelists, if we can redefine and redeem that word. “Throughout her life,” Jon Sweeney writes, “Mary showed Jesus to others.” We would do the same. Sweeney continues: “(Mary was not a) a ready-made disciple…she does not have an unerring and unflinching gaze of certitude, no easy credulity…(But) from the beginning and throughout her days, Mary showed what it meant to be a follower of Jesus, wait on God, expect God, hope for God and have awe for God.” (Presbyterians Today, December 2006)

* We want to be, as Barbara Brown Taylor asserts, like Mary, “a daredevil, a test pilot, a gambler…(one who) can decide to take part in a plan you did not choose, doing things you do not know how to do for reasons you do not entirely understand…take part in a thrilling and dangerous scheme with no script and no guarantees. ( page 153)

Prophet, test pilot, evangelist, courageous God-bearer. That is a tall order, to be sure. A tall Christmas order made all the more complex because that story has become a bit too familiar, or a bit too unfamiliar.

So on top of everything else, we want to be storytellers. We want to remember, tell our own hearts and spirits, tell our church, tell our children and grandchildren, tell the city, tell the world. We want to remember and tell them about how love came down, how it keeps coming down, how with Mary we behold it, and how with Mary we say “here I am.”

May our souls magnify the Lord, and may our Christmas dreams and Christmas prayers be bold and joyous and overflowing with hope. Amen.