Mary

Advent 4B 12/21/14
Luke 1:26-38; 46b-55

God, our Savior, look with favor upon us, your lowly servants. Establish our households as you did the house of David. Bless our community though the gospel and the proclamation of Jesus Christ. Amen.

The Bible is full of many different types of literature.

Most of you probably know this already, but I want to make sure we’re all on the same page here.

The “good book” is actually a collection of many books. The words of the Bible were inspired by God, and recorded by humans. Even though we call the Bible “the Word of the Lord,” we recognize that those words were recorded of the course of several hundred years, by dozens of authors, in many different writing styles.

There are the letters of Paul, for example, and the genealogies in Chronicles. There are stories like Jonah and parables like the Good Samaritan and an entire book of poems we call the Psalms.

In today’s reading from Luke we have an example of one specific literary genre that shows up several times throughout the Bible. It’s kind of a unique style of writing. It is used only to describe God – or an angel of God – coming directly to a prophet, to commission that prophet to carry some message to the world.

This type of literature is called a call narrative.

You might be familiar with some of the call narratives of the Old Testament.

Isaiah saw the Lord seated in the temple, with six-winged seraphs around him, and he was frightened. When the Lord asked, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” Isaiah answered, “Here am I, send me.”

God came to Samuel while he was sleeping, and Samuel thought that his mentor Eli was calling out to him. Finally Eli helped Samuel recognize that it was God speaking to him. The next time that God called “Samuel, Samuel!” the boy responded, “Speak for your servant is listening.”

Moses met God in a burning bush, in a story that most of us know well. God called to Moses out of the bush, and Moses replied, “Here I am.”

Nathan saw the Lord in a dream, in the story we heard today from Second Samuel. He had to go tell King David to change his plans, as a result of this conversation with God.

Each of these men were given a message from God, or a mission to carry out, once they stopped and listened to what God had to say.

        

Today’s Gospel reading, by contrast, tells the call story of a young woman.

The angel of God came to Mary, and, unlike all the men who encounter angels in the Bible, Mary doesn’t appear to be frightened.

Did you know that? Apparently angels are terrifying creatures, because the first thing they always say to people is “do not be afraid.”

         Why would they need to say that, unless they were scaring people?

But Mary doesn’t show fear; she is simply puzzled.

Who is this strange messenger who appeared out of nowhere? And why is he calling me “favored one”?

The angel moves on to the call portion of the interaction. God has a mission for Mary.

         Did you notice how the angel butters her up before he makes his request?

         You have found favor with God, Mary. You’re pretty amazing. God likes you a lot.

Yeah, ok… so what does God want?

Oh not much. God doesn’t ask Mary to confront a king or lead a nation of slaves to freedom. God doesn’t give Mary a message to preach to the people or ask her to leave her homeland for a foreign country.

God’s request of Mary is much simpler many of the requests that were made of Old Testament prophets.

All that God asks of Mary is for her to have a baby.

OK, maybe that’s not such a small thing after all!

Becoming a parent might sound simpler than liberating thousands of slaves, but for the person who’s doing it, it’s not any easier.

Having a baby is life-changing. There’s no turning back once a child enters your life.

And Mary already had a pretty good life to look forward to. She had a supportive family, as we know from her visit to her cousin Elizabeth right after the angel left her. Mary was engaged to a man with the means to provide for their family, and from all accounts he was a pretty great guy. In a society in which women were dependent upon men for shelter and protection, that’s about the best that a woman could hope for!

Having this baby – having God’s baby – could put all this at risk for her. Would her fiancé still marry her? Would her family still support her? Choosing to have a baby is not really a decision that can easily be made in a vacuum.

Actually, that’s another way in which Mary was very different from other women in her society. They didn’t get to choose whether or not they had a baby. There weren’t birth control options or in vitro fertilization or other means of family planning, like there are today.

Today, women are usually able to make the choice of whether to have children or not. And they tend to make that choice with the support of their families – if they have a husband, he’s on board with the idea of parenting. If there’s no significant other in the picture, the woman probably has parents or siblings or some kind of support network that can help her raise the child.

So Mary was facing an entirely new decision – have a child or no? And she was doing so without being able to consult with her fiancé or family before responding.

We come now to the point in the call narrative in which the prophet responds to the call of God.

To me, this is one of the most fascinating pieces of the story.

I can’t help but notice that we are never able to hear the tone of voice of the prophet responding to God’s call.

This is obvious in some of the Old Testament narratives – Isaiah is alone in the Temple with these creatures he finds terrifying. So when God asks, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” – does Isaiah respond, “Here I am!!! Send me!!!”

         Or does he look around and say, “um… I'm the only one here. I guess I can go…”?

Mary gives a prophet’s response to the angel’s request: “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”

But does she say, “Yes! I can’t wait to do what God asks of me! I hope this all happens soon!”

Or does she say, “Well, you came to me so it sounds like I don’t have much choice in the matter. Since I have faith in God, I guess I can put my life into his hands…”?

If Mary was like the other biblical prophets, she probably had some reservations about following God’s call.

But we already know that she wasn’t just like the other prophets – she wasn’t frightened of God’s messenger, for one thing.

So maybe she wasn’t afraid to say “yes” to this extraordinary request.

I don’t know whether Mary’s response was out of necessity – she was the only one around – or out of faith – she was truly willing to serve God’s purpose.

         In either case, she did say yes.

And by saying yes, Mary put her future on the line, for God, and for her unborn son, and for all of humanity.

We don’t know whether Mary was originally a willing or reluctant prophet… but we do know that by the time she was visiting Elizabeth, she had some pretty profound reflections on what this pregnancy would mean for her and for the world.

         We sang her song together today as the Psalm for worship.

Mary’s song is full of themes of reversal and upheaval of the known world order.

         Allow me to paraphrase.

God, I am just your lowly servant, but you have decided to bless me anyway.

If you choose to bless even a poor powerless woman like me, you are an even greater God than I ever imagined.

You will use your power to humble the proud and conceited people in the world.

You will take power away from world leaders and give it to the nameless and faceless people in society.

You will feed the hungry at the expense of the wealthy, and follow through on all your promises to your chosen people.

Mary may not have received a special message from God that she was supposed to deliver to God’s people, but when Mary said “yes” to God’s call, something changed within her. Mary realized the breadth and depth of God’s mercy, and she just had to share that news with the world.

Mary agreed to bear the Word of God through her womb, but she also bore God's words on her lips. 

And so, through Mary’s song, we have her interpretation of what the birth of Jesus means for humanity.

Mary praises God and gives thanks that God will reverse the balance of power in society.

This reversal of power will come from the most unlikely of places – from the baby who Mary carries inside herself.

This is almost too much to comprehend. But God asked people to perform prophetic actions throughout the course of history. Hosea married a prostitute. Isaiah went around naked and barefoot for three years. Ezekiel literally ate a scroll of Scripture.

         And Mary had a baby.

God called Mary in the same way that God had been calling prophets for generations.

And somehow, for some reason, Mary said “yes” to God’s call.

Because Mary agreed to be a prophet – to be the bearer of God’s Word – Jesus was able to be born, and the salvation of humanity was secured.

God became flesh and dwelt among us.

It turned the world upside down.

And it took a young woman saying “yes” to God’s call to make it happen.

In these last days before Christmas, let’s remember to give thanks for Mary, and her willingness to be a prophet of God. Mary helped bring the Word of God into the world.

I hope that, if any of us ever have the opportunity to serve as a prophet in the way that Nathan and Moses and Isaiah and Samuel did – and in the way that Mary did – that we would also have the courage to say “yes” to God’s call.

Amen.