May I speak in the Name of God Who is: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
The last candle is lit. Ready or not, Christmas is upon us. Ready or not, we will be back here Saturday night or Sunday morning to meet our Lord as He comes to us as a child… and to pray that we may continue to meet Him, as He comes to us in so many ways, at so many times. The Incarnation tells about who Jesus was and is: God. It also tells us about God, about the nature and character of God: that God is the sort of God who is not distant and far from us, far above us and out-of-reach. While God is the Almighty Creator far beyond our understanding, at the same time God is connected to us and one with us. The gap between the mortal and the divine is bridged in Christ.
It seems as though two sisters had been given parts in the annual Christmas pageant at their Church. At dinner that evening they got into an argument as to who had the most important role. Finally the 15 year-old said to her 10 year-old sister: “Well, you just ask Mom. She’ll tell you it’s much harder to be a virgin than it is to be an angel.”
The truth in the sister’s observation can be attested to in St. Luke’s Gospel It all began in an obscure village, in a remote province of the great Roman Empire, with a simple peasant girl. She was young. She had no impressive degrees, or resume, or achievements. She had no stature in the community. In order to be accepted and function socially at all she had to have a husband. The arrangement was made between two families and the couple remained apart, engaged for about a year before they got married. This was Mary’s situation when one day she had a surprising visitor.
The archangel Gabriel appears to Mary and salutes her: “Greetings, highly favored one!” (translated in the Latin Vulgate, “Hail Mary, full of grace!”) St. Luke says that Mary was “greatly troubled and considered in her mind what sort of greeting this might be”: You think?! what nonsense was this that the angelic messenger of almighty God was telling her, that she was “full of grace” and “highly favored.”!!! This wide-eyed peasant girl, though counseled by the angel, “do not be afraid,” must have been scared to death! Of course, one day she had plans to have a baby with her husband-to-be, Joseph… but the “Son of the Most High?!”
Can you imagine what the comfortable self-righteous establishment would have to say? Probably something like this: “Another unwed teenage mother for the welfare roles; no money, no education… see how these people are! And this one has hallucinations about angels to boot! Then she goes and has the kid in a filthy barn full of animals… she should be reported to Child Protective Services…Shame on her!"
It is in this wonderous story of the Annunciation that we must encounter the shame of Mary. Her shame is that so many rational, scientific-minded of the world raise their eyebrows, or even outright sneer at her being miraculously with child. Her shame is that so many today are no more sensitive to the condition of the humble and downtrodden than the brutal Roman occupiers of 1st cen. Palestine. And her shame as that simple Hebrew girl, is knowing that she is defenseless in the court of human rationality and the self-interests of the world.
But the key to Mary’s greatness, the central reason why she stands as first among the saints and why “from henceforth all generations will call her blessed” is her ability to listen, to hear the voice of God, and then to say “let it be to me according to your word.” She doesn’t do what Abraham and Sarah did when they got the news about Isaac being born to them in their advanced retirement, namely double over with hoots of laughter. She doesn’t do what any of us would probably do in such a situation; she doesn’t press Gabriel for a sign, or make excuses of personal defects in order to wrangle out of the deal, like Moses did. She doesn’t remind the Holy One, like Jeremiah did, that she is too young and unequal to the task. And unlike Jonah, she doesn’t try to run away and hide. Mary’s greatness is her choice to walk away from the secure future she had outlined for herself and into the frightening unknown future God offered her. That is hard; that is always hard.
We no doubt have plans for Christmas and for our families and for our lives. These plans should certainly include God. As Advent ends, we need to realize also that God has plans for us. We need to remember that, very often, it has been those times in our lives when things did not go as we had planned that God was most present, and the most real. We read about Mary’s consent to the freedom of God on this fourth Sunday of Advent, not only to fill us in on the details of Jesus’ birth, but also to consider whether our Advent ponderings have prepared us to make the Christmas consent to God becoming one of us. Do we have the strength of Mary to ponder the impossibility of God being with us as an outcast, hopeless, helpless infant?
Consenting to Christmas is difficult, but the real obstacle is not the big, bad ‘secular world’, as is so often suggested. Sure, the outrageous commercialism of the season distracts us from our Advent disciplines of pondering and preparing the way of the Lord, but our own busyness is not the real problem: God is… or rather God’s plan for us is. Saying ‘yes’ to ‘God with us’ is difficult because in order for us to get in touch with the impossible becoming possible, we have to be willing to critique our fear of being surprised by the unexpected… and then allow our conflicted selves to be amazed by the annunciations going on around us all the time. Through Mary we are modeled faith, heroic faith. Not faith that says ‘yes’ and then does nothing, but faith through which nothing will be impossible.
Mary, then, is not just the mother of Jesus, but our mother too… the mother of all believers. We, too, are touched, adopted, and grasped by the same Spirit which animated creation and the same Spirit which came upon Mary. We are impregnated by the same Spirit to have conceived within the womb of our souls, the same Jesus.
What good is it if Mary gave birth to a son 2,000 years ago and I do not give birth to Him in my own life, in my time, in my society? God is the initiator of change. God is on the side of the poor, humble, neglected, and oppressed… supremely represented in the person of blessed Mary. And we are to bear the Christ and bear witness to the saving acts of God by ministering to the world. Are we accepting, allowing, and assenting to the birth of Jesus Christ in our lives each day and are we taking that new birth to those people and those places where heroic Mary-like faith directs us to go? Our true validity as Christians of the Incarnation lies in the answer…
Amen.
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