Moving Mary to the Front of the Nativity Set

Luke 1:39-55
In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary's greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud cry, "Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.
And Mary said,
"My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.
Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
for the Mighty One has done great things for me,
and holy is his name.
His mercy is for those who fear him
from generation to generation.
He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He 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.
He has helped his servant Israel,
in remembrance of his mercy,
according to the promise he made to our ancestors,
to Abraham and to his descendants forever." --NRSV

Sometimes I need a reminder to get my theology straightened out. I got one one day early on in my career as the campus minister at UVA. I was walking across the grounds there in Charlottesville with Joel, who was about five at the time. I got caught up in the beauty of the place and as we were walking towards Alderman Library I said, "Joel, do you know who created this university? It was Thomas Jefferson." He had already heard a lot about Thomas Jefferson in his young life, being the son of a UVa grad and of the Wesley Foundation director. He was quiet for a minute but then he said, "Yes, but God created everything else, right?" That was my reminder. Be careful what you teach!

I got another reminder once in a Mexican desert. It was early December and I was doing some scouting of mission projects for the Volunteers In Mission program in the state of Puebla, about 200 miles southeast of Mexico City. I was riding in the passenger seat of a Volkswagen Beetle with my knees up around my chin, choking on all the dust pouring in the windows. We were in the middle of nowhere, there was not a village to be seen, when we came upon a group of people marching up the road. There were about twenty people including men, women and children all in simple dress. They were carrying a placard with a picture of the Virgin of Guadeloupe, an image of the Virgin Mary which is the most revered in all of Mexico. The church member who was driving the VW Bug told me that they were pilgrims on their way to Mexico City to celebrate the feast day of the Virgin which is a national holiday in Mexico--Dec. 12. They were walking over 200 miles to be there, all because of this woman. I suddenly realized that the Virgin Mary, who is so often overlooked by Protestants as a "Catholic thing", was a figure that could make people walk through the deserts to see her. My theology was being adjusted again.

The Mary I grew up with in my Sunday School lessons in the Methodist Church was a very unsatisfying figure in a lot of ways. Unlike Moses, who argued with God, or Sarah, who laughed when God said she would have a child, Mary seemed incredibly passive to me. The angel Gabriel appears to her and informs her that she is about to become an unexpected expectant mother and after asking the obvious question of "How?" she merely says, "Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it happen as you say." Where is the struggle, Mary? Where is the "Wait a minute, Gabriel, you must have the wrong girl"? Aren't you going to say more to God to call into question this radical upsetting of the apple cart?

So for me and for most Protestants, Mary slipped quietly to the back of the manger scene, content to be shrouded in blue and shrouded in obscurity. We sympathized with her plight as a mother before her time in a culture where she would have been a scandal, but we really were more content to let her be an uncomplicated model of piety and a set piece in the Christmas pageant. Place her on the donkey under a brightly starlit sky, or in the manger where soft light falls on her face and the child she holds. Much more than that we can't bear and we don't have to, unless we read the Magnificat.

Which we just did, though you may not have recognized it by that name. In one of the most amazing pieces of poetry in the Bible, Mary moves from the back of the manger to the position of chief interpreter of the events of Christmas. Magnificat is the Latin word which begins this wonderful speech and it serves as a convenient title for a speech that is as joyful as it is revolutionary. When Mary speaks, no Sunday School lesson in the world can make her into a simple piety. She knows God didn't come into the world in Jesus just to give us characters to build TV Christmas specials around; she knew that God was coming to rattle our cages and shake the earth beneath our feet. She also knew that that was good news.

In the midst of the chaos of her pregnancy and the uncertainty of her situation, Mary finds the voice to say, "My soul magnifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my savior." Like the Old Testament figure of Hannah before her, when Mary found that she was carrying a child of promise, it became a promise not only for her, but for her nation and for the poor. "God," she says, "is powerful and will remember the people of God. God will lift the lowly and level the lofty. God will feed the hungry and send the rich away empty-handed." This is scandalous stuff. Even today, maybe especially today, this is scandalous stuff. To say that God's coming is a threat to the established order in a world clinging to the stability that order ensures is scandalous stuff. To say that God's coming is a challenge to the rich in the richest nation on earth is pretty hard stuff to hear. Thank you, Mary, you may return to the back of the manger now.

But she won’t go there, because Mary has been visited by angels and she's got her finger on the pulse of the life God offers. What she is suddenly able to see is what prophets and John the Baptist and desert wanderers have always seen--that security is not always to be trusted and chaos is not always to be feared. Sometimes God can be found in the place where the world is turning upside down. Sometimes God is in the unexpected place waiting for us.

So here we are at the end of the pre-Christmas season. The shopping and the traffic and the stresses all stretch us and turn us and churn us until Christmas, if it comes, seems more like an achievement than a celebration. Yet even in the stress and strain something new is being born in us and it might even be called knowledge. It might even be called hope.

Beyond our immediate lives, though we don’t have much time to think about it because of the crush of the season, there is a world that is equally chaotic. We’re only vaguely aware that things are not going well and our leaders seem as lost as we are and the violent threats continue. A conference gathers in Tehran for people who deny that the Holocaust, the slaughter of millions of people by the Nazis, ever happened and the president of Iran says that Israel will be wiped out. It’s a threat. Bombings and kidnappings and torture continue in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere. We don’t want more chaos like that.

Then yesterday I read a news story about a poll in Great Britain. Britain is often called a post-Christian culture, along with much of Western Europe, because so few people attend church. But the new poll finds that Britons have not only left the churches, they now see them as a threat. A poll by the Guardian newspaper showed that 82% of people in the United Kingdom say they “see religion as a cause of division and tension between people.”[i] God is seen, not as the refuge in the face of violence and turmoil; God is the source of the problem. When we see the violent ways in which suicide bombers express their faith, that’s one thing. But there is a growing sense in this post-modern world that religion itself is threatening. “Why do these religious leaders stir people up with notions of eternal life and returning saviors? Why bother with such archaic notions that only rile people up?”

I bet you didn’t think of yourself as a revolutionary when you walked through the doors of the Church this morning. Not many of us see children dressed as bathrobe shepherds and young people singing Christmas carols at Heritage Hall and older people knitting prayer shawls and families lighting an Advent wreath and single people meeting for Bible Study as threats to the international order. When we take water from the fount and place it on an infant’s head to recognize her new life in Christ…when we take a loaf of bread and break it and bless a cup and share it we don’t think of these things as anything more than the somewhat unusual family traditions of the Christian people. But Mary knows that what God is doing is threatening. Those Britons who responded to the poll are right. What God is doing threatens a world that is addicted to war with the promise of peace. God threatens a world prone to poverty and injustice with a new order where those on the underside are moved to the top. God threatens a society where there are so many other labels for who we are – you are a consumer, a victim, a customer, a poor person, a rich person, a geek, a nerd, a drama queen – and challenges them all as inadequate to explain how God sees us. We are not any of those things because God knows us only as children of God.

A Mary who can help us to see the good news in the bad news is worth walking through the desert to see. A Mary who helps us see the world as God sees it is deserving of more than a veil of soft light and flowing blue robes. A Mary who leads the praises of a God who upsets the order and establishes change for the poor and the lowly is the Mary I see now that my theology has gotten adjusted.

And on the 12th of December, this year again, on a hillside on the northern edges of Mexico City, thousands of pilgrims ended their dusty journeys with a celebration of joy. They raised their placards and fell to their knees and glorified the God who saves--the God of Mary, the God of Jesus Christ, the God of you and me.

And henceforth, all generations shall call us blessed. Thanks be to God.

[i] Julian Glover & Alexandra Topping, “Religion does more harm than good – poll”, Guardian, 12/23/06.