23rd December
2012 : Advent 4 : Year C
8:00am and 9:30am Kalamunda
Micah 5:2-5a : Magnificat :
Hebrews 5:5-10 : Luke 1:39-45
John L. Bell has
long been one of the driving forces behind the contemporary Iona Community, whom
Saint Columcille, better-known as Saint Columba, founded in 563AD[1].
Often in collaboration with Graham Maule, John Bell composes beautiful melodies
or arranges folk songs, and writes some of the sharpest, most intelligent,
incisive and insightful lyrics in contemporary Christian music. He’s also an
ordained Minister in the Church of Scotland; and I’m an unashamed groupie!
Ever since I
read the liner notes for the Iona Community’s early cassettes, songs for Advent
and Christmass, John Bell’s comment on Mary the mother of our Lord has
delighted and tickled me. He lamented the fact that Mary had become, as he put
it, “an anaemic virgin” rather than the robust, feisty young woman holy
scripture portrays her as being.
Mary of
Nazareth, the almost-certainly-teenage young woman engaged to local bloke,
Joseph, a carpenter, is the one whom many scholars believe Luke the evangelist
regards and portrays as Jesus’ first disciple.
Her strength of
character and fortitude certainly fit her for such a role. She is the one whom
the Living God chooses to bear the Son, Jesus. But Mary is no simple-headed
peasant girl who acquiesces out of thoughtless piety.
Like Abraham,
mentioned in the canticle we read as the psalm, Mary has a faith that is strong
enough to speak directly about the matter God invites her into: to bear the
Saviour-Messiah. Yes, we may regard such forthright speech as boldness – but,
like all the heroes of faith, both in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, it
is primarily born of an unshakably trusting relationship with the Living God.
Mary knows who this God is – not in
the sense that she believes herself familiar and therefore vulnerable to
contempt – but rather from time spent forming and moulding and listening and
sensing and feeling. In other words, immersing herself in God and God’s ways.
So when the
angel Gabriel announces God’s invitation Mary has a few comments and questions
to make before she agrees, willingly and wholeheartedly. And when she goes to
visit her cousin, Elizabeth, the soon-to-be-mother of John the baptiser, she
speaks with authority and confidence in the full knowledge that something holy
is happening between them and for them and within them.
We learn only
later that Mary doesn’t know the whole story, which is hardly surprising; but
when events like worshipping shepherds and elderly prophets come into her small
life, she isn’t fazed, she doesn’t run, she doesn’t evade or hide or droop her
proverbial bundle. Instead, Luke tells us, she will “ponder these things in her
heart”.
So the great
thing in Mary’s life – the moment that is so instructive for us who seek to
follow Jesus – is that initial YES to God’s invitation to bear the Son, Jesus. Though
born of faith, it’s a considered agreement, which that faith tells Mary is
trustworthy and doable because the Living God does not ask humans to do what
they cannot do.
What Mary shows
for us is the willingness to trust God’s will – a willingness which this
preacher at least has often enough disguised under a sand-flinging flurry of industry
and busy-ness. You know how it goes: I’m
so busy seeking God’s will that I don’t have time to listen to God when the
divine will is actually communicated. And when God breaks through the
busy-ness it becomes possible – dead easy – to concoct excuses and reasons and
justifications and rationalisations.
This is a wholly
different ballgame from Mary’s standing firm and seeking a few natural answers.
In all that, she holds the invitation in her hands and takes it seriously
enough to investigate further.
One thing,
however, that Mary does understand, is that in allowing the conception and
gestation of the Son, she is actually bringing to bear, as it were, glory and
praise on the Living God. Just as praising a cake or a painting or a
well-executed sporting achievement reflects on the baker, the artist and the
sportsperson, so too Mary’s entire part in the story of Jesus and his
conception and birth reflects on the Creator, the Living God.
When Mary sings,
My soul magnifies the Lord! she’s
saying exactly that – what happens here, what I am doing, glorious and groovy
as it may be for me, to become a mother – itself in most cases a wonderful
awe-inspiring happening – is actually going to make the Living God even more
praiseworthy, even more awesome!
It’s something
well-worth remembering next time God’s will breaks into our own lives. If we
dare to take the risk of saying YES to God’s invitation, then we are not only
doing God’s will, which is truly a Great Thing, but we will also ultimately be
“magnifying” the Lord, like Mary.
The reverse,
however, is also true. Our failure to accept the invitation to do God’s will means
that something God has planned will be delayed unnecessarily, and the
opportunity to reveal God in a world where so many need God and yet cannot see
or hear or find God – that opportunity will also be delayed.
Delayed but not
lost. In God, nothing and no one is lost – unless by choice.
May what we choose, therefore, be the same as Mary’s
choice. May her YES echo and resound upon our lips as it did on hers. May our
YES likewise magnify our awesome Living God, and may this world become a place
of grace and peace because of what we, like Mary of Nazareth, choose to do in
the name of the Living God!
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