MARY, YES AND GOD

23^rd 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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[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columba

MARY AND JESUS - HOW WE KNOW WHAT WE KNOW

20th December 2009 : Advent 3 : Year C
9:30am Camillo
The Baptism of Kai Justin Reynolds
Micah 5:2-5a : Hebrews 10:5-10 : Luke 1:39-45

In his CD talk, Mary and non-violence, Richard Rohr makes the observation that we don’t know a lot about Mary of Nazareth, the mother of Jesus, from the Christian scriptures. But he goes on to say with great insight that the primary source of our knowledge about this remarkable woman is her son, Jesus.

Rohr points out that when we look through the eyes of Jesus we are also seeing with Mary’s eyes. It’s a phenomenon that any reasonably attentive parent will notice, as their children – from a breathtakingly early age – pick up and reproduce even the slightest mannerism or twitch or behaviour.

I noticed it first when I saw that my son, Iain, then aged about two or three, frowned the way his grandfather frowned. At the time I thought it somewhat strange because Iain didn’t spend a lot of time with his grandfather, my Dad. Now, sometimes I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed and on this occasion I was clearly still waiting for the whetstone… But I eventually figured out that Iain’s frown came, not from his grandfather, but from me; and I was the one who picked it up from my father and hence transmitted the frown with all its subtlety to my son.

Now, we’d have to admit that Jesus would have picked up a great deal from his father, Joseph. Joe is on the scene for at least the first twelve years of Jesus’ life. Luke tells us as much in the story about the very precocious kid Jesus staying behind in the Temple while Joseph and Mary set off without him, notice he’s missing and return to Jerusalem to find him lecturing his betters… But after this – no more Joseph. The best guess we can make is that Joe kicked the bucket somewhere between Jesus’ twelfth birthday and his public ministry at the age of thirty. But given that Jesus is known to the townsfolk as Mary’s son, it’s likely his Dad died before Jesus became an adult at the age of thirteen…

So Mary likely had a huge influence on Jesus’ growing years, the period of time we in the west call adolescence, which is a relatively recent invention. And what we hear of Mary in these early chapters of Luke’s gospel suggest that she had what we would call today a powerful social consciousness – that she was very concerned about social justice and understood very well the message of the Living God in the Hebrew scriptures – that God desires mercy, not sacrifice; that God cares about the widow and the orphan. In other words, about the poor and the oppressed and the marginalised.

So it is that we arrive at the powerful poem our tradition entitles The Magnificat. Its clear message of solidarity with the poor and denunciation of the rich and powerful prefigures Jesus’ own social concerns by some three decades. That Jesus speaks with unparalleled authority, assuredness and confidence does not diminish Mary’s influence. If anything, it reinforces her position as primary role model to the boy who grew into a man convinced of his vocation to convey good news to the poor.

Nor is it likely that Mary beat this into Jesus… Mary is the woman who in Luke’s gospel ponders deeply on some pretty powerful and amazing events. She doesn’t jump to conclusions, she doesn’t pretend to understand what was beyond her – or anyone else’s – capacity to understand.

Instead, she “keeps things in her heart”. In other words, she ruminates in a healthy way. She considers deeply the meaning of things. At times she seems to understand her eldest child. At other times she appear as bewildered and confused as anyone else among Jesus’ followers.

It all goes together as part of the difficult and enthralling journey of faith into which the rest of us enter when we are baptised. Our aim as followers of Jesus is to see with his eyes, which are arguably also the eyes of Mary.

This is a good thing because Mary gives us that capacity to step back and ponder. This is not – and must never become – an attempt to arrive at any kind of understanding of things that mostly defy understanding. Rather, this business of symbolically removing ourselves from the midst of difficult situations allows us to stand with God and gain greater clarity with regard to any given situation.

Ultimately, it allows us to surrender ourselves to the Living God so that God can begin the work of transformation that is the essence of our spiritual journey. We will shortly be witnessing the formal beginning of such a journey when Kai comes to be baptised. The actual journey began long before this moment, probably before Kai was even conceived.

That is essentially a statement of and from faith. We don’t know – and it doesn’t matter that we don’t know. What matters is whether we are prepared to spend time with God learning about God’s ways and learning to see with Jesus’ and Mary’s eyes.

So when Kai is baptised he will publicly and outwardly begin his own journey of faith. None of us can know where that journey will take him but our prayer is that he will know that the Living God accompanies him every step of the way.