Psalm; Luke
Fourth
Sunday of Advent: December 18, 2011
The
angel Gabriel coming to Mary to tell her she will bear a son is one of those
stories we all know as a part of the larger, beautiful story of the first
Christmas. Mary, the willing servant of
God, becomes the mother of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. We love Mary: images of her in the stable,
with the baby Jesus, make us feel warm and cozy and make us want to sing Silent
Night.
Given
that, I realize that when I deconstruct a passage like this one, I risk taking
some of the “magic” out of Christmas for folks.
I can tell you I don’t do so lightly; this is, in some ways, a very hard
sermon to preach. But I am going to take
the risk for the sake of freeing this story from the past, so that it might
inform our faith as we live as Christians in the world today. That’s your fair warning – but if you hang in
there with me, I promise we’ll get to the good stuff…because I do think this is
a story full of gospel truth, and one that leads us beautifully into
Christmas.
There
are two fundamental problems at work in this story of the annunciation, as it
is called. The first problem is with the
author, and the second problem is with us…the readers.
The
problem with the author is that he was a human being – affected by his culture
and setting – just as we all are. This
is not something he could fix, nor should we have an expectation that it could
have been otherwise. But he was human,
and the images and metaphors used in this story were conceived at a time when
views on women and what their role was were – well, let’s just say they were
not exactly enlightened by our standards.
Throughout
the bible – written mostly by men – women, with scant few exceptions, are
portrayed as being valuable solely for their ability to produce sons. And worse, when we read these stories, we see
that the men didn’t believe women had, or should have had, any say in their
role in reproduction. Most of the time,
as these authors tell it, God comes in and announces to a woman she’s going to
have a child, whether she likes it or not.
In
the case of our passage today, not only does God, through the angel, announce
that Mary will have a child, but the way in which she will conceive, and the
images the author uses to describe this conception, is problematic for many
women – specifically for some women who have experienced sexual abuse. The images of the Holy Spirit overpowering
Mary’s body in order to impregnate her are based in a culture that had little
or no sensitivity to issues surrounding abused women.
I
know this is not something we want to think about…but we don’t live in the same
culture as the authors, and we do
have a choice about whether to be sensitive to such things. And knowing that at least 1 in 6 women have experienced
such abuse, we would do well to choose sensitivity – at least in the form of
rejecting this particular image as revelatory of the God of love who stands with the abused – not in power over them.
We
hear this story year after year, and I know for a fact it stirs up terrible feelings
and memories for some women…so if we are going to read it here in this space –
this sanctuary that is supposed to be safe and life-giving – we need to
acknowledge this and say out loud that in this space we reject such images for
God…we reject a God that would ever employ such tactics.
Does
that mean we need to reject this story entirely? I struggle with this. There is much
in the bible that is colored by biases, prejudices, and misconceptions based on
the culture of the time. But it’s
anachronistic to blame the authors for this, and it’s also a mistake to assume
they have nothing profound to say just because they were creatures of their
culture. These are inspired people of
faith, and they are exceptional writers, human though they are.
If
we’re careful and if we do acknowledge
those places where human frailty slips in, I think instead of rejecting the
whole shebang, we are best off re-imagining these stories for today, rejecting
the parts that are bound by that culture and embracing the truths these authors
were trying to proclaim. And of course
we do so knowing we are bound by our
culture and limitations and biases, and faithful people in the future will have
to re-imagine the story for their day, shedding the images steeped in our
cultural prejudices.
But,
the bottom line for me is there is
something core in this story that can be meaningful for us if we reject the
images some fine painful, and re-imagine something life-giving.
Which
leads us to our second problem: us. The author was trying to describe an
experience and understanding of God, and to do so he used metaphor. As I have said before, sometimes only
metaphor will do when speaking of the divine, because we are trying to point to
something that transcends us, transcends our language and experiences – and
that is a job for metaphor. Think of all
the metaphors the authors of our scriptures use to try to describe who Jesus
was relative to God: Lamb of God; Word
of God. Obviously, the author didn’t
think Jesus was a barn animal with four legs.
These are metaphors. And “Son of
God” is one more metaphor meant to say something about Jesus, but doesn’t
literally mean he is God’s biological child.
And the virgin birth is a metaphor meant to point to a truth about our relationship with God, not to make a
declaration about a biological fact.
We make the mistake of trying to
read this story as if the author meant
it literally or as an historical account.
And so we get caught up in the virgin birth, whether such a thing
happened, whether such a thing is a miracle.
We get caught up in thinking of Mary as Jesus’ mother and God as Jesus’
father as if they form a nuclear family of sorts. And then we try to figure out who Joseph is
in all that.
This
literalizing of the story creates all kinds of problems. For some it’s been emblematic of why they
reject the faith altogether, knowing a virgin birth is not literally possible
and so they can’t participate in a religion that would claim otherwise. For others it has led to a faith in a magical
God that points a finger and makes miraculous things happen, which creates
problems in thinking about how God moves and acts in our world today.
In
addition, I think to understand this story literally confines the truth of it
in people who lived 2000 years ago, and so we miss entirely what it might say
for us today. We make Mary into an idol
– the one and only chosen for this miraculous act…unique because she was able
to conceive a child without ever having sex.
We make the birth of Jesus into an extraordinary, supernatural event
that happened 2000 years ago – something that has never happened since. In doing so, we forget that, in part, these
characters are stand-ins, symbols, for other things – they transcend their
time, and the symbols point to universal truths, not just particular events.
So
if we let go of culturally limited metaphors and a literal reading of this
story, we’re prepared to look for its core meaning or message. This is where it gets good. J
This is where we see it’s not just about an extraordinary event in the past, but about extraordinary
possibilities today.
Let’s
begin with what the angel says to Mary.
The first thing the angel says is “Greetings favored one – Yahweh is
with you.” Mary, we’re told, pondered
what sort of greeting this might be because she was perplexed – so I decided to
ponder it a bit myself.
I
spent some time this week with this word – the word “favored.” As I looked at the Greek, it seemed clear to
me that this does not mean that Mary was more special than everyone around her,
and that is why God “chose” her. A
better, if more awkward, translation would be to say, “Greetings one whom God
has made grace-filled, lovely, and blessed.”
In other words, God has made Mary beloved. And we know, from looking at all of
scriptures, this is something God has done for all of human kind. Our baptism in Christ clothes us with the
character and nature of Christ, the one about whom God said, “This is my child,
my beloved.” This greeting to Mary is
God’s greeting to us – all of us, even the most lowly, poor, broken, and lost.
This
event begins – is entirely rooted in – love: the love between God and human
kind. And when we start with this love, our passage tells us, miraculous
things are born. This is why the author
had to make God the partner of Mary in all this. This is divine-human love, not just the love
between two human beings. This is a
story about connection with something in the universe that by its very nature
moves toward goodness, justice, and peace.
And that connection, initiated by God and embraced by us, is the beginning of the story of our
faith.
When
we begin with this love…when we connect with the divine, something is born
among us that is pure, unbridled, possibility.
This is what we see in Jesus.
Jesus, the product of divine-human love, was both pure possibility and
the model of how humans can make this possibility a reality. Through love, something emerges in our world
that is the seed of the Realm of God…and if we
nurture the seed, tend to the possibilities, participate in its growth, this
Realm will become real all around us.
Today.
So
how do we connect with that love? This
is where we need new images and metaphors.
And they don’t come easy when talking about something that is just
beyond our imagination. And we’re as
susceptible to limitation and cultural constraint as the gospel writer was. But if we can re-imagine that Holy Spirit not
as the divine one overpowering us – overshadowing us – but as inviting us, I
think we have a good start. We do, like Mary,
have to consent to participating in God’s love…we have to respond in faith; we
say with Mary, “Here I am.” But we are
compelled to do this not by the force
of the spirit, but rather by the allure of love…pure love, which is gentle,
kind, forgiving, transforming, hopeful, and just…and inviting.
The
holy spirit – divine love – invites us to participate in the movement of the
spirit. And when we do, possibilities
are born. More is waiting to be
born. That’s the message of Advent. And in this coming week, when we celebrate
and remember Jesus’ birth – let’s remember where it began: In divine-human connection and love. May Christmas this year be an invitation to
you to participate in that love that Christ might be born again and again in
our midst. Amen.
