"What Gift Can I Bring?...Vulnerability"
Advent 'V-Power'
- Rev. Bob Thomas, Senior Pastor
the Gospel Lesson: Luke 1: 46b - 55
Advent III
9 shopping days left ‘til Christmas…Everyone is busy making their lists checking them twice, e-mailing updates to grandma and grandpa…We’re busy baking fruitcakes and shopping online for unique gifts for all the fruitcakes in our lives. And then we read the gospel story for today that reminds us that Christmas was, from the very beginning, born on the hopes and faith of a poor peasant girl from an obscure village called Nazareth in Judea. It is a story about God looking down on all creation and choosing to use this poor virgin as the primary instrument by which to reconcile God to the world. You have heard her say, “ how can this be? Me so young my cousin Elizabeth so old? And in the next breath answer her own question with a powerful affirmation of faith, “Nothing is impossible with God.” (But what about the other mother…weary, single, three kids…knowing that she will watch her children open presents that others have chosen and paid for…she looks beyond her pride to the expected joy that her kids will feel)…Today we ask the question, What gift can I bring? The answer is vulnerability. Remember we started with Vision as painted by the prophet Isaiah…no matter what exile you are facing, God’s got a plan and there will be water flowing in desert places. Last week the Voice of the baptizer in the wilderness called on us to get real and repent of our sins and our sinfulness. Today Mary models vulnerability.
Of all the people whom God could have chosen for this purpose, God chose a poor young peasant girl.
God didn’t exactly follow the conventional wisdom of the day. Had God hired a marketing firm from Madison Avenue to get the message to the world, the gospel story of Christmas would look like an episode of Dora the Explorer or High School Musical 2. Just think how many people would have seen the whole thing if it had been choreographed and danced with a star like Marie Osmond? That would have made a statement about who God is and what God’s up to at Christmas. Or they might have produced a commercial with God manipulating the controls of the newest version of the “Wii”video game. That would have put God right in the spotlight this Christmas.
But God, of course, chose another, more humble, way. God looked down from heaven and made the conscious choise to be born into this world in the life and hope and faith of a poor vulnerable virgin girl…whom no one noticed, whom no one would ever believe. And that was NO accident. I don’t believe God chose the first Joe and Mary God happened upon. I believe God knew exactly what he was doing.
The powerful? No, that won’t work—they’ll just use me to advance their own causes and agendas. The wealthy? No, I’d just get lost in all their stuff. The famous? No, they hate to share the spotlight, and the press loves to scandalize them. The poor? Yea, that’ll work. The poor. They still have room enough in their lives to receive me. The poor have nothing to get in the way.
God knew that to use the powerful to bear the Holy in to the world, we’d all try to return the favor somehow, try to balance the books. But, of course, this is one gift you can’t match. God knew that. So God decided to play musical chairs with the powerful and the poor, and when the music stopped at Christmas, the poor were given the only remaining seats, and the powerful just stood there, wondering what just happened in this smelly stable with this unusual star light? .
So let’s take a closer look at Mary this morning because God took a closer look at Mary—and chose her not in spite of, but because of, her “low estate.” We don’t talk much about that in church. We clean Mary up at Christmas. We paste her white, creamy middle-class face on Christmas cards every year…. You look at those cards and Mary looks like a thirty-three-year-old Ottawa Hills or Sylvania Township soccer mom in a SUV. She’s beautiful, so full of potential and success—a stay-at-home mom with an M.B.A. The church, over the years, cleaned up Mary’s image in order to make her more presentable, worthy, believable—in order to make her look just like us.
But Luke says she was a peasant from Judea, or Detroit; maybe she lived in her car in Windsor; or in a shelter in downtown Toledo. She was a face in the crowd; a statistic; a drain on the tax payers; an unskilled, uneducated, unemployed, illiterate, domestic who worked day jobs when she could find someone to hire her. You can’t put that on a Christmas card, but that’s who she was. A faceless, nameless, forgotten nobody who’s now pregnant –and who knows who the father is…
God chose Mary and thought she had all the right stuff to bear God’s only son into this world. Throwing on flesh and blood to became human was God’s last remaining option for saving the world, and God found Mary, of all people, to be the best possible candidate to carry out the plan. Of all the people God could have chosen, God chose vulnerable Mary—worthless to the world, but treasured by God.
Christmas is God’s divine protest against the powers of this world, which have proclaimed that you have to be someone in order to make God’s list; that you have to satisfy certain worldly criteria in order to make a difference in this world. Christmas is God’s judgment on that kind of world. Christmas is God’s proclamation that everyone is treasured: rich, poor, male, female, red, yellow, black and white…all are precious in his sight. Christmas announces a new age in which, as Mary sings, the proud are scattered in the imagination of their hearts, the mighty are pulled from their thrones; those of low degree are exalted, and the hungry are filled with good things.
Mary is saying that the world has now been turned upside down, that a new age is dawning, that the kingdom of God is breaking in, and the King is on his way. Those who previously had no place at the banquet table are now given the place of honor. Those who once had nothing to give to this world are now filled with the hope of a new world.
And Mary bears a son who confirms it all. Remember his first sermon, according to Luke? Jesus stands in the synagogue, unrolls the scroll of Isaiah, and what does he preach? “The Spirit of the Lord us upon me, to preach good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind; to set at liberty those who are oppressed. And to announce that a new day, a new age, has dawned.”
The divine plan that grows in the womb of Mary is about to change the world. The poor, at last, will be lifted up by God, and given the keys to the kingdom of God. The powerful and the poor will trade places in God’s eyes. And the Christmas hope is that they will trade places in our own eyes—that we will learn to look at the faces of the poor and see what God sees; not someone who is worthy once a year of our seasonal generosity, but someone who is worthy of our very best love; someone who gave birth to Jesus; someone Jesus chose to live with, and die for. They are the ones who maintain our lawns and clean our homes; their backs are raised to the sky in the cabbage fields off Reynolds Road; they line the halls of nursing homes like old, abandoned cars. You don’t have to look very far to find Mary in this world.
We really don’t know very much about Mary from the scripture texts except that she was sensitive to the ways and will of God. Mary was receptive to God’s word; she heard and listened and kept that Word, allowing it to inspire, direct and change her life. Mary continues to teach the church how to welcome and how to witness to the good news whom we call Jesus Christ. Mary the vulnerable virgin, teaches all would-be disciples to become that empty, open, welcoming, holy place where God enters in and love is free to happen. Remember how she says, “Let it be done to me as you say.”
Mary’s response to God challenges us to ask ourselves: When God makes a loving overture into my life, do I try to avoid the encounter? Do I demand full knowledge before I respond, or have I reached that point of vulnerability from which I can trust God’s voice without full understanding and believe God’s leading without being completely and personally in control of MY life, MY plans, MY future? Do I ask God to reveal what cannot be answered, or am I vulnerable enough, to respond from my deepest truest self and say something new, a “Yes” that will change me forever? Because of Mary’s “Yes,” she became God’s living temple.
Now you say, “Preacher, it may be good and well for Mary to offer space in herself for God to dwell and be born into the world, but few of us possess the radical vulnerability to do so.” But do so we must…through profound and prayerful responsiveness to God’s GRACE, we too must welcome God into the very fabric and fibers of our lives. In order to do that, God asks us to give away everything of ourselves. The gift of greatest meaning and power we can offer to God, is not our skills, gifts, abilities, and possessions. In a few weeks we’ll remember gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh the magi brought to the infant king. In the New Testament church Peter and Paul had their preaching. But the virgin Mary had only space, love and belief to offer. What is it that conceives Christ and delivers Christ to the world?
Preaching?
Art?
Writing?
Scholarship?
Social justice?
These are all gifts worth having and sharing. But preachers lose their charisma, art goes out of vogue, scholarship becomes out dated, social justice alone does not suffice. In the end, when all other gifts have met their inevitable limits or lost their luster, the virgin peasant girl who is boldly in love with God and who makes a sanctuary of life is the one who delivers Jesus Christ, who himself becomes Deliverer of the world.
Isn’t this really the mystery we celebrate at Christmas? Christ born in us. God here in us. All the trappings and treasures, traditions and trees point us to the truth that God has enter time and opened eternity. Look with me to the poor, peasant girl, the Virgin Mary who teaches us by her example to simply quiet ourselves and instead of doing something, just to be something…something special. We can choose to be vulnerable, we can be a womb of welcome, a sacred place made holy by the God who dwells within. God seeks a place in each heart and life. How will you respond?
This is what Mary in her absolute vulnerability says: “Lord, let it be done to me as you say.” May that be our prayer on this third Sunday in Advent and may this be a truly Holy and JOYFUL Christmas.
Amen and Amen.
