Advent 4
Opening
It's so often happens that I am boggled in my mind with what we say and read in church. I think did we really say that? Did we really mean that?
Take, for example, the Collect of the day we opened our liturgy with.
Purify our conscience, Almighty God, by your daily visitation, that your Son Jesus Christ, at his coming, may find in us a mansion prepared for himself; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
We just let it roll off our tongues. But listen! In just the most simple sort of way, we acknowledge that Almighty God comes to me everyday. I can imagine that might be a kind of theoretical statement whereby we acknowledge that God the creator of the universe is somehow maybe in the universe itself present. But with me? When I'm getting out of bed, groggy from sleep and wanting a cup of coffee? Me when I'm crabby or impatient?
But we are claiming that God comes to visit me in order to prepare me for meeting God's Son Jesus Christ. It's like getting ready for church when I was younger, my mother made certain that I was dressed in my finest Sunday clothes. "You never know who you're going to meet."
But we're not talking just dressing up in fine clothes. No we're talking about the finest mansion. God is visiting us So that we become the finest dwelling place in the land.
The Son Jesus Christ is going to live with us. Amazing. Don't you think. And then there's this whole Mary thing.
Magnificat
Experience
My earliest abiding memory
Today’s reading begins a pivot from a focus on John to Jesus, culminating, of course, in Christmas and the Incarnation of the Son of God. Today the focus is on Mary, his mother.
When I was growing up I didn't know much about Mary other than what I encountered at the annual children's Christmas pageant.
We hear from John in the Gospel, but it’s focused on John’s relationship to “the one who comes after.”
The psalm is that “Song of Mary” that I so treasured at Evergreen camp in my teens.
When I was in my early teens for several years running I attended church camp in Evergreen, Colorado. Many years later I learned that that particular camp had a very significant role in the life of the national church from the 1940s and '50s. I learned also that it was dominated by High Church clergy in the 1960s when I was there. That, I guess, explains why every night we had Solemn Evensong. So imagine a group of 13-year-old boys and girls gathering every evening for prayer with incense and chanted lessons and prayers.
It was at that point that Mary became an active part of my spiritual life with the intonation of the Magnificat -- the "Song of Mary" -- and the petitions in Evening Prayer. There's something about the combination of smell and music that one never quite shakes.
It was there that I first imagined that I wanted to be a priest. I was called to be a priest. I was also a 14 year old trying to find his way in a sometimes strange world.
I heard my first dirty joke, told by a priest. Did that have something to do with it?
I first heard about this author named C.S. Lewis. We read from his space trilogy, particularly the volume named Perelandra. That same priest made the case that in this novel Lewis was painting a portrait of what a renewed and redeemed creation looks and feels like.
This, then, was the first time I encountered the notion that -- the Gospel, the faith, God's very self and presence, -- might be communicated through fiction or other kinds of writing. Later I would encounter it again and again in poetry.
20’s
In my 20s I became particularly interested in experiencing and understanding contemplative style prayer of various kinds. During that time I experimented with the well-known Catholic practice of praying the Rosary. I wasn't trying to be Catholic, but trying to be closer to God, in some sense or other made a "mansion". Interestingly, some years later I learned that more and more Protestants were praying the Rosary for just the same kinds of reasons I had. Eventually there developed a method for Anglicans, the aptly titled "Anglican Rosary."
In ministry
By the time my children came along, I was committed to praying with them and trying to ensure that they didn't remember a time that we didn't pray together. Among others, at bedtime we prayed the Lord's Prayer and the Hail Mary -- though I modified both of them slightly. I didn't use the word "hallowed" in the Lord's Prayer because I figured my kids would never use that word in a normal sentence, that it was not a real word in that sense. I also didn't use the phrase "at the time of our death" in the Rosary, figuring that young children didn't need to be daily reminded of death. They would be exposed to that enough in time.
"Hail Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus."
Marianists
Much later in life, I began a close relationship with the Marianist community in Honolulu. It began with my spiritual director telling me to find a Christian community outside of my own community and commit to worship with them at least once a week. As their name implies, the Marianists have a particular devotion to Mary.
Mary sentimentalized
Taking Mary seriously
In my view, Mary has for too long in the tradition been sentimentalized and even trivialized. It's a way of seeming to idolize her without taking what she represents seriously in our lives.
Putting Mary on a pedestal
The church had regarded Mary's place in the gospel as central from the very beginning. Early on the tradition gave her the title God bearer -- theotokos in the Greek.
In the Middle Ages she was regarded as the paramount model of chivalric love and figured prominently in poetry, art, and song.
Later in the Roman Catholic tradition her place was so elevated that she seemed almost to be on a par with Jesus himself. It was one of the points of contention at the time of the Reformation.
That may seem to contradict my claim that Mary was not taken seriously. When we exalt someone so high -- "Queen of Heaven" is one of her titles -- that person is so remote that she is inaccessible by us mere mortals.
I had experienced in my own prayer that Mary was very real and very much a part of my every day life. Others had the same sort of experience.
Mary’s humanity emphasized
I was moved to discover representations of Mary in the 70’s and beyond that reacted against the sentimentalizing of Mary. Her pregnancy and child-rearing were portrayed – well, the way real people are.
It didn’t make her less important in my prayer life, but more. What Mary had to say to me became more and more important. Not the least of these was the song of Mary, the Magnificat.
This canticle begins with a wistful, spiritual sounding cry from Mary:
“My soul magnifies the Lord.”
It is the tenor of that phrase that I first resonated with, Mary helping me to turn my inner eyes and heart toward the awesome mystery of God.
But the song continues to be firmly planted in the world we all live in.
Rather closer to a revolutionary
Her song rings out the message:
- God has mercy on those who fear him.
- God Scatters the proud in the height of their hubris.
- God Casts down the mighty when they think they're most powerful.
- God Fills the hungry with plenty to eat while the wealthy go without.
- God Fulfills the promise of Abraham and his offspring.
Mary speaks the language of the Gospel that her son would later preach. The expectations that we place on the world are over-turned when God does the preparing. Mary is in harmony with the gospel from before Jesus was even born.
The Magnificat and the Beatitudes are very close and speak to the same divine reality, the same promises of God that are already (but not yet) fulfilled.
Mary's voice is at the heart of the Gospel that we preach. Not because she is exalted in heaven, but because she lives in the world that we do.
We live in a world where the proud appear to be victorious. We live in a world that takes advantage of the poor and the weak. We live in the world where power is the be all and end all.
Mary courageously proclaims that in God's mansion, those values are turned upside down. She is something of a revolutionary, at least in a manner similar to the way Jesus was a revolutionary.
Closing
On this last Sunday before Christmas, Mary is the featured speaker. A mother. A mother who would go through all the pangs and anxiety associated with becoming a mother. But a mother, also, who would one day be at his side as he was executed for being a danger to the state.
Mary knows the utter devastation of seeing it all come crashing around her. But she believes in God's promise that, in the end, the poor are lifted up and the proud are put in their place.
This Sunday is sweet in the cycle we call Advent. The promise of things to come is almost tangible, almost a taste on our tongue, almost within reach. She exemplifies for us the world we live in, in which we are called to put our faith in that which we don't yet see. Some have called it the "already but not yet" of Christian hope.
When I was in college I studied the 14th c. English mystics. Among them was Julian of Norwich. She was one of the reasons that we named our 2nd child Julian. Julian (or Juliana) of Norwich lived in a time of pandemic. It was called the "Black Death." When she looked around her there was not much evidence that God's promises would be victorious. And then she got sick and was near death. There she received a series of "Revelations" which she wrote down so that we have them in our own day. She did not see all that was wrong in her world. She did not see all the things that weren't working and were tearing people down and apart.
She saw what Mary saw. In words that I first encountered and memorized in T.S. Eliot's long poetry sequence the "Four Quartets":
All shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.
That is hope -- an Advent hope. Amen.
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