Mary: Meek and Mild or Bold and Gutsy?
What God has done for me will never be forgotten,
the God whose very name is holy, set apart from all others.
Luke 1:48b-49, The Message
Are you ready for Christmas? You know, are the presents wrapped and waiting to be tucked under the tree? Is the baking done? Are the Christmas cards in the mail? Are you ready to welcome family and friends into your home? Are you ready to be transformed by Christ’s birth? Are you ready for Christmas?
When I was growing up, we would start getting ready for Christmas on the first weekend in December. My mother would pull out the boxes full of Christmas decorations and the process would begin. Each of us had our own job to do. My brother was in charge of the outdoor lights. The older he got, the more elaborate the display. By high school it was a huge peace symbol on top of the roof. My sister would busy herself in the kitchen with the holiday baking… our grandmother’s cookies and Irish soda bread to give away to the neighbors. Mom would start writing the annual Christmas letter sharing with friends and family who lived far away the adventures of our past year.
I have shared with you before that it was my job to help with the decorations – specifically to create the display of madonnas. Not Madonna, the singer but the Madonna… Madonna, the mother of Jesus. My mother had been collecting pictures and figurines of Mary for years. From all over the world, her collection of Madonnas represented a variety of cultures and races, each one seemed to be more beautiful than all the rest. With a sense of anticipation and awe, I put each figurine in place, finally placing my mother’s favorite pure white China statue in the gilded arch – a can from a ham spray painted gold – nested in angel hair – spun glass, actually – in the center of the display. Mary, meek and mild – Mary, lovely and serene.
I have told you before, that now, all these years later, I am the one with a collection. But I don’t just collect just Marys, I collect the whole nativity scene. We now have 39 different crèches from all around the world. And my favorite Mary is probably the Mary from Uganda – simple… plain… almost crude in her appearance. Made from the bark of a banana tree, this Mary speaks to me of the power of God’s incarnation. She tells the story of God “taking on our flesh” in the birth of Jesus. Mary, simple and holy. Mary, one of us.
The truth is, none of us can be ready for Christmas until we have spent time with Mary. On this fourth Sunday in Advent with Christmas now only a few days away, the scriptures tell us Mary’s story.
According to Luke, when the angel Gabriel told Mary she was going to have a baby, she was afraid. Well of course she was! She was probably all of fifteen years old, engaged to a man she hardly knew, and about to leave the only family she knew to become a part of his. An angel showed up and told her she was pregnant and Mary was “thoroughly shaken.” She and Joseph had not “known” each other, in the biblical sense, so how could she be “with child?” What would her mother think? Or worse, her father? What about the neighbors? What would Joseph do?
Can we really blame her for running away from home to be with the only person she could think of who might understand… her cousin Elizabeth who was also expecting? I can just imagine the two of them commiserating about morning sickness and swollen ankles and cravings. Two pregnant women – one young, poor and unwed and the other far beyond the age to conceive – sharing obstetrical details with one another, wondering out loud about the promise and possibility of the life within their wombs.
We don’t know the whole story of the months Mary spent there with her cousin. We only know what Luke tells us. We only know that with Elizabeth, Mary found her voice, singing a song that invites us all to see beyond the ordinary… see beyond the status quo into the promised future of God.
Of course, when we think of Mary, most of us have in mind the meek and mild Mary of Christmas cards… of white China figurines surrounded by angel hair… of children’s Christmas pageants. Mary… “You know the one I mean. The one who has a passive and demure stance. The one who has pale, white skin and folded hands, and eyes that are either averted toward the ground or staring wistfully up at the heavens.”* We think of the Mary that little girls in Sunday School hope to be when they are finally the oldest girl in the pageant and responsible enough to hold a baby. We think of Mary, meek and mild, sitting beside a manger, cradling her newborn son.
But this is not the Mary of Luke’s Gospel… at least not yet! No, the Mary we meet in the story thus far is strong, active, smart, courageous, and maybe even a little bit audacious. She might better be described as bold and gutsy! She was strong enough to get out of town before her parents could send her off to boarding school or Joseph could withdraw his proposal. She was courageous enough to say “yes” to her role in God’s incarnation and audacious enough to dream dreams for this child that she was carrying… dreams big enough to transform the world
Something must have happened to her as she met Elizabeth. The Spirit was not only present in that first kick that Elizabeth felt within her womb but also present in Mary. Finding her voice she sang out a song reminiscent of the songs of praise and prophecies from the Hebrew scriptures… a song proclaiming that the Messiah had come. Finding her voice, she sang of a new world order that was waiting to be born.
But this song was no lullaby meant to put a baby to sleep. Instead, her dreamings for her firstborn son were a wake up call to the world. Listen again to her words, this time from The Message:
“I’m bursting with God-news; I’m dancing the song of my Savior God.
God took one look at me, and look what happened –
I’m the most fortunate woman on earth!
What God has done for me will never be forgotten,
the God whose very name is holy, set apart from all others.
God’s mercy flows in wave after wave
on those who are in awe before him.
God bared an arm and showed strength,
scattered the bluffing braggarts.
God knocked tyrants off their high horses,
pulled victims out of the mud.
The starving poor sat down to a banquet;
the callous rich were left out in the cold.
God embraced he chosen child, Israel;
and remembered and piled on the mercies,
piled them high.
It is exactly what God promised,
beginning with Abraham and right up to now.”
Right up to now, this song is a wake-up call. With this Mary… this bold and gutsy Mary, we encounter God’s embarrassing and threatening “challenge to good order” in our lives and in our world. With this Mary, we come face-to-face with the upside-down world that is coming when we truly embrace the birth of Jesus Christ. With this Mary, we hear the call to be a part of creating the new world that God is calling into existence.
I guess it depends on our perspective… the circumstances of our lives… which Mary we like the best. Mary, meek and mild allows us to keep on with life just the way it is… no changes… no recognition that this world is seriously out of whack with the Gospel! With Mary, meek and mild nothing has to change in our world. We can ignore her words, telling us that the poor will have the bests seats at the table while the rich are sent away empty. We can chock up the idea of God knocking the powerful down a notch or two or three, to raging hormones and prenatal moodiness. With Mary, meek and mild we can contain Christmas to a rather innocuous celebration that can be neatly packed away in boxes until this time next year.
But Mary, bold and gutsy – well she’s going to hold us all accountable to God’s dreamings for our world! Mary, bold and gutsy reminds us that God intends to influence our politics and our economics right along with our churchgoing. Mary, bold and gutsy challenges us to realize that with the birth of her firstborn son, things will change. The hungry will be fed – the poor will find favor with God. And those of us who would stand in God’s way are in for a shock. We just might find ourselves being sent away. Mary, bold and gutsy sings of a world where no one goes to bed hungry and no one is left to make it on their own. She sings of a world where those in authority will stop abusing their power and the last will be first and justice will be our choice. Mary, bold and gutsy sings of the incarnation where God takes on our flesh, becoming one of us and standing with us no matter what. Mary sings of the promise of love.
Barbara Brown Taylor offers that Mary “does not have a sonogram, or a husband, or an affidavit from the Holy Spirit that says, ‘The child really is mine. Now leave the poor girl alone.’ All she has is her unreasonable willingness to believe that God who has chosen her will be a part of whatever happens next.”**
So here we sit with just a few more days until Christmas waiting for whatever will happen next. Are we ready? Do we have Mary’s unreasonable willingness to believe that God will be a part of everything that happens next? Do you know which Mary will come to cradle her firstborn son in her arms? Will she be Mary meek and mild or bold and gutsy?
*From “Mother-Vision: On Justice and Social Transformation” – a sermon by Traci West in The Book of Women’s Sermons: Hearing God in Each Other’s Voices.
** From “Singing Ahead of Time” -- a sermon by Barbara Brown Taylor in Home By Another Way.