Guts

Propers: The Fourth Sunday of Advent, AD 2020 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

We don’t know much about Mary. There are legends, traditions. Later there would be doctrines and dogmas. But all we know for certain—assuming we take the Scriptures seriously—is that she was a young, vulnerable, unmarried woman who was chosen, and who consented, to become the Mother of God.

These days a child out of wedlock would not be such a big deal, but hers were harsher times. Back then a woman without a husband, a child without a father, had no support, no standing, and no protection. They would be, in short, condemned to the edges of society, to penury, shame, and exposure. We do not hear anything of Mary’s parents, who might take her in, only of a distant cousin, an elderly kinswoman. Yet it would be inaccurate to say she is alone. Mary is betrothed to Joseph, a man of whom again we know little, save that he is quiet and he is good.

Betrothal in those days was a formal ceremony which took place nine months to a year in advance of the wedding, specifically to prove that the bride could not be pregnant by another man. To break such a betrothal required a full religious divorce, and if Joseph were to find Mary pregnant, knowing the Child could not be his own, he would be within his legal rights to have her stoned to death—the ancient penalty for adultery. He won’t do that, of course. Joseph is a good man. But how could she know that yet?

So imagine this: here’s Mary, going about her business, a girl barely into her teens, in an agricultural community of 50 to 75 families, and an angel appears, an honest-to-God angel. And he says, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with thee!” And Mary is, as it says, perplexed, pondering what sort of greeting this might be. But I’m wondering if that isn’t a polite way to say that she’s freaking out, because the very next thing the angel has to tell her is, “Don’t be afraid!”

For you, Mary, have found favor with God. And now you will conceive in your womb and bear a Son, and you will name Him Jesus—which means “Yahweh Saves”—He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to Him the throne of His ancestor David. He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of His Kingdom there will be no end.

Now it’s been a thousand years since the time of King David, who ruled over God’s people Israel, and who was promised that a descendant of his line would continue to reign over Israel forever. And in that thousand years between David and Mary, a lot has happened.

Empires have come and gone. God’s people have been scattered to the winds and gathered home again. There was a whole other dynasty of warrior-priests, whose final princess was named Mary—after whom our Mary was likely named. But the last Davidic king to sit on Israel’s throne was blinded and led away into captivity more than 500 years before Mary was born. And Herod, the usurper currently ruling Judea, is a jealous, bloody tyrant, and puppet of the Emperor in Rome.

Mary knows all this, and it’s a lot to take in. A lot of history, a lot of hope, a lot of broken dreams. An angel from heaven—terrifying in power and glory, yet himself nothing more than a servant of the Most High—has told her that she, as a betrothed virgin, will bear the Son of God; and that He will be the Messiah, the promised anointed heir of King David, a line that was broken half a millennium before. And this of course will place Mary and her Son in direct conflict with Herod and his taskmasters in Rome.

Danger heaped upon danger. The danger of being rejected, abandoned, divorced, and stoned. The danger of bearing a King who will topple a pretender from his throne. The danger of an angel of the Lord come down to a small and rural village. Angels in the Old Testament are known for having a blast radius. And then of course there’s the identity of the Child Himself. For Mary is a good Jewish woman: she knows that God does not sire offspring in the manner of men or pagan gods.

The Son of God is God Himself, God in flesh, God come down. The Son of God is Immanuel, God-With-Us, who looks to be a Son of Man but who in truth is so much more. And Mary knows all this, for it had all been prophesied of old. But it’s one thing to read it in a Bible, and quite another when a spirit bursts into your home and God ignites Himself within your womb.

Who is this God, who is about to turn her life upside-down? Who is this God, who sets her at odds not simply with husband and town but with empires and kings and the spirit of air and darkness who holds the very world within his thrall? Mary knows, for she has seen and understood the works of the Lord. Mary knows, for God is revealed throughout the length and breadth of the history of her people.

And in response to all this she replies with that famous song of Mary, her mighty Magnificat [sung from Lutheran Book of Worship]:

My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my savior, for He has looked with favor on His lowly servant. From this day all generations will call me blessed. The Almighty has done great things for me, and holy is His Name.

He has mercy on those who fear Him, in every generation. He has shown the strength of His arm. He has scattered the proud in their conceit. He has cast down the mighty from their thrones and has lifted up the lowly.

He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich He has sent away empty. He has come to the help of His servant Israel, for He has remembered His promise of mercy, the promise He made to our fathers, to Abraham and his children forever.

This is the God Mary knows: the God who champions the poor and oppressed, the God who feeds the hungry and topples tyrants, the God who keeps His promises year after year, century upon century, even to the End of the Age. This is the God who has chosen her, who has honored her, who has taken her for His own—His own Mother, His own womb, His own flesh and blood. She is the source of Jesus’ humanity. She is the body of Christ before Christ has a body.

Mary, peasant girl of a broken lineage in a fallen kingdom on the far side of the world, is to be Blessed Virgin, Holy Theotokos, Mother of God. And to all this wonder and terror and danger and promise, she says yes: “Here I am, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”

It is her consent, her fiat, her yes, which undoes the long disobedience of humankind, all the way back to the garden, back to our first parents in Eden. Eve’s no is undone in that yes. And just as all men have died in Adam, so now do all men rise in Jesus Christ. Behold: the New Adam, the New Eve, the New Creation.

Mary is our mother and our model. We are called to be like her, not simply in meekness and obedience, but in bravery and defiance, in suffering and in hope. She pays a great price for becoming the Mother of our Lord, and reaps a far greater reward. Everything promised to Mary is promised to us as well. As hers was the Body of Christ, so now we as the Church are the Body of Christ. And as she bore the Creator into His Creation, so now we are called to bear Christ anew in our own day and age.

The second verse of “O Come, All Ye Faithful” contains the lyric, “Born of a virgin, a mortal He comes.” But that’s not what the Latin says. In Latin it’s earthier, grittier than that: gesterant puellae viscera—born through the guts of a girl! That’s our job now. We are to be Mary. We must birth the Christ. We are to welcome, to gestate, the life of God within us, so that through us, through our flesh, through our yes, Christ may grow and thrive and be born again for all the world to see.

Soon it is Christmas: let all tyrants tremble. Soon it is Christmas: let all mothers rejoice. Soon it is Christmas: let Christ be born in us, that He may bear this world anew.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.