“Mary in Israel”
By Rev. Dr. Jason Byassee
December 15, 2024, Advent III
Good morning, friends. It’s the Third Sunday of Advent when even Protestant churches like ours focus on Mary. We light a pink candle for her. And we tell her stories: the angel, Joseph, the shepherds, the magi. We act these things out in our pageant and our children grow up looking at life through the eyes of these characters: innkeepers and centurions and townsfolk and whatnot. We will have animals back on Christmas Eve: sheep and goats and bunnies, and an alpaca (just like the first Nativity). Our pageant has had a major revision thanks to Fraser Elsdon and Andrew Adridge, so it’ll be great. We do Christmas right around here, don’t we? Ask the 800 or so who gathered yesterday for Yule Sing.
I was at a conference recently and met a colleague whose work I’d admired. She works on Flannery O’Connor, my favourite American fiction writer, who died in 1964. If you don’t know O’Connor, I understand—she’s a minor figure in the literary canon, a regional writer, a southern gothic grotesque, all descriptors she loathed. But if you understand the way God transforms creation, you’ll love O’Connor. Now, she uses racist language enough to get cancelled, but none other than Alice Walker, author of Beloved, black queer pioneer, defends O’Connor’s work for being not just accurate but transformative. Dr. Jessica Hooten Wilson is a scholar of O’Connor, younger than me, teaches at Pepperdine, so I was pleased to meet her. But I’d forgotten something important. She doesn’t just write about O’Connor. She is writing more O’Connor. Flannery’s estate approached her and said, ‘we have an unfinished manuscript, and we think you’re the person to bring it to the world.’ Now that’s a sorority: Flannery O’Connor, Alice Walker, Jessica Hooten Wilson. Watch out when the sisters get together.
In church we don’t just have a book, the Bible. We also have the author, Jesus Christ. We become him, and he us. And he’s asking us to finish his story with our lives. That’s what Christianity is for.
Our scripture for today is a prayer by Hannah. She has been unable to have children. Her husband pouts, aren’t I better than ten sons? And she cries even more. The Bible is often funny, and we miss it. The priest Eli hears her prayers and thinks she’s drunk. Have you ever prayed so hard that you acted intoxicated? That’s one way to manage Christmas cocktail season without drinking: just pray hard enough that you’re off your face and no one will serve you any more alcohol. Hannah explains no, she is just praying, old Eli blesses her, and she conceives of the prophet Samuel. Israel’s stories are not flattering. Neither do ours have to be. Our corrupt religious leaders mistake prayer for drunkenness. But our God still makes a way out of no way.
In Advent, we follow some more childless women. Elizabeth, who becomes mother of John the Baptist. And Mary, who becomes mother to … well you know who. The stories differ some: Elizabeth’s husband Zechariah is a priest in the temple like Eli. And the angel Gabriel turns up and says:
“You’re going to have a kid!”
“We’ve never had kids.”
“I know, God can make a universe, surely God can make another prophet.”
Zechariah says “uh, no, see, this is a problem. I’m a priest in the temple. I come to work here every day and one thing that never happens is an angel doesn’t show up with new news about God doing something to save us. This is not happening. I have a seminary degree to prove it.”
And the angel Gabriel says, “You’re not allowed to speak anymore.” It’s the perfect punishment: if God’s leaders can’t listen to God, we shouldn’t speak.
Do you know that our Muslim cousins also honour Gabriel? They call him Gibril and tell a version of this story.
Gibril appears to a much less likely person. If Zechariah got it all wrong, then Mary, what chance does she have? Zechariah is old, prominent, an elder, respected, we might’ve known his name if we’d never heard John’s. Mary is young, unheard of, we’d never have heard her name without her child. Mary is the wrong person for this: wrong gender, wrong age, wrong marital status, wrong end of the power spectrum, wrong, wrong, wrong and God says: you, you’re perfect.
Do you see why I keep saying that Jesus Christ calls all the wrong people? And that’s good news for anybody who’s ever felt or been wrong, weird, unchosen, forsaken. No, beloved, you’re exactly who I’ve come for.
So, Gibril heads over to Mary. Now how’s this going to work out?
The angel says, “You’re going to have a kid.”
Mary says, “I am a kid.”
The angel says “will anyone let me finish a sentence today? Like I said, you’re going to have a kid. And this kid will be God’s kid. There will be no sex — women are not just there for sex, they are there for God, like every creature. And this kid will save every kid, and every creature, what do you say?”
I love this vision by the African American painter Henry Owassa Tanner—who travelled to the holy land and used local models. Every parent has seen that look on their child’s face: are you a fool? You fire angel thingee?
The church knows this story. We’ve had 30 infants play baby Jesus in our pageant’s history. Last year we had a daughter of a previous baby Jesus play baby Jesus for the first time. Grandbaby Jesus! But suspend what you know a minute. You’re an oppressed people in Roman-occupied Judea. It’s not called Israel and hasn’t been since the Babylonians destroyed the state of Judah in 586 BCE. It won’t be called Israel again until 1948 when the modern state is constituted. Watch the new Mary movie on Netflix for a sense of how dangerous that world is. Luke is written after the Romans destroy the temple and crush a Jewish uprising in 70-73 AD. In 135 AD the Jews rebel again, and the Romans ban them from Judea and rename the place Palestine, after the Jews’ historic enemy, the Philistines. The ultimate punishment for a people with a promised land: you can’t have it back again ever. Did I say they/them? I mean us. The Romans ban us.
If you’re Jewish in that time and place, you’d like a messiah right now very much please. A king like David who unites the people, conquers Jerusalem, defends the land against his enemies, and has a son, Solomon, who builds the first temple. Messiahs bring political independence. And God’s messiah is to be born to ... who’s that again? Mary? From where? Nazareth?!
In the history of Israel, important people get born of other important people but with angst. Sarah has trouble getting pregnant, but births Isaac. Rebekah has the same problem until God intervenes and gives her Jacob and Esau, who fight until this day. Jacob’s wife Rachel can’t conceive until God blesses her with Judah and Benjamin, two fathers of the twelve tribes. Jacob also has lots more kids via servant girls and other wives (I’m not making this up—read Genesis, it couldn’t get a PG rating if told straight). Friends of mine who’ve had trouble conceiving struggle with these stories: it sounds like if you pray hard enough, God will give you a child. A Muslim scholar I heard recently argued this way: no, God is the giver of life, and also the giver of non-conception, either way, God will be glorified. Hannah herself prays, “The barren has borne seven, but she who has many children is forlorn.”
In our day, we have medical marvels to help people conceive who otherwise could not. That’s a gift. But even it can’t promise a child. The great Karl Barth says, “the only child who must be born already has been”. But wait, there are children who need parents. And parents who need children: in the foster system, via adoption, and more importantly now: in church. One of our elder women visited with our youth group over Christmas cookies and they loved each other. In church you can have a dozen stand-in moms, a hundred surrogate grandparents, and gobs of substitute grandchildren. To become human, you need folks without your same last name pulling for you, praying for you, making life beautiful with you. Where else in our culture do people of different generations and surnames make their life together?
At my last church in North Carolina we had a wonderful children’s ministry, some 60-70 kids involved. And our children’s minister was a marvel, like Bonnie Marsh here: God bless you Colette Krontz if you’re out there watching. When I couldn’t remember a child’s name, Colette usually could, but if she couldn’t, she’d ask Bill: a retired Navy veteran from World War II. When I met him, he was in a wheelchair, on oxygen, gruff, with anchor tattoo proudly in place. I’d been told he only ever ate out of cans he opened with his bare hands. Why was Bill so good with names? He’d been the postmaster. He knew every family in town. And he’d remember: hey, how was your test? Third grade is tough. Hey, I’ve been praying for your mama, how’s she doing? When he died the church was full—for a man with no family in town, 600 people turned out. Don’t you want more Bills in your life? More Colettes? More Bonnies and Joshs, more Lindas and Bettys, more Connors and Sierras? We may one day look back on this generation and lament that we were the only ones in human history foolish enough to think you can raise children without grandparents and cousins and aunts and uncles around. Well, in church we got plenty of stand-ins.
Mary and Elizabeth are actually cousins. Elizabeth is one of Mary’s people. So, she dashes far away in the dead of winter to see someone who loves her.
39 In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, 40 where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. 41 When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit 42 and exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. 43 And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? 44 For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy. 45 Blessed is she who believed there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken by the Lord.”
If you are or have ever been Catholic, that’s about half the hail Mary, straight from scripture. This passage is so important in Catholicism it’s inspired some of our best artists.
What’s the other half of the hail Mary, the part we don’t use?
Well, here’s the whole thing. We’re used to hearing our choir sing it in Latin in here, let’s bravely post it in English.
Hail Mary, full of grace,
The Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou among women,
And blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners,
now and in the hour of our death, amen.
If you’re Catholic, you can say that as easily as the Lord’s prayer or the national anthem. John Arndt and his double David Gungor of the Brilliance have a moody, angsty, and brilliant version I commend to you. These are some of the most beloved words in human history. Even if we’re Protestants, our foremothers prayed these words while giving birth for 500 years before the Reformation. Their thoughts were of Mary. They knew women had done even harder things before.
There’s a debate among Catholic feminists: is Mary our ally or not? Those who say she is point out that we Protestants lost a powerful woman at the heart of faith. After the Reformation all women could do was marry a pastor. Before the Reformation begins in 1517, women could be abbesses, order popes and kings around. Those more circumspect point out that Mary has been used to shame women for their sexuality and elevate a harmful purity culture. There is truth in both claims. And as ever, we are trinitarians, so the answer is never one or the other. It is both and both and both. In God the Holy Trinity there is the Father, and the Son, and the Spirit who is nothing but love between the first two. So, nobody has to lose. We are against binaries that claim for me to be right, you have to be wrong and evil. We Protestants are right. The Bible is God’s first word. After Vatican II, Catholics agree: Scripture is how God speaks first. And in the Bible, Mary is the model for faith. Her every word is precious.
For example, at the wedding at Cana, Jesus is annoyed and doesn’t want to make the water into wine. She tells the stewards, “Do whatever he tells you.” At that moment she breaks the fourth wall, looks right at us, and preaches the gospel, the first preacher in Christian history is not John the Baptist, it’s not even Jesus, it’s Mary of Nazareth and she says to us all, “Do whatever he tells you.” In five words she says more than I’ll ever say in weekly sermons of 3000 words. The Catholics are also right. In the divorce at the Reformation, Catholics got the pope, the saints, the hierarchy. Catholics also got Mary. Why did we give away the mother of God, mother of the living, the mother of believers, this daughter of Zion, like Sarah, Rebecah, Rachel, Ruth, Hannah? In all those stories women get pregnant the normal way, their father and mother knew one another and bore a child. But in Mary’s case? No dad. None at all. Just God. And you don’t think other girls haven’t shown up in the village claiming their baby was from God?
In the magical painting by Sandro Botticelli, Joseph is a ball of misery. Or is he worshiping? Or is he ashamed: his friends are like, dude, you didn’t touch her, who did? If she says the child is from God, you should stone her to death. Joseph isn’t sure what to do. You ever felt like that? Unsure what to do? So does the holy family. So, no binary: Catholics will share, Protestants will too, and Pentecostalism might be the church’s future. God promises us a church, but not what kind: but there will be a people witnessing to Jesus Christ as he makes all things new.
This meeting between Mary and Elizabeth is a meeting between two women whose pregnancies undo the old world and create a new one. That’s why folks of all cultures honour these two. John will announce Messiah’s coming. Jesus, his cousin, will be that messiah. They will fall out: John at one point asks: ‘Are you the one? Because we’re all kinda disappointed.’ Ever felt that in your family? Tension? Strife? So does Jesus in his. Eventually John will die, executed by a petty tyrant. Jesus will be executed by another pathetic tyrant (I almost said powerful tyrant, but that’s a contradiction in terms, just ask Bashar Al Assad. Welcome to Russia baby!). And at Jesus’ resurrection, tyrants quake. And women rejoice. Like Mary and Elizabeth at the Visitation. Rowan Williams, former archbishop of Canterbury, calls this meeting “a conspiracy of hope.”
Finally, my favourite description of the virgin birth. It’s not an explanation: we don’t get those in Christianity or life. We get a story, song, miracles, but not workaday modern science. St Symeon the New Theologian in the 11th century in Byzantium askes this: how is it fitting for God to get born of a mother alone with no male involvement? Now remember, 11th century monks are not your poster boys for feminism. Symeon figures this: well, God already made a person from no parents. Who’s that? Adam. God already made a person from a man alone: Eve. God already made persons from a man and a woman both: all the rest of us. The only thing God had not yet done was make a person from a woman alone: Jesus. That’s not an argument. It’s an artist’s rendering: God always works in the most beautiful way possible. All the great women in Israel got pregnant with help from God and a husband. In one case, a woman in Israel gets pregnant with help from God and no husband. So we too can pray: “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.”
I’ll hold off on the more disputed second half. Wait are we Catholic now? One of you told me you were going to bring a rosary soon. Good, they’re always welcome. Are we Jewish now? One of you told me you’re going to bring a kippah. Good, always a blessing. Are we Pentecostal now? None of you have told me you’re going to raise your hands in worship yet, but we make you sometimes at children’s blessing, I raise mine at communion. Things are only going to get weirder still. Know why? God saves the world through the womb of an untouched Jewish teenager from the sticks. And that’s the best joke there’s ever been. Not mockery, but a deep belly laugh that says, wow, the joke’s on all of us, and God wins in the end, and nobody has to lose. Thanks be to God. Amen.