“Mary’s Memory”
By Rev. Dr. Jason Byassee
Sunday, December 29, 2024
Reading: Luke 2:19
“Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart” (Luke 2:19).
It’s been a wild week here at the church. In Germany, Christians say that at Easter the Lord Jesus rises up and the preachers all fall down—with exhaustion. I don’t want to overdo that—my rabbi colleagues here work harder in the high holy days than I ever have, many professionals work Christmas Eve and Day, but there’s something to it.
I am amazed at all we do at Christmastime. Yule Sing on December 14th feels like two years ago somehow, but it was only two weeks. Our own Ms. Elaine was here and conducting with all her radiance, the Weston Silver Band filling God’s house with song, Stephen Boda blasting away on that organ. Fourth4th Advent, December 22nd, with our El Hogar bake sale raising more than usual, Joanne showing us all how to do mission in Honduras now and in the future. Dress rehearsal for the pageant that evening. Andrew Adridge captaining us all with grace. Volunteers risking their fingers setting up the set and tearing it down between the last pageant and our candlelight service. Two shows on Christmas Eve. Joanne preaching for our first Christmas morning service in years. Dayle leading us in feeding 450 folks in our auditorium on Christmas Day. Many asked if we had any more Christmas services later. Uh, no, we’re all serviced out, sorry. Sextons doing extra work. Admin people counting extra money right up until December 31 (if you want tax credit in 2024, give by Tuesday—this isn’t like your RRSP giving!). All of our generosity of time, talent, and treasure making it happen. Thank you all.
And then baby Jesus. Many kids in our church have played baby Jesus in our pageants going back 30 years to John Harries’ invention of this gift to the city. We had two new baby Jesus’ this time: mighty Penny and mighty Hudson. And I gotta say, they seemed thoroughly unimpressed by the whole rigmarole. Their moms were outstanding angels. The babies just sort of yawned and fed and slept. Kinda what babies do.
One of the most distinctive things Jesus teaches is that all of us must become like little children, infants even. His kingdom has a very small door, and most of us are too full of ourselves to squeeze through. Hudson and Penny have figured something out that the rest of us usually don’t. Feeding and napping and cooing is a pretty good life. It’s interesting that those who live longest go back to doing those very same things. The wisest ones get there faster.
We’ve been in a series on Mary at our church all Advent and Christmas. This Sunday is technically the first Sunday after Christmas, still part of Christmas season. On January 5, 2025 we’ll celebrate Epiphany with communion, and on the first Sunday after Epiphany we’ll confirm some young people and we’ll all remember our baptisms. I love it when there’s something special every Sunday. But today, y’all are the keeners here, and there’s nothing special. I mean we still have the trees, there are some Christmas songs in our liturgy, but insiders call the Sundays after Easter and Christmas “low Sundays.” Have some intern preach, or cancel services altogether, nobody will be there. Well, somebody’s here. Y’all. Whoever is watching online however long in the future. Jesus says you only need two or three and he's here with us. I’ve watched our musicians sit patiently with only one student, and I wonder if their parents know—that’s one of the best musicians in North America entirely focused on your child. Christmas and Easter are big and loud and thumpy—we had the animals back! The building was full multiple times for days straight! But most of life is not like that. Most of life is ordinary, un-thrilling, normal. You might know someone best if you know what they’re like on a boring Tuesday afternoon at 4:00 pm. Monks and nuns say that’s when the noonday demon strikes. Moms of young ones know the kids are crabby. Exercise hounds get outside while there’s still light. Others fill in the barstools or pot joints. What are we all like at our low ebb? So today is a low Sunday, sure, not even halfway through the winter yet, but it only gets brighter from here.
A preacher friend points out our lives are ruled by multiple competing calendars. There’s the shopping calendar that we all complain about but can’t escape—whatever is being pushed on us in the stores just now. Even the service industry folks are exhausted at the minute, but I’m sure the Valentines stuff will be out soon. There are various sports calendars. The Leafs are headed toward their annual first round flameout. My Hurricanes our annual second round dissipation. The NFL playoffs aren’t far off. And in ten minutes, I swear, pitchers and catchers will report for spring training. Hard to believe, right? The Christian calendar works a little differently. Advent is actually a penitential season, like Lent. I was off caffeine and alcohol, which is not the easiest thing to do during the Christmas cocktail season. Advent and Lent are not diets though—you can cheat on the Lord’s Day; every day of resurrection is a feast. If you’re a liturgy snob, you say there should be no Christmas hymns until Christmas Eve at the earliest. Lots of seminarians come out into churches as liturgy snobs, I’ve been one, maybe some of you have. The joke: what’s the difference between a liturgist and a terrorist? You can negotiate with a terrorist. But the point stands: In most of December the church waits for a saviour and watches and confesses sin. The rest of the world shops and celebrates and collapses with exhaustion. But for us in the church, we’re also in the world. And if you’re a sports fan in the church at Advent and Christmas? How are you still alive?!
Take this week for example. It’s our strangest, most secular holiday this week: New Year’s Eve and January 1. The church’s calendar begins on the first Sunday of Advent, but in medieval Christendom it began on Annunciation Day, March 25th, when the angel Gabriel first tells Mary the good news, none months before Christmas. What whiplash to go from Silent Night to Auld Lang Syne in a week. Our Jewish friends and neighbours celebrated Rosh Hashanah, the new year, back in October. The eve of a day is important in Jewish calendars: in Genesis we’re told “it was evening, and it was morning, the first day,” so Judaism has days start in the evening—some Christian traditions remember that, hence Christmas Eve. And each sport has a different new year start date, when hope springs eternal. Not even my Hornets know they’re bad yet on opening night. News flash: we are.
But just because we’re done with Advent and Christmas doesn’t mean we have to be done with Mary. Some of us have been working on ways to incorporate her more deeply into our church life together. This building was built in 1915 to look like it was built in 1115. If the Vikings come back, we’re in good shape here. We all know where to go when the Orcs attack. But medieval English churches had Mary everywhere. She’s omnipresent in liturgical architecture, music, visual arts, the works, in the Middle Ages. One reason Dayle and Joanne and I have been preaching about Mary is because we find her so... weird. Inspiring. Catholic. Jewish. Somehow both familiar and unfamiliar. I don’t think Mary’s going anywhere, she’s not done with us yet, nor are we done with her. If anyplace on planet earth that’s not Roman Catholic or Anglo Catholic or Orthodox can recover Mary, couldn’t it be us?
The reading might be the shortest we’ll ever have in my tenure here. “Mary pondered all these things and treasured them in her heart.” Pondered. Folks ponder three times in the first two chapters of Luke, where so much pageant material comes from. And the first one to ponder anything in Luke, or in the whole New Testament, is who exactly? I asked a rhetorical question like that once in two different evangelical churches here in Canada. Neither was Pentecostal. And yet someone audibly yelled out, “Jesus!” Uh, sure, he’s the answer to most of our questions, but today it’s Isaiah. The first ponderer in the New Testament is one Mary of Nazareth. The angel Gabriel says “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.” The church calls this scene the Annunciation. We’ll celebrate it on March 25th as the Church long ago did. Now remember, when angels appear before people in the Bible, those people are terrified. Why? Because angels are terrifying. I know we like our angels cute. But in the Bible, angels aren’t cute. They’re, well, more like William Blake’s imagination than Brother Angelico’s. When I saw one of our angels at dress rehearsal or at the pageant I did the same thing each time, I started with fright. Ah! The old King James says that when people see angels we are “sore afraid.” Who’s the only one to whom an angel appears in the New Testament and they’re not afraid? Not even a little? Mary of Nazareth. As if she were waiting. As if she sees angels all the time. As if she were ready to hear God’s craziest idea ever about how to save the world and knew how to say “yes.” Or in the words of the text in Latin, “Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum.” If you’ve ever been a Catholic of any sort, you might know those words as “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.” The King James Bible in 1611 went out of its way to make the words sound not-Catholic. Don’t blame King Jimmy though. John Wycliffe had done the same before him. So had, I’d wager, Jan Hus in Prague and other reformers before Luther’s arrival on the world stage in 1517.
That same angel Gabriel had a long day, as our own David Michael Moote can attest, as our sound team can amen, here all Christmas Eve, all Christmas morning, bless you all. I mean, we don’t work as hard as the delivery guys on e-bikes, or the folks cooking for days, but we worked a little. Gabriel appears to Zechariah in the temple and says hey, your wife is going to have a child. Zechariah doesn’t believe it. Gabriel can’t stand it
I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God, and I have been sent to speak to you and to bring you this good news. But now, because you did not believe my words, you will become mute, unable to speak, until these things occur.
It’s the perfect punishment. If God’s people can’t listen for God, we shouldn’t speak.
Joanne Leatch has been studying theology and disability, a growing field we’ll hear more about in 2025, I’m sure. I edited a book once on theology and disability. Brian Brock of Aberdeen University taught me that those we call disabled see things the rest of us cannot see. When the child is to be born of Elizabeth, she says he will be called John. The townies are surprised and say, “None of your relatives has that name.” They gesture at Zechariah. Now this is funny, it’s nothing I’d ever seen until Brock pointed it out to me. He learned it as an advocate for the differently abled: Zechariah is mute, not deaf. He can hear just fine.
Zechariah asked for a writing tablet and wrote, “His name is John.” And all of them were amazed. Immediately his mouth was opened and his tongue freed, and he began to speak, praising God. Fear came over all their neighbours, and all these things were talked about throughout the entire hill country of Judea.
And now, the pondering.
All who heard them pondered them and said, “What then will this child become?” For indeed the hand of the Lord was with him.
The people are pondering what will become of John the Baptist, because the Lord’s hand is with him in such a powerful way. Fraser Elsdon, our intern from Emmanuel College, brought this out so beautifully in our pageant, but several of you told me you didn’t understand why Protestants don’t know who Elizabeth is. Because she and Mary both seem too Catholic. So, we minimize or downplay their importance in Protestant-land. Forgive us. We’re supposed to be Bible people, but often in the west after the Reformation that means we’re not-Catholic, or anti-Catholic. But we don’t have to be not-anything, or anti-anything. We can just be Jesus’ people. Right?
The sermon today is called, “Mary’s memory”. Anybody who’s read Plato knows how important memory is in western letters. St. Augustine picks up this theme in his Confessions. One seminarian I know says they’re spending Christmas break reading those same Confessions. Well done, more of this. You’re getting into it earlier than I ever did, and I’ve written several books on Augustine now. For the Platonists, for Augustine, memory is a godlike feature. Somehow, we creatures have the capacity to summon up things that happened long ago as if they’re happening right now. Memories can affect us biologically. Physiologically. Therapists can work with this to help bring healing. And if we’d asked aboriginal peoples in the Americas they’d have said, ‘uh, yeah, we knew this all along. Maybe ask us next time.’ Instead, we foisted European religious and national divisions onto a people innocent of them.
One of my mentors is the Reverend Fleming Rutledge, one of the first female ordinands in the Episcopal Church in the USA. She spent a semester at Wycliffe College at U of T, and as much as I know it pains some of you old Trinity folks, her memory still permeates the walls across the street. She taught there in 2007, and folk still tell stories about her today. I last taught anywhere in Canada in 2023 and I’m confident the stories about me have faded. Mama Fleming taught me the African proverb that when someone dies, their library burns. A Cree colleague of mine loves Appalachian based banjo filled folk music as much as my peeps in Boone do. Did I mention we should ask indigenous peoples what’s true before we ask western intellectuals? More about all of this in the years to come, Lord willing. I got to know a church in Maine once. The senior pastor had been there 23 years. The associate was there 25 years. And she told me that after 48 total years of experience with the same congregation, “I think they’re starting to trust us.”
I learned in seminary that Mary was considered a protector of the church. To the point that some medieval images have God the Father firing arrows at us humans and we’re being protected not by Jesus, but by Mary. I’d never seen such an image myself, until I was at some museum in the last year or two I did. That’s why the photo is so bad—I took it. Jesus is kinda hapless over there. The Father is after us. And Mary is shielding us. Now, when I say, us, look a little more carefully. That’s mostly priests and bishops. Orthodox Christians know that depicting God the Father as a male is a heresy. The Reformers know that it’s Christ who has mercy. I’m just saying I’d heard this. But now I’ve seen it. And so have you.
The last ponderer in Luke 2 is our own Mary of Nazareth, mother of God. From our verse for today. “Mary treasured all of these words and pondered them in her heart.” Treasured is a pretty good English translation. “Pondered” is, well, a little ponderous. The Greek word behind it is symballo, which any intro Greek student knows comes up often in the New Testament. Now I hate making this move, I teach against it, using koine Greek. It seems like it’s showing off, and no one cares except super nerds. But that’s a rule of thumb, not a rule of scripture or of nature, so here goes. Symballo is where we get our English word symbol. A symbol is a thing that means both itself and more things. But “symbol” is still not quite good enough for Christians. “The symbol” is what Eastern Orthodox churches call the creed. We might woodenly translate it that Mary “creeded” these things. She believed them. She put them in the creed, that we say when we’re baptized or confirmed. Did I say believed? I mean believe, present tense—Mary believes now, she puts them in the creed now. Mary is the mother of faith. Without her, no faith, no Jesus, no salvation. That’s about as Catholic as I can put it before the bishop calls and disciplines me. Wait, what’s that you say? We don’t have bishops in the United Church of Canada? My Methodist bishop is back in Charlotte getting ready for the Panthers game. Okay, good. Mary is Israel. She is the church. She is the first believer. She is the author of the creed. She is a glimpse of humanity redeemed, made new, as Christ will make all things new one day soon. More of all of this in the years to come. If God grants them to us before Mary’s child comes to make all creation as newborn as Jesus is. Amen.