STRENGTH OF WOMEN FOUND IN THE STRENGTH OF MARY

By Elizabeth Welch

Stewardship Officer and Hospital Chaplain

December 18, 2005

Michelangelo

Virgin Mary:

Detail from the Fresco: The Last Judgment

Mary is seated at Jesus's feet on the Throne of Judgment.

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Note:  This Sermon will be a permanent part of our

ongoing study of the history and viewpoints of

the Blessed Virgin Mary.

2 Samuel 7:4,8-16
Romans 16:25-27
Luke 1:26-38
Psalm 132 or 132:8-15

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have to admit that as a young woman the image of Mary, the mother of Jesus, provokes ambivalence before it engenders reverence. On the one hand Mary is a powerful symbol of God’s choice to work in and through women. In this regard Mary encourages us to believe that even when the world refuses to acknowledge it, women have a strength that God acknowledges. All whom the world tramples upon and labels as weak or unworthy can find strength in this Mary. Perhaps this is why she so often appears to the poor, like the peasant, Juan Diego. Since this appearance she has been known as Our Lady of Guadalupe, finally immortalized in the world’s eyes with rich, brown skin.

Unfortunately, the hierarchy of the Church has often presented Mary as the quintessence of what it has wanted all women to be – passive, submissive and willing to suffer anything and everything for the good of others. It is this conflation of Mary with passivity that has led Benedictine sister, Ruth Fox, (left)  to lament that in art and statuary, Mary is presented as “a teenage beauty queen, forever eighteen years old and . . . perfectly manicured.” Kathleen Norris adds that women need to reclaim the image of Mary as a woman capable of “walking the hill country of Judea and giving birth in a barn” to contrast with the plentiful images of Mary as a “wealthy Renaissance woman.” The most dangerous result of this Mary of Renaissance glory is that it presents Mary as an object to be admired not a woman to be honored.

It is not only young women who need to reclaim Mary. As a people of faith we need to reclaim Mary as more than a passive beauty queen. Mary more than any other figure of scripture stood in the place in which we stand: hearing the whisper of God’s call in our ears, but bearing no earthly idea where this call will lead. Mary did not have a divine teacher to lead her, she walked forward alone. It is Mary more than any other figure of scripture that teaches us what it is to have faith in things not yet seen. It is Mary who teaches us what can happen if we are willing to accept our fear of divine mystery and wade into its hopeful waters anyway.

Luke tends to be a sort of lay psychotherapist – revealing to us characters’ internal world. Here, Luke offers Mary’s internal response to Gabriel’s greeting, “Hail, O favored one, the Lord is with you!” Luke writes: “she was greatly troubled at the saying, and tried to discern what sort of greeting this might be.” This response is often interpreted as proof of Mary’s confusion and fear. I argue that the phrase reveals Mary’s power: it shows Luke’s dry wit and his belief that Mary was a woman of intelligence and humor. Mary knew the stories of her people - she knew what it meant to be favored by God. In the Hebrew Scriptures, receiving a message from an angel that you are favored by God is a flashing red light that says – if you know what is good for you, you will turn around and run now.

Salvadore Dali: The Annunciation: 1947

Dali Museum Spain Watercolor

Many prophets respond to God’s call with an initial attempt to deny the call: Moses says, oh no, God, surely you do not want me, I don’t speak well. Jonah pays his fare on a ship that will take him in the opposite direction of Nineveh, where God has called him to. And Habakkuk, (icon below) gifted with visions of the end result of his people’s violence and injustice, begins his prophecy by lamenting to God, why do you make me see wrongdoing and look at trouble? These responses make Mary’s “ let it be with me according to your word” all the more powerful.

Mary knew very well that God’s favor would call her to walk a difficult path, one for which she could not imagine having the resources, but she also knew that her desperate longing for something more was finally being realized. Mary was not chosen just because she was lowly and unassuming, or even because she was strong and courageous; she was chosen because in a world that limited her value to that of an object to be bought and sold, she knew that she was something more than skin and bones. Mary was chosen because in world that mocked her people’s faith, she believed that God would raise them up from their suffering. Mary was chosen because she was hopeful. And all who are hopeful know that hope is a fire kindled by faith and humor. This was not lost on Luke and should not be lost on us either.

Much bickering has centered on the word, virgin, in this passage – I do not want to enter the fray on the side that insists upon the word as limited to a physical reality, but neither do I want to set myself amongst those who pass over the word as unworthy of reflection. Clearly Luke thought the descriptor to be important, why else would he use it repeatedly? But, I think the time has come for us to stop limiting this word to a descriptor of Mary’s body and to start considering the power of this word in describing us as the body of Christ. What must we be untouched by, unknown by, not pierced by, in order for Christ’s conception and birth to continue to be miraculous?

In her reflection on the meaning of the word virgin, Kathleen Norris (left) points to Thomas Merton’s description of the inward point he seeks in contemplative prayer, “a point untouched by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point which belongs entirely to God.” Norris adds that to be virgin is to be “cognizant of oneself as valuable, unique, and un-diminishable at core . . .” Both of these ideas are valuable. But we need to consider not only what this word means to us individually but what it means to us as a people of faith. After all Mary’s hope was not just for herself, it was for a nation of faith. Perhaps for us to be virgin we must be untouched by the disillusionment of the world – we must remain impervious to the tired cynicism that denies the possibility of something new or different or transformative. To be virgin is to heed our deep and painful longing to be the bearers of new life. To be virgin is for us to hold space for the life that is to come.

Advent is a season of longing, not a vapid, reasoned longing, but the passionate, heedless longing of the lover for the beloved, the desperate longing of the exile for her homeland. It is an embodied longing that is at once intimately sensual and deeply spiritual. The slow walk from Advent into Christmas is a movement from longing for transformation, to giving ourselves up to transformation.

In her poem, Annunciation, Denise Levertov, posits that we each experience Annunciations:

Aren’t there annunciations
of one sort or another
in most lives?
Some unwillingly
undertake great destinies,
enact them in sullen pride,
uncomprehending.

More often
those moments
when roads of light and storm
open from darkness in man or woman,
are turned away from
in dread, in a wave of weakness, in despair
and with relief.

Ordinary lives continue.
God does not smite them.
But the gates close, the pathway vanishes.

It has taken me a long time to be comfortable with Mary, a woman who responds to an impossible call with such grace. I have wondered at how image after image of her presents her as utterly serene, unmoved. But truth is so often in the details. I am reminded of reading a five year-old’s description of myth as “a story that isn’t true on the outside, only on the inside.” As I examined the images of Mary – those by Botticelli, or Michelangelo, or Fra Angelico, or even our own statue of Mary, I realized the truth of Mary’s serenity is in her eyes. It is always in her eyes that we see hers is a not a naive serenity, but a serenity that is hard fought and won. A serenity that feels the heaviness in her womb, that hears the cry of her newborn baby, that sees the shadow of the cross and that hopes for the light of the open tomb. This is why we lift our voices to her ever-listening ear when we are suffering, when we despair, when we doubt our ability to be Christ’s hands in the world.

Today, the voice of Gabriel rings in our ears, “Hail, O favored ones, God is with you . . . For with God, nothing will be impossible.” The question before us this week is, what will it take for us to respond, “Here we are servants of God, let it be with us according to your word?” What will it take for us to not let the gates close, to not allow the pathway to vanish, to not let ordinary life continue? Amen!

Elizabeth J. Welch
All Saints Episcopal Church
Advent IV, Yr. B,
18 Dec 05

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