Disregard
Luke 1:26-55

December 14, 2008


If you are in doubt about the esteem in which Mary is held in the Christian Church, all you have to do is walk into the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception on the campus of Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. Catholic University is one of my alma maters and when you approach the campus you don’t see the university, you see the Shrine, a huge several block long complex. The professors and graduate students used to walk daily from our library over to the Shrine cafeteria on the lower level. The food wasn’t that good and these were airport prices for the airports. But go upstairs, however, and it was a different world.

It is the largest Roman Catholic Church in North America and one of the ten largest churches in the world, and it’s all about Mary. There are over 70 chapels and oratories off to the sides or underneath the huge central sanctuary. Most of the chapels commemorate a particular ethnic celebration of Mary - the Black Madonna of Krakow, the Queen of Ireland, Our Lady of Fatima and Guadalupe. Regrettably, the Mary of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church since the Ethiopians are usually not Roman Catholic. The Ethiopians not only celebrate Mary in their art and icons, but in hundreds of stories of Mary appearing to ordinary and extraordinary Christians, intervening and blessing their situations.

However, we Protestants are generally impoverished in the knowledge and attention we give to Mary. Sure, we place her front and centre in every crêche scene and call her the Virgin Mary, the Mother of Jesus, even in some circles the Mother of God. Perhaps we find all the elaborate and creative devotion paid to her a little too much, more intent upon creating a mythology of Mary than understanding what her role in the Incarnation is all about. For the most part, we sing the songs and ignore her. It’s time to pay attention.

she has heard this incredible message from the Angel Gabriel, Mary sings her amazement in the poem typically called the Magnificat, itself a rewording of Hanna’s prayer of thankfulness after she had become pregnant with Samuel. “God has regarded the low estate of his handmaiden,” she says. What she means is that in a world then of class and privilege God has disregarded her lowly social status and granted her this unparalleled gift. Mary’s low estate was not the lower middle class, but the class of human beings who are universally lowly and sinful beings compared to the divinity. As human beings, lowly and sinful, we have a marked tendency to forget this fact and assume as high an estate as we can get away with. Mary did not forget, and kept all these things, pondering them in her heart.

W. H. Auden hears the story in his Christmas oratorio For The Time Being with a more sensitive ear. The angel Gabriel appears to the young Mary and not really shocking her, but declares something marvelous she has hoped for is about to happen. He mentions the problems Eve had, “in love with her own will,” and Mary understands. She knows what is happening and is absolutely amazed that the Word which created the world out of nothing “should ask to wear me.”

This is what Christmas is about. Paul would later urge Christians to put on Christ like a dress or a coat. Mary is stunned to realize that God wants to dress up in a human body and it is hers. This was an extremely patriarchal, male-privileged society, so in the first instance that the Gospel would dare to intimate that God “wears” a woman is almost unthinkable. Except that Christians thought it, and insisted that it was only going to work if God became a woman, in a manner of speaking, that sets us apart among the world faiths. For a man to be inhabited by God could simply be an intellectual fancy or pretension. But for a woman to go through pregnancy and child birth wearing God the Word was undeniably a far more intimate engagement with the human condition than we can imagine.

When God wears one of us in such an unambiguous way, puts on our clothes, then the world and its human beings become radically different. The image of God imprinted upon us at creation is literally fleshed out and our problems are experienced by God. Then you and I know that when Jesus talks about how to live a new life, we know he’s talking about the very kind of life we have to go through.

The other part of this famous story that Auden fills out begins with Adam and Eve. The Eden tale recalls how both the inhabitants of Paradise chose first whatever seemed to satisfy their own needs and agendas and that found them in a lot of trouble before long - and the rest of us human beings have kept following the same dead end.

“Since Adam, being free to choose,
Chose to imagine he was free
To choose his own necessity,
Lost in his freedom, Man pursues
The shadow of his images:
To-day the Unknown seeks the known;
What I am willed to ask, your own
Will has to answer; child, it lies
Within your power of choosing to
Conceive the Child who chooses you.”

Christmas comes as a gift that we cannot earn; it has chosen you. Yet, you still have to choose it. That seems obvious, especially here in a Christmas-y church setting, why would you not choose Christmas, the Word becoming flesh and dwelling among us?

Hey, we talk about it every year. Fewer and fewer people choose the Nativity and the Incarnation of Christ, and instead have adopted a season that is wonderfully joyous at best, but also conveniently vague and non-specific. You don’t have to do anything at Christmas because nothing happens that matters.

Yet, what we proclaim here today unashamedly and unapologetically is that something happened on Christmas morn. Now we are wearing God and for a human being that changes everything, for we are able to understand with deepest empathy those suffering the most. We are no longer worried about our low estate or high estate, but are worried about ensuring that any and every human being receives respect and dignity and the physical and spiritual necessities of life - because that person of lowly estate is wearing the same clothes as you. The whole culture is about giving and receiving gifts at this season, but on Christmas Day you have to choose to wear Life, choose to wear God, and once you have chosen the Child who chooses you, life is never the same again. Thank God.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan