Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
To hear the sermon in its fullness click here.
Mary is the supreme example of what happens when God is at work by grace through human beings. God’s power from outside, and the indwelling Spirit within, together result in things being done which would have been unthinkable in any other way.
In the twelve verses of today’s Gospel Mary is described as favored, perplexed, thoughtful, and afraid. She questions believes, and submits to her vocation---not with a single “yes”, but with many, as the implications of her call unfold over her lifetime.
The announcement of the enfleshment of God in Jesus which we celebrate today has been obscured and distorted over the centuries by a one-dimensional image of Mary fabricated by the Church. Much of Christianity has been negatively and uselessly trapped in guilt about being “flesh,” while the great messages of the Gospel—grace, healing, and justice—have largely gone unheeded. Obsessive guilt about our embodiment has led us to create a Mary not made of flesh.
We cannot return to a healthy view of our own bodies until we accept that God has forever made human flesh the privileged place of the divine encounter. This Creator of ours is patiently determined to put matter and spirit together, as if the one was not complete without the other. The Lord of life seems to desire a perfect but free unification between body and spirit. So much so, in fact, that God appears to be willing to wait for the creatures to will and choose this unity themselves—or it remains unrealized. God never enforces or dominates, but only allures and seduces. God apparently loves freedom as much as incarnation. God knew that only humble vulnerability could be entrusted with spiritual power—and so God hid it like a treasure in the body of Jesus.
God desires us to learn wisdom and humility from our bodies, not to repress them out of fear. Jesus trusted God’s slow process of incarnation. The result was the resurrection and the realization of eternal union between body and spirit, human and divine. The reason we have trouble with the full incarnation in Jesus is probably because we have not been able to recognize and enjoy the incarnation in ourselves.
We must begin by trusting what God has done through Mary in Jesus. We must reclaim the incarnation as the beginning point of the Christian experience of God. We must return to the Hebrew respect for this world and for all the wisdom and goodness of the body. The embodied self is the only self we have ever known. Our bodies are God’s dwelling place, God’s temple. We need to recognize our physical responses. Repressing feelings and sensations relegates them to our unconscious shadow where they come out in unexpected and often painful ways.
Trust in God is not just faith to believe in spiritual ideas. It’s to have confidence in love itself. It’s to have confidence in reality itself. God is in it; God is revealed in everything. Most of us have been conditioned to say “no”. What Mary shows us is that faith is about learning to say “yes” to the moment right in front of us. Only after we say our “yes” do we recognize that God is here, in this person, in this event, in this time. God is in all things and is available everywhere. In that moment we become God’s full work of art. In that moment, love is stronger than death, and Christ is surely risen in us. Love and life become the same thing.
We tend to do things wrong before we even know what right feels like. But mistakes do not seem to be a problem for God; they are only a problem for our ego that wants to be pure spirit. Living solely out of our ego splits us off from our body. God is an expert at working with mistakes and failure. It is no different for us than it was for Mary. In some ways it may seem simpler to obey arbitrary rules about diet or sex than to truly honor the living incarnation we are.
The extraordinary thing about Mary is her ordinariness, beginning with her full humanity. God’s favor was not earned by her good behavior. God chooses Mary because she has nothing. Mary is among the most powerless people in her society: she is young in a world that values age; female in a world ruled by men; poor in a stratified economy. She has neither husband nor son to validate her existence. That she should have found favor with God shows Luke’s understanding of God’s activity as surprising and often paradoxical, almost always reversing human expectations. Luke’s account is patterned on the annunciation scenes in the Book of Judges, which would have made excellent sense to any Hellenistic reader who was accustomed to miraculous events accompanying the birth accounts of extraordinary people.
Mary’s statement about her virginity, in light of her own incomprehension of how she could conceive, does not reflect doubt as much as amazement at Gabriel’s message. Her question is a request for information, not proof. She recognizes what all believers must recognize, that we, creatures before the Creator, are incapable, in and of ourselves, of accomplishing God’s will. We are all, in that sense, virgins. How has God’s call in our own lives violated the selves we imagined ourselves to be---transforming us from virgins who are unable to bear and birth God to the world, to creative agents with God?
Gabriel reminds Mary and us that our incapacity in and of ourselves is not the end of the story, that nothing is impossible with God. Doing God’s will is not about fulfilling requirements; it’s about a trusting relationship. When God takes the initiative, it is always a matter of love. It is not human action but divine power. Although Mary cannot comprehend the full meaning of the message, she responds as a willing partner in the holy disruption that befalls her. Her obedience is not forced. She acts freely when she offers herself.
Our life is a dance between the loneliness and desperation of the false self and the fullness of the true self. It’s not so much about what we do; it’s about what God does. God and life itself eventually destabilize the boundaries of the small self, allowing the ego to collapse back into the true self, which is re-discovered and experienced anew as an ultimate homecoming.
We cannot anticipate the ways that God will break into human history---into our history. As with Mary, the indwelling divine moves toward fulfillment in each of us in a personal and unique way throughout our lifetime with different ways and degrees of consenting to it. There are as many ways to manifest God as there are beings in the universe.
We do not create our own salvation, nor do we have the capacity to imagine the ways of God. Luke tells us in Mary’s story that not only is redemption possible; it has already happened. Because of the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Christ, the holy continues to break into our lives, to bring us closer to the completion of creation and the already-and-not-yet reign of God.
As Mary discovered in her life, the spiritual journey is a path of deeper realization and transformation; it is more than a growing up, it is a waking up. It is never a straight line, but a back and forth movement that ever deepens the conscious choice and assent to God’s work in us.
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| Br. Robert James Magliula, OHC |
In the twelve verses of today’s Gospel Mary is described as favored, perplexed, thoughtful, and afraid. She questions believes, and submits to her vocation---not with a single “yes”, but with many, as the implications of her call unfold over her lifetime.
The announcement of the enfleshment of God in Jesus which we celebrate today has been obscured and distorted over the centuries by a one-dimensional image of Mary fabricated by the Church. Much of Christianity has been negatively and uselessly trapped in guilt about being “flesh,” while the great messages of the Gospel—grace, healing, and justice—have largely gone unheeded. Obsessive guilt about our embodiment has led us to create a Mary not made of flesh.
We cannot return to a healthy view of our own bodies until we accept that God has forever made human flesh the privileged place of the divine encounter. This Creator of ours is patiently determined to put matter and spirit together, as if the one was not complete without the other. The Lord of life seems to desire a perfect but free unification between body and spirit. So much so, in fact, that God appears to be willing to wait for the creatures to will and choose this unity themselves—or it remains unrealized. God never enforces or dominates, but only allures and seduces. God apparently loves freedom as much as incarnation. God knew that only humble vulnerability could be entrusted with spiritual power—and so God hid it like a treasure in the body of Jesus.
God desires us to learn wisdom and humility from our bodies, not to repress them out of fear. Jesus trusted God’s slow process of incarnation. The result was the resurrection and the realization of eternal union between body and spirit, human and divine. The reason we have trouble with the full incarnation in Jesus is probably because we have not been able to recognize and enjoy the incarnation in ourselves.
We must begin by trusting what God has done through Mary in Jesus. We must reclaim the incarnation as the beginning point of the Christian experience of God. We must return to the Hebrew respect for this world and for all the wisdom and goodness of the body. The embodied self is the only self we have ever known. Our bodies are God’s dwelling place, God’s temple. We need to recognize our physical responses. Repressing feelings and sensations relegates them to our unconscious shadow where they come out in unexpected and often painful ways.
Trust in God is not just faith to believe in spiritual ideas. It’s to have confidence in love itself. It’s to have confidence in reality itself. God is in it; God is revealed in everything. Most of us have been conditioned to say “no”. What Mary shows us is that faith is about learning to say “yes” to the moment right in front of us. Only after we say our “yes” do we recognize that God is here, in this person, in this event, in this time. God is in all things and is available everywhere. In that moment we become God’s full work of art. In that moment, love is stronger than death, and Christ is surely risen in us. Love and life become the same thing.
We tend to do things wrong before we even know what right feels like. But mistakes do not seem to be a problem for God; they are only a problem for our ego that wants to be pure spirit. Living solely out of our ego splits us off from our body. God is an expert at working with mistakes and failure. It is no different for us than it was for Mary. In some ways it may seem simpler to obey arbitrary rules about diet or sex than to truly honor the living incarnation we are.
The extraordinary thing about Mary is her ordinariness, beginning with her full humanity. God’s favor was not earned by her good behavior. God chooses Mary because she has nothing. Mary is among the most powerless people in her society: she is young in a world that values age; female in a world ruled by men; poor in a stratified economy. She has neither husband nor son to validate her existence. That she should have found favor with God shows Luke’s understanding of God’s activity as surprising and often paradoxical, almost always reversing human expectations. Luke’s account is patterned on the annunciation scenes in the Book of Judges, which would have made excellent sense to any Hellenistic reader who was accustomed to miraculous events accompanying the birth accounts of extraordinary people.
Mary’s statement about her virginity, in light of her own incomprehension of how she could conceive, does not reflect doubt as much as amazement at Gabriel’s message. Her question is a request for information, not proof. She recognizes what all believers must recognize, that we, creatures before the Creator, are incapable, in and of ourselves, of accomplishing God’s will. We are all, in that sense, virgins. How has God’s call in our own lives violated the selves we imagined ourselves to be---transforming us from virgins who are unable to bear and birth God to the world, to creative agents with God?
Gabriel reminds Mary and us that our incapacity in and of ourselves is not the end of the story, that nothing is impossible with God. Doing God’s will is not about fulfilling requirements; it’s about a trusting relationship. When God takes the initiative, it is always a matter of love. It is not human action but divine power. Although Mary cannot comprehend the full meaning of the message, she responds as a willing partner in the holy disruption that befalls her. Her obedience is not forced. She acts freely when she offers herself.
Our life is a dance between the loneliness and desperation of the false self and the fullness of the true self. It’s not so much about what we do; it’s about what God does. God and life itself eventually destabilize the boundaries of the small self, allowing the ego to collapse back into the true self, which is re-discovered and experienced anew as an ultimate homecoming.
We cannot anticipate the ways that God will break into human history---into our history. As with Mary, the indwelling divine moves toward fulfillment in each of us in a personal and unique way throughout our lifetime with different ways and degrees of consenting to it. There are as many ways to manifest God as there are beings in the universe.
We do not create our own salvation, nor do we have the capacity to imagine the ways of God. Luke tells us in Mary’s story that not only is redemption possible; it has already happened. Because of the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Christ, the holy continues to break into our lives, to bring us closer to the completion of creation and the already-and-not-yet reign of God.
As Mary discovered in her life, the spiritual journey is a path of deeper realization and transformation; it is more than a growing up, it is a waking up. It is never a straight line, but a back and forth movement that ever deepens the conscious choice and assent to God’s work in us.
As it was for Mary, may it be so for us. +Amen.
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