Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, New York
We are all meant to be mothers of God. What good is it to me if this eternal birth of the divine Son takes place unceasingly but does not take place within myself? And what good is it to me if Mary is full of grace if I am not also full of grace? What good is it to me for the Creator to give birth to his Son if I also do not give birth to him in my time and my culture? This, then, is the fullness of time. When the Son of God is begotten in us.
This morning, Meister Eckhart challenges us to answer his questions. How will we give birth to the Son of God in our time and in our culture? Perhaps, the first and better question is, Will we? Will we give our consent? Will we say, like Mary, “Let it be? “
The Annunciation to the Theotokos, the God-Bearer, is an annunciation to the entire human race that the Son and Word of God has become incarnate. What happened physically in Mary is meant to happen spiritually in us. Eckhart’s questions invite us to see humanity, and not Bethlehem, as the true birthplace of God. How amazing is that?! God has chosen humanity to give birth, to give life, to make real, God in this world. That says a lot about what God thinks of us. So often we diminish ourselves when we say, “I’m only human.” But God looks at us and says, “Humanity, created in my image and likeness! They shall be the ones through whom, by whom, and in whom my Son will be born.”
I suggest that Mary’s experience has some pointers to open us up this morning to being God-Bearers. Once in a sermon, I heard a caution given, that I have never forgotten. The preacher said that in our rush to make the men and women of the biblical drama special, we miss the power of God’s actions---that God acts through ordinary human beings like you and me. Connecting our small stories with the larger stories of God can only be done through the flesh and blood realities of our lives. We must be prepared to hear its sacredness through its humanness---not despite it.
Mary was a normal teenager who lived in an obscure village, in a nearly forgotten part of the Roman Empire. She was engaged to a man, Joseph. Nowhere does it describe her as possessing qualities of leadership or intelligence or faith or beauty that would have set her apart for the unique call that Gabriel offered. In all respects, Mary was a girl living her life, day by day, as best she could, in a community of ordinary people.
Consider the moment of the Annunciation when the intrusion of the angel into Mary’s life utterly changed it. When Gabriel made his invitation, Mary doesn’t ask about the future or the consequences on her life. Her only question was a simple and logical one. She knew how babies were made. She wanted to know how her part would work. She assumes that God knows God’s job and will do it. Unlike many of us, she is concerned about what is hers to deal with. She doesn’t get lost in the past or future, which belong to God. Because she did not clutter herself up with second guessing God, she could be open to cooperating with God’s plan. Her yes to God was a blanket acceptance in faith of whatever would come in her life. Our own faith and trust in God need to be more like that since we will never in this life come to understand the reason for all that happens to us. God’s way of dealing with us is through collaboration, not dictatorship. Knowing our hesitations, doubts, and fears, God waits in both the crucial and the trivial moments of our lives for us to say yes.
Mary most certainly had plans for her life. Marriage was on the horizon for her. We all make plans. Most nights when I go to bed, I already know what I will do the next day. I get up at the same time each morning and follow the same routine. My calendar tells me where I will be, when, and what I will do for at least the next nine months. I’ve planned my life. I suspect that to some degree your life might be like that too.
During our time of Contemplative days a few weeks ago, which were filled with several unplanned events, I was struck by an insight I remembered a directee sharing with me. She said that on most days, we humans have the tendency to not live by faith, but by our plans. We can get through most days without faith. We plan our life, and we live our plan. Faith doesn’t really enter it until our plans get interrupted and the impossible happens. I suspect that’s often what’s going on when we ask someone to pray for us or another asks us to pray for them. Our plans have been interrupted. What Mary never expected or planned happened. We hear that in her question to the angel, “How can this be?” Haven’t there been times when we’ve also asked: “How can this be?”
It might be the last thing you ever wanted to happen, or it might be something you had hoped and dreamed for all your life. Regardless, the impossible showed up and interrupted our plans. That interruption asks us to make an offering and that’s very different from a plan. Plans are about the future. An offering is about the present moment. Plans are made with expectations of an outcome. We plan to get what we want. An offering is made without expectations and without the need to control the outcome. Plans set limitations. Offerings hold unknown possibilities.
When Gabriel, the messenger of the impossible, shows up Mary doesn’t try to understand or rationalize what’s happening. That’s just more planning. Instead, she makes an offering. “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” Every time we say “Let it be with me according to your word” we relinquish control, we surrender to the Mystery, we entrust ourselves to the Unknowing, and we open the womb of our heart to God’s presence.
I don’t want us to be naïve about the offering Mary made. I can easily imagine that even as she makes her offering, she’s asking herself, “What will happen to me now? Will Joseph believe any of this? What will the neighbors say?” Her offering is very risky. Remember, in her time and culture, pregnancy for a betrothed woman was considered adultery punishable by death. It put her in a vulnerable place without any guarantee of the outcome. That’s true for any offering you or I might make. Her “Yes” was just her first step. Mary’s offering is followed by another offering when she goes to her cousin Elizabeth as we heard in our gospel today. Mary sets out in haste to visit her cousin, who is bearing an equally unexpected child. At the sound of Mary’s greeting John, the unborn Forerunner, leaps for joy in Elizabeth’s womb –greeting the unborn Messiah.
Luke offers no information about the three months Mary’s spends with Elizabeth. His sole focus is on the greetings that take place, between these two women and their unborn sons. Sacred iconography portrays this greeting as one of an embrace. Elizabeth recognizes and embraces the divinity carried inside Mary. Elizabeth greets salvation.
In many ways our own lives are a series of unplanned circumstances and greetings. Every day we greet one another – family, friends, colleagues, strangers. Every day we greet the circumstances of our lives – joys, sorrows, successes, disappointments, losses, the mundane and the exciting. Every one of those greetings and circumstances are pregnant with new life and the possibilities of making an offering of love, compassion, forgiveness, reconciliation, healing, joy, beauty, wholeness. The greetings and unplanned events of our lives are pregnant with the divine, with salvation. How will we greet the next person we see? How will we receive the most recent unplanned circumstance of our lives? Will we recognize, greet, and embrace the divine, our salvation?
When God accepts our surrender to the divine will, we are apt to feel not honored but abandoned. Mary was able to recognize God’s favor and delight in her, even as God reached down and interrupted her plans. She blesses God for the amazing thing that is happening in and through her. She places her blessedness into the context of God’s will. She is not concerned with the joy or the sorrow that her motherhood will bring. She sees from God’s perspective what looks to the world as revolution. In this disruption to her plans, she sees and sings of God’s faithfulness and mercy.
In her Song of Praise, another offering is made. When she gives birth to Jesus and treasures and ponders all the shepherds tell her, another offering is made. When she places her newborn son in the hands of the old priest, Simeon, another offering is made. When she stands at the foot of the cross, another offering is made. Mary offered. Offering after offering after offering. What if we lived more like that?
I’m not suggesting that you should completely give up planning, but what if we held our plans a bit more loosely? What if we met each person and circumstance of our life asking ourselves, “What’s the offering I can make in this place at this time?” Faith is about making an offering and letting go of the outcome. What might that look like in your life today? What’s the offering being asked of you? Whatever that offering is, like Mary, we will bear and give birth to the divine within us. +Amen.
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