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Last week, the story of Zachariah and
Elizabeth invited us to “expect the unexpected.” This week,
Mary’s tale invites us to “see the unseen.” It’s a familiar
story of Mary and the vision:
·
a young maiden and a heavenly
mystery
·
an unexpected angel and an
overpowering annunciation
·
an expectant mother and a joyous
Magnificat
·
a humble servant of the Lord,
willing to become the blessed mother dressed in royal blue
with a holy halo hovering over her humbly bowed head
But that’s not where the story begins.
And it’s not just Mary’s story—it’s our story, an incredible
story of the journey toward faith and faithfulness, toward
Bethlehem and new birth…
1. …and it begins in fear and doubt.
Don’t miss it. Don’t move too quickly to
the scene of humble obedience. Mary’s first response was
really pretty much what you would expect and probably pretty
much like yours and mine would be in the same situation. In
what must be incredible understatement, Luke says:
…and Mary was greatly troubled and
considered in her mind what sort of greeting this might be.
Or as the Eugene Peterson translation
says, “she was thoroughly shaken.” Other versions translate
the Greek word as “deeply perplexed” or “greatly
perturbed”…and I’ll bet she was! I’ll bet she was scared to
death! Her first response was not faith, but fear. So much
so, in fact, that before the angel could get on with the
message, he first had to calm her down, saying, “Don’t be
afraid.” And her second response wasn’t much better. It
was pure disbelief. “How can this be?” Or translated into
our vernacular, “You’ve got to be kidding! I mean, really,
who put you up to this? How can this be happening to me?”
Now I am not sure why that should
surprise us, since it is the same first response of everyone
else in the story:
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Zachariah and
Elizabeth: surprised and shaken, and the angel had to
say, “Don’t be afraid.”
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Joseph: doubting and
frightened, and the angel had to reassure him, “Don’t
be afraid.”
-
Shepherds: stunned
and scared, and before the angel choir could break into
joyous song, they had to repeat the same message,
“Don’t be afraid.”
Because in every case, the first response
to the annunciation is not faith but fear, not belief but
doubt.
Fear, uncertainty, doubt, questions,
reservations—isn’t that where most of us find ourselves…not
just at the beginning of the journey, but maybe even now,
maybe even here, maybe even today? We’d like to think that
if an angel appeared to us, we’d jump right on the
bandwagon. We’d be eager to follow where God might lead,
willing to do God’s work. But my guess is that we know
ourselves well enough to know that’s not the case. We are
more like the man who came to Jesus asking for healing for
his son, and when Jesus asked if he believed, the man said,
“Lord, I believe, help my unbelief.” (Mark 9:24) Right
there, side by side, belief and unbelief, doubt and faith,
fear and hope.
Or maybe we are more like St. Paul who
says, “I don’t even understand my own actions—the good that
I want to do, I don’t do, and the evil I don’t want to do,
that’s what I do!” (Romans 7:18) The mix of good and bad,
faith and doubt, courage and uncertainty—that’s where the
journey toward Bethlehem and new birth begins for Mary, and
that’s where it begins for me.
2. So Mary’s journey toward
Bethlehem and new birth begins about where ours begins, and
it moves toward acceptance and faith.
You see, at some point you simply have to
decide who you are going to trust. At some point in each of
our lives there comes a moment when we have to make a
choice. Follow logic as far as it will go, ask all the
questions you can muster, wrestle with doubts and fears
until you come to a point where you have to make a choice.
And the only way that makes any sense is to say, even with
trepidation and lingering doubt and fear, “Yes…I guess…let
it be.”
Author Jeff Edmondson describes a time
when he was wrestling with his faith and future, trying to
discern where God was leading, and his brother challenged
him with some really tough questions. He says it would have
been easier to just go with the flow, but his brother forced
him to deal with the tough issues instead of taking the easy
road. Some years later, he said he was having dinner with
his brother and reminded him of the conversation. “For the
life of him,” Edmondson writes, “he couldn’t remember the
conversation at all.”
“Well,” Edmondson said, “whether you
remember or not, your questions drove me to find answers
about God’s will for my life.”
His
brother asked, “And what’s the answer?”
“End of
the day, it’s all about faith, gutsy faith.”
And so he entitles his book: Gutsy
Faith: Hard Conversations with God. (Jeff Edmondson,
Gutsy Faith, page 11)
And isn’t that what this story
represents—Mary’s hard conversation with God, Mary’s gutsy
faith? Just for this morning, can we pull Mary out of the
romance of the sentimental, misty-eyed “Silent Night” just
long enough to see her for what she was:
-
a teen-ager
struggling to understand herself and her relationship
with God
-
a pregnant woman
wrestling with the pressures of this pending motherhood
and the responsibility which would be hers
-
a potentially
unemployed single mom in a society which offered her
nothing but disgrace
-
a fear-filled
doubter, uncertain of what to believe
Just for today, see her, not quite yet as
the venerated “Mother of God, Queen of Heaven,” but as the
woman next door, the woman down the street, or better yet,
as a woman on the street. See her as one of Hannah
Montana’s hoards or as the teenager with the telephone
surgically attached to her ear.
Maybe if we can see Mary for who she was,
then we can see her faith for what it was—tough faith,
courageous faith, gutsy faith. If we can see her as the
fearful doubter who comes to a point of gutsy faith, then we
can hear her sing, not in the melodious, ethereal tones of
Lennon and McCartney, but in strong voice of determined
courage:
Lord, let it be, let it be just as you
say.
God, let’s go for it! I’ll give it all
I’ve got.
That’s “gutsy faith.” That’s Mary’s
faith. That’s the kind of faith which can lead us toward
Bethlehem and new birth.
And that kind of faith can lead us to sing with Mary:
-
about a God who is
mighty and is ready to do great things
-
about a God whose
mercy is on those who fear him
-
about a God who will
scatter the proud, put down the mighty, lift up the
lowly and fill the hungry
It
takes gutsy faith to sing that kind of song. It takes gutsy
faith to see the unseen.
3. The journey toward Bethlehem
and new birth begins in fear, moves to faith, and ends in
vision—seeing the unseen.
It was December 1996. A water stain, 60
feet high and 20 feet wide, appeared on a plate glass window
in an office building in Clearwater, Florida. Many people
believed it to be a vision of the Virgin Mary. They came
from across the country to gaze at it, stand before it,
kneel before it, pray to it. Hundreds of candles lined the
sidewalk below, until the city had to form a “Miracle
Management Task Force.” (I love it…a task force to “manage”
miracles! Exactly how does one “manage” a miracle?)
By the time Christmas was over, they
estimated that more than 400,000 people had come to see it,
and the veneration continued for five years until a
disturbed young man shattered it with ball bearings from a
slingshot. Somewhat cynically, my brother writes of a friend
who said, “I have a near-Catholic veneration of Mary, but I
can’t think of one good reason why she would show up on the
window of a mortgage finance office.” (Maybe if it were this
year, it would make more sense!)
A professor in my brother’s congregation
just across the bay from Clearwater gave the scientific
explanation—moisture on the outside of the window combined
with smog and particles in the air; air conditioning blowing
on the inside, sunlight hitting the glass just right,
causing a certain refraction of the light rays. But he says
as he watched the people responding to it, it reminded him
that there are some things in this world which science can’t
explain, and that even a water stain on a window can become
a moment of insight for a spiritually hungry world, catching
a new vision, sensing a new hope, looking for new birth,
seeing the unseen.
Right here, right now, the economists and
the demographers can tell us all about what’s happening in
our region, in our economy and in our world. But let me tell
you another story:
-
It’s the story of a
family for whom Christmas came to life when they
delivered Angel Tree gifts and the kids said, “That’s
the best thing we ever did.”
-
It’s the story of a
man who came in to pick up his poinsettias for delivery
to some of our seniors and was disappointed to discover
he only had two assigned to him this year.
-
It’s the story of
dozens of volunteers who have been working at Cass this
month in seemingly mundane tasks with a vision for the
ministry and mission it can support.
-
It’s the story of a
congregation which is close to pledging a budget of over
$2 million in a day when many folks just couldn’t see
how it could be done.
-
It’s the story of
people who catch a vision of what God is doing in the
world and with Mary are willing, in spite of their
doubts and fears, to answer with a gutsy faith saying,
“Yes, Lord! Let it be! Let it be!”
It’s the story of people who can see the
unseen and are ready to make the journey toward Bethlehem
and new birth…if only we have the eyes to see.
I don’t know where you are on that
journey this morning. My guess is we are all over the map.
Some of us are with Mary at the point of fear and
doubt—greatly troubled, not at all certain where God is and
what God wants. Some of us are with Mary at the point of
saying “Yes”—for the first time or the umpty-ninth time,
saying, “Yes, let it be. Let it be.” And some of us are with
Mary, ready to break into song—“My soul magnifies the Lord
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.”
Wherever you are this morning, I invite
you to open your eyes. Catch a vision of God’s will and
God’s work. Open your eyes to see the unseen.
It’s not a Christmas carol, but perhaps
it expresses the prayer of Mary and perhaps it is our prayer
for the day:
Open my eyes, that I may see
glimpses of truth thou hast for
me;
Place in my hands the wonderful key
that shall unclasp and set me
free.
Silently now I wait for thee,
ready, my God, thy will to see.
Open my eyes, illumine me, Spirit
divine.
(UM
Hymnal, 454)
Note:
The story of the vision of Mary in
Clearwater, Florida comes from James A. Harnish’s Advent
devotional book, Rejoicing in Hope. |
