There's Something about Mary

Advent 4, Year C
Luke 1:39-55
The Rev. Joshua Rodriguez-Hobbs

I don’t know if any of you have been watching “Supergirl,” but it’s been one of my favorite new TV shows this year. In the second episode, Kara Danvers, Supergirl’s alter ego, has a confrontation with her boss, media mogul Cat Grant, because Cat has branded the new hero, “Supergirl” instead of “Superwoman.” Grant quips back: “What do you think is so bad about ‘girl’? I’m a girl. And your boss, and powerful, and rich, and hot, and smart. So if you perceive ‘Supergirl’ as anything less than excellent, isn’t the real problem you?” It’s a great speech, but I think I side with Kara Danvers on this. Supergirl sounds so much less powerful than Superwoman. It’s a way of diminishing her, of reminding us that she is less than Superman, who has a new multibillion dollar budget movie coming out, coincidentally, not just a TV show. If I’m right, and we shouldn’t call “Supergirl” a girl, why do we insist on calling Mary one?

We do that a lot. Almost everything I read this week as I prepared for this sermon referred to Mary as a girl. Everything pointed out that she was probably about thirteen or so when the angel Gabriel came to her—something that happens before our reading from Luke begins this morning. And yes, Mary’s reaction to the angel is disbelief, but can you blame her? Moses responded to the burning bush with disbelief, Isaiah and Jeremiah responded to their prophetic calls with disbelief, Gideon asked for multiple signs that God was calling him to be judge over Israel, and yet we never use these men’s disbelief as signs of their youth and naiveté. Mary doesn’t sound like a girl in our reading this morning, which takes places just after the familiar account of the Annunciation.  That shouldn’t surprise us. Mary might have been around thirteen years old, but that made her a woman in her time and place. It’s not a coincidence that that’s the age at which Jewish girls and boys have Bat or Bar Mitzvahs, ceremonies which recognize them as women and men.

The first thing Mary does after Gabriel appears to her is not meek or mild, the usual adjectives we give her. She sets out to visit her cousin Elizabeth in a Judean town in the hill country, a journey of eighty miles that would have taken her at least four days. She makes this journey alone, Luke tells us, confident that God will protect her. That’s not meekness. That’s bravery. When she reaches Elizabeth and Zechariah’s home, she bursts out into song: My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my savior. We read those words, the words of the Magnificat, together this morning. Did they sound like the words of a meek, helpless girl to you when you read them a few minutes ago? Or did they sound like the words of a mature, confident, politically astute woman?

Mary’s words are a prophecy, and she is willing to accept the prophetic role that God has offered her, partnering with God to remake the world according to God’s vision. Mary declares that God is going to make the world anew, that she stands at a turning point in human history. God is going to scatter the proud and to cast down the powerful. God will lift up the lowly and feed the hungry, but God, Mary tells us, will send the rich away empty. God will remember the promise made to Israel, even though that promise feel so remote and so hard to fulfill.

Two thousand years later, does it seem hard for you to believe those prophetic words? It does for me, sometimes, I’ll be honest. There is so much violence, so much fear in our world. But there was also much violence and much fear in the world when the angel Gabriel came to Mary. There was more violence and more fear when Luke sat down to write his Gospel, because he wrote following a war between Israel and Rome that left the Temple in Jerusalem, the sign of God’s presence on earth, destroyed. Luke wrote following a bitter civil war in Rome in which four men claimed to be Caesar, and three of them were assassinated within months of claiming the Imperial throne.Luke and Mary know that it is like to live in a world that is as violent and as dangerous as our own, and yet they proclaim their trust that God is going to turn the world toward justice.

Martin Luther King, Jr. remarked in 1964,
 “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” This is the vision that Luke and Mary give us today, on this, the Fourth Sunday of Advent, days before Christmas. We live perpetually on the Fourth Sunday of Advent, in that moment between the promise and its fulfillment. We trust and we have faith that God will act, that God will bend the arc of the universe toward justice, that God is bending that arc as we speak. God bent that arc on Christmas and on Easter. We proclaim that God has been victorious over sin and death, over violence and evil and oppression in every form, but we still live with their effects. There is still work to be done. There universe still needs to be bent. And this is a hard place to live. Mary and Luke knew this, too, just as we know this. To again quote Martin Luther King, Jr., this time from his Letter from a Birmingham Jail: “We must come to see that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and persistent work of men willing to be coworkers with God, and without this hard work time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation.”

This is what Mary does in our reading today. She proclaims that she is a coworker with God through the life growing within her. Mary claims the work that God has given her to do, the way in which she will do her part to bend the universe toward justice. For this reason, one of the traditional titles given to Mary is the Theotokos, a Greek word which means, “God-bearer.” This is not something a girl does. This is the work of a mature, confident, powerful woman. This is the example that Mary gives us, one which all of us, men and women, boys and girls, should strive to meet. Mary shows us what it looks like when we accept God’s call in our lives, when we respond with hope and faith, maturely taking our place in God’s work of salvation.

Doing so will make us God-bearers, too. As the thirteenth century German mystic Meister Eckhart said, “We are all called to be mothers of God—for God is always waiting to be born.” Where is God waiting to be born in Baltimore? Where is God waiting to be born in your life? How are you called to be a God-bearer, partnering with God in bending the universe toward justice? How will Mary become your example in this? Amen.