Water Daily: Virgin Mary

Showing posts with label Virgin Mary. Show all posts

12-21-23 - Girl Power

You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.

This story is so outrageous; who would invent it? Why would you make up an immaculate conception? If the idea of sexual union troubled you, you’d probably want to avoid the whole reproductive system, right? You wouldn’t write it right into the story of God!

But a young woman’s reproductive system is right smack dab in the middle of our salvation story. The conception may have been immaculate, but nothing after that was. To put it crudely, we get no Incarnation without a woman’s plumbing.

The angel said to her, “And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus.” ... Mary said .., “How can this be, since I am a virgin?"

Certain charges were leveled at early Christian thinkers and church leaders, that they were flesh-denying and anti-woman, weaving a conspiracy of suppression. Some might have been, but you can’t honestly derive such a view from our Gospels. If that was your agenda, why would you tell the story of the Messiah’s emergence through a woman’s birth canal? Why would all four Gospels agree that the first person to see Jesus risen from the dead was a woman? Why would the Gospels show Jesus’ friendship with and trust in women?

Right here at the heart of our story is a young woman, whom we today would consider still a girl – and she is the agent through whom God is revealed to human eyes. Imagine! AND SHE SAYS YES! Did she really have a choice? Luke tells us unmistakably that she chose: Then Mary said, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”

“Here am I.” That’s a statement of identity and presence. Here am I. What if we started each day with those words? “Here am I, world! Here am I, God!”
“The servant of the Lord.” That’s a statement of relationship and mission. Mary wasn’t asking what God had done for her lately; she self-identified as God’s servant and proclaimed it boldly.
“Let it be to me as you have said.” I accept. I know what you’re asking, I know in part what it’s going to cost me, and I accept. Amen – let it be.

That’s a powerful young woman! That’s an agent of change! Even before the canticle of radical reversal and equality that’s attributed to Mary in the Magnificat (or, if you prefer it sung, here's Rutter's...), right here we see girl power to the nth degree, a formidable young woman who will carry, and bear, and raise, and lose our beloved Jesus – and then receive him back, though only in part, and never to keep.

I’ve never thought of the story of the Anunication as an anthem of women’s empowerment, but just writing this fills me with energy. I want to go out and tell every young girl I know: Look at this girl! Look how calm and clear and powerful she is! There is power in serving others, in offering ourselves – if we recognize our own worth in the process.

Maybe you know a young woman whom you can affirm today, remind of her value. So many forces in our culture rob young women of their sense of worth. (Fashion industry? Social media? Advertising?) How might we join with others to overcome or undermine those forces? God chose a young girl for God’s greatest mission. She said yes. Girl power rocked the world! It still does.

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12-20-23 - Say What?!

You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.

I don’t know that I would want to hear that I had found favor with God… God’s favor can come with a request for a favor! In the case of Mary of Nazareth, a rather big one: to allow her body to be the vessel for the Son of the Most High.

The angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. He will reign over the house of Jacob for ever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.”

Did Mary hear anything after the words “womb” and “son?” Where would you even start with an announcement like this? With the pregnancy? The predictions of greatness, of divinity, of Messiah-ship? That’s what “the throne of his ancestor David” means – and no doubt Mary understood the code. Or would you focus on the words “reign” and “kingdom?” I don’t know that I would have heard any of it – this was an angel speaking! My senses would already have hit “tilt.”

So even more credit goes to young Mary for not only taking it in, but responding in a most down-to-earth, matter-of-fact way: “How?” Mary said to the angel, “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” How indeed? Gabriel’s answer is short on details, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you…”

Mary is left to sort through the words, the past, the future, the fear, the excitement, the bafflement. She ignores the grand and cosmic mystery of identity about this coming child, and focuses on the reality closest to her: her body. This wondrous event is to take place in her body – a body that, she reminds the angel, has not experienced sexual intimacy. Is she to endure the wear and tear of childbearing before she’s had the pleasure of child-begetting?

How will this be? How indeed does God work through the frail and fallible flesh of any person? Mary’s mission may be the most intimate in our whole crazy story of redemption, but every part of that story involves God working through a person. People are asked to yield their time, livelihood, home, safety, security, voice, identity… They are called to make themselves available to the Spirit of God.

Us too. What has God asked of you, probable or improbable, difficult or simple? This is a small example, but it was a big deal for me to yield my space and my schedule when my mother moved in with me last spring – and at times I gave it grudgingly. What aspects of your life and self have you made available to the Holy One to fill and use? What have you held back? What are you willing to offer?

In prayer today we can work through a litany of “oblation,” offering in turn our minds, our bodies, our time, our gifts, our resources, our relationships, our networks, and, of course, our spirits. (Here is a form to help you.) As we offer each area, we might wait for a word on how God wants to use that in us.

Mary was called to be a vessel of Christ’s body, to bear him into the world. We are called to be vessels of Christ’s spirit, to bear him into the world in our own ways and circumstances. That includes our bodies as well as everything else that makes us who we are. We can invite the Spirit to fill us – and then see how we make space for grace.

12-18-23 - The Virgin

You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.

It’ll be the shortest human gestation period in history. This year, the Fourth Sunday of Advent falls on Christmas Eve. At church in the morning (join me online at 10 am EST…) we’ll hear about Mary’s becoming mystically (and also actually….) pregnant. A few hours later we'll celebrate the wondrous birth of her baby, Jesus. And why not? Of all the takeaways from this story, perhaps the greatest is the angel Gabriel’s exit line: “For nothing is impossible with God.”

We meet Mary, a young woman betrothed to a man named Joseph, right about the time she meets the Angel Gabriel: In the sixth month [of Elizabeth’s pregnancy with John, who would grow up to be the Baptist…] the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin’s name was Mary.”

Who was this Mary? Luke tries to make a decent introduction with the “where-when-who." She lived in Galilee, considered by many a low-rent backwater of Judean provinces. Scripture says nothing of her economic circumstances or her family – which doesn’t stop later generations from naming her parents Anna and Joachim and designating them saints.

We are told that she is a virgin, an awfully intimate detail to learn about one we’ve just met. Maybe Luke just meant her unmarried state, where we might find the word “maiden” more decorous – but her virginity does figure into the story.

We learn that this young woman is engaged to a man called Joseph – and that his ancestry is significant: He descends from Israel's legendary King David, from whose line many believed the Messiah would come. As Jesus' earthly father, Joseph will provide his Davidic lineage. That lineage also gets him and his betrothed to Bethlehem, David’s ancestral town, where prophecies said the Messiah would be born.

We'll save for another day the encounter between Mary and this angel. Today let’s focus on the girl, this girl who has been so adored and so worshiped and so controversial for so many generations. In many ways she is a screen onto which people project their own wishes and identities. We know little about her beyond these biographical details – and the amazing grace with which she considers the angel’s announcement and comes to a quiet “Yes,” a "yes" staggering in its humility and vulnerability.

It is that “yes” which has led some to attribute supernatural qualities to her – sinlessness, saintliness, even divinity. Such ideas are not only unbiblical - they undermine the power of her story for us: That God chose an ordinary girl for an extraordinary ministry, and that she chose to accept the mission and let it shape her life. Were it not for Mary, there would be no Jesus of Nazareth as we know him. God might have found another way, but this is the way our story is revealed. Mary is the woman who bore God for us.

Today in prayer we might contemplate Mary, however she appears in our mind’s eye. Imagine her in her room when the angel appears, and play through the story. (Here is a powerful painting of that scene by Henry Ossawa Tanner, if you want some help...) Or go even deeper and imagine yourself in that position. What would you think? Say? Do?

However we enter her story, let us give thanks to Mary, or for her, for the gift she gave us. In a small way we share her mission – to allow the Spirit to fill us with life, a life not wholly our own but mingled with ours to create a new person, the Christ who comes to set all people free; and then to bear that Christ into the world.