(Gentle) . . . Cudgel Mary Luke 1: 46-55
Rev. Debra Bowman, Comox United Church
Nov. 27, 2022
It is so good to be back with you today. I got quite attached to you in the time I worked here, and am glad to be back to say hello. When Joyce invited me I said yes, provided I could preach on Mary and the Magnificat. I know it’s a tiny bit early in the Advent season, but I am on a mission to redeem the image of mild mother Mary. Last year I reflected on this passage at the Women’s Advent service and I hope you’ll forgive me if you hear something similar – but it is a different sermon!
I just love, love, love this picture of Mary. It’s a statue I saw in Ischia, a little island just off Naples, Italy where a friend and I spent some time this fall. You may have heard about it in the last day or two as there was just a terrible landslide in one of the towns. A very kind woman in halting English translated the write up about this statue for me as we both stood in awe in the front of the church where she stands.
Mary is rescuing a little boy from the clutches of a demon. The demon is at her feet, his a bit in shadows but he's cowering before the might of the mother of Jesus. I love the power in this image, the visceral physicality of defeating evil and protecting the vulnerable. I also love that Mary, like all mothers, is multi-tasking. Cudgel in one hand, baby firmly gripped in the other, and using her whole body to be between the demon and the little boy holding her leg. Isn’t it wonderful! Such a different image of love and commitment to the kindom of God’s goodness.
Our reading today includes perhaps the ultimate act of love – giving over one’s body and life to further the work and the will of God in the world. Mary’s words once she came to terms with hearing that she would bear a baby named Jesus, are a bit like Martin Luther King’s famous “I had a dream speech’ except, Mary said it a long, long time before he did.
There is a saying that I like about stories of our faith: I don’t know if it happened this way, but I know it’s true. We don’t know the facts of the story of Jesus’ birth, but what we do know is true is that somehow, somewhere Jesus came in to the world through the womb of a woman, and he lived and talked about God’s love for the world in a way that made people experience hope, peace, joy and love as truth, as real, and as being very close to them.
We usually think of Mary as a young, acquiescent girl, not someone with much will of her own, really not much more than a vessel for God’s coming realm. But Mary didn’t just agree to birth a child, she agreed to be the first one to sign on for a revolution, a cosmic revolution in which the world would be about to turn. Mary literally put her body and her life on the line. The Magnificat, the song in which she sings of God’s justice and her part in bringing it forth, is not the soft soliloquy of a puzzled young person with no will of her own - it is a celebration of God/of Love, drawing, near - and her role, and our role in it.
It strikes me, as passages of the Bible often do, that Mary’s words speak to us in an extremely relevant and urgent way these days. Her words rouse us from fear and anxiety to taking our place in the turning of the world.
When we sing the hymn after the sermon, I invite you to notice, to really notice, the call to not just hope, but to action, that the rephrasing of her words, and the music call us to. I can’t sing this hymn without wanting to march about the kitchen with my fist raised in the air. The arts of poetry and music giving voice and vigour to religion.
Progressive Christian theologian Nancy Rockwell has written:
Luke’s is the only gospel in which Mary’s story appears, and in his account there is nothing submissive nor immature about her. According to Luke, the Angel approached her with words of great honor: Hail Mary, full of grace. Many artists paint the angel kneeling, in recognition of the honor given to her. …
Many women in biblical stories appear in domestic settings…[but] with Mary…we never find her cooking, cleaning, washing up. What we find her doing, over and over, is traveling, in journeys that involve risks and an element of danger. [Or waving a big stick beating a demon]
[What we find her doing is grasping the task God has set before her and fulfilling it in every way – bearing a child in the most precarious of circumstances and loving and releasing that child as an agent of God. She is open to housing God, to hosting the incoming kindom of Love].
Her recital of the Magnificat is a political manifesto, delivered fairly publicly, [and dangerously] in the home of an official temple priest…. In Mary’s manifesto there is evidence of … a good deal of political savvy. [She has signed up] for a bold agenda: to bring the mighty down from their thrones; to scatter the proud in the imagination of their hearts, to fill the hungry with good things and send the rich empty away.
Traveling alone, like every prophet before her, she sets out on her first journey, to her cousin Elizabeth’s house, to declare her agenda. There will be more journeys: to Bethlehem; to Egypt and back; to Jerusalem when Jesus is twelve; to Jerusalem when he is crucified.
She gives birth in a barn, lies down with animals, and welcomes weathered shepherds in the middle of the night. She is determined, not [docile]; free, not foolish; holy, not helpless; strong, not submissive. She beckons women [and all of us] everywhere to speak out for God’s justice, which is waiting to be born into this world. (No More Lying About Mary December 3, 2015 by Nancy Rockwell
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/biteintheapple/no-more-lying-about-mary/)
Recent events in our world are making it clear that it is time for all of us to welcome the kindom of God through a commitment of our lives. In a time when racism, and misogyny, and fear of the immigrant and prejudice against people of colour and other religions is on the rise, we need to rise up. When we see that the pandemic scratched off the thin veneer of civil society and revealed a capacity for miserly meanness that makes the acts of Ebenezer Scrooge pale in comparison, we need to rise up. When Two-spiritedLGBTQ+ people are subject to acts of violence, discrimination, bullying, and even murder, we need to rise up. Each one of us needs to find in our own way a song of resistance, a song of solidarity with the sacred desire for justice, for hope, peace, joy and love to reign.
Meister Eckhart, a 13th Century mystic wrote: We are all called to be mothers of God – for God is always waiting to be born. There is urgency now in that waiting, a time for us to decide how to be the voices of Hope and Love in our world. I know, having spent a significant amount of time with you people, that you have those voices within you. You have that strength and compassion within you. May God give you each a song, and may you sing with the courage and grace and guts of Mary.
Amen