Hope for the World

Sermon

For many of us, there is something about these very familiar people in our Bible stories that is absolutely confounding.  Take the apostle Paul, whom I would like to meet when and if I go to Heaven, and argue with, because – for me – he has written both some of the most beautiful and the most infuriating things in all of scripture.

Or Jesus.  Right?  I’m pretty solid when it comes to acknowledging the power and challenge of his teachings.  I make a conscious choice to believe that he was fully human and fully divine and I know that’s a real sticking point for others.  I choose to believe that God did raise him from the dead and that he did appear to his disciples, but I totally accept that some people aren’t there.  And I wonder and worry what he thinks of me.

And then there’s Mary, the mother of Jesus.  I wish we had the ability to do a slide show of the images of Mary across the centuries and continents.  Is she the shy village girl?  Is she the strong disrupter of the status quo?  Is she brave or terrified?  Full of love or accepting of the social conditions of marriage?  Is she a nagging mother that Jesus barks at, or is she a worried parent, so afraid of what will happen to her son?  Did she live out her days in grief or in wonder that her son rose from the dead?  I have so many questions.

For today, let’s just think about the Mary we meet in the first chapter of Luke’s gospel.  What do we know about her?  We know that she lived with her parents in Nazareth, a small village of a few hundred people, nowhere near the power centers or Jerusalem or Rome.  As a young teenager, who had started getting her period, she was ready for betrothal, a promise to marry a man for whom she would bear children.  We don’t know if she had any siblings, or exactly what her relationship was to her kinswoman Elizabeth.  We don’t know what she thought of Joseph, to whom she was betrothed, if there was any love in that relationship or simply obedience to what was expected of her.

Her name, Mary, is related to the Hebrew name Miriam, and maybe in her Jewish home, that is what she was called.  That name reminds us of the woman from Hebrew scripture, Miriam the sister of Moses, Miriam who sang and danced and played the tambourine when God led her people to freedom.  We know that God chose Mary of Nazareth, for reasons we don’t know.  I’m not sure it’s even worth speculating about why God chose her – we might assign her virtues that didn’t belong to her; we might transfer a few of our own prejudices upon her.

We know that God chose her and we know that, more or less, she said yes after some moments of terror and disbelief.  We know she trusted her kinswoman Elizabeth, and made that journey to the hills of Judea, a journey of some 80 to 100 miles, to share her unbelievable news.  So I think it’s safe to say she had some chutzpah, whether she made that journey alone or with company.

And we know that she sang.  When I’m in one of those moods I like to imagine that Mary couldn’t carry a tune and her song came out a bit like Buddy the Elf’s song to his father

I’m here with my dad and we’ve never met
And he wants me to sing him a song
I found you daddy
Guess what?  I love you I love you I love you.

But let’s give Mary the benefit of the doubt.

In this story, I wonder if we need to give God the benefit of the doubt too.  Let me explain.

It feels rather risky to have this special, incredible, irreplaceable child nurtured in the womb of a girl of no account in a tiny village in the remote outskirts of a Roman colony.  And really, if you were the Creator of All That Is, don’t you think you might bypass the whole living inside a mother, swimming in the amniotic waters thing?  What was God up to?

So I think we need to give God the benefit of our doubt and say that God knew what God was doing.  God knew that ordinary Mary, if she chose to say yes, would be a good enough mother.  And mean that in the best possible way.

Part of what makes this story extraordinary is the very ordinariness of it.  If Hollywood did this story, a stunningly beautiful 25 year old, living in some amber-lit city would be cast as Mary.  She would wear flowy white linen, and her hair would look perfect, and make-up artist would spend three hours making her look like she was bare faced.  Angels would be her handmaidens, and her parents would be concerned but supportive, and… you get it.

Instead, we have an ordinary teenager of no account.  We know nothing of what she looked like, of her personality, or even if she believed all this God stuff. But as is true for most of us, what we believe is secondary to what we do.

What Mary did was say yes to God and then sing about the life she hoped her child would have.  She hoped he would have a life centered in the things that God wants for the people: the disarming of the proud, a rebalancing of power, food and justice for the hungry, recompense for those at the mercy of the rich.  She wanted those things for her child, and for herself, and probably for all those she knew in her little village on the outskirts of a colony of Rome.

There is hope for the world in that.  In our call to worship, we acknowledged that God is the hope of the world, and in the church we often say that Jesus is the hope of the world, too.  I believe that the omnipotent love of God, the relentless work of healing by Jesus, and the grace that infuses all of that is indeed hope for the world.

I also believe that Mary’s very ordinariness and regular old human virtue is hope for the world too, in that God usually does not call exceptional, perfect, Mensa, Olympic, New York City penthouse, Nobel Prize folks to do the work of God.  God chooses girls who have barely entered adolescence.  God chooses people who live in Nowheresville.  God chooses people who have so many blemishes on their record and God sees that they can still be part of the divine plan.

The divine plan hasn’t changed that much since Mary sang about it.  God is still inviting the likes of you and me to engage in the work of humility and not pride; of seeking more power for those on the margins and less power for those in the penthouses.  God’s work is the work not only of getting food to those who are hungry but of dismantling the systems that make them hungry in the first place.  It’s the work of seeking justice for people who are discounted or killed because of the color of their skin, and the centuries of hate that have strengthened that.  It’s the work of simple kindness and generosity, and heroic forgiveness, and undaunted hope.

This week bell hooks died.  She was a regular person who did great things.  She was a black woman scholar whose work deeply influenced the feminist movement and challenged white feminists to see that women of color belonged in the movement as well; it’s hard to describe what an enormous gift her writings were to those working to make American society more just in the past forty years.

She was born in a small town in Kentucky, one of six children; her father was a janitor and her mother was a maid to white families. She graduated from Stanford, received her PhD from University of California, Santa Cruz, and became an author, professor, feminist, and social activist. She wrote about the ways that race, capitalism, and gender played off each other in ways that led to a dangerous classism and oppression of those considered lesser. She taught at Stanford, Yale, City College of New York, and spent the last seventeen years teaching at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky, a college town with a population of 12,000. She considered herself a Buddhist Christian.

In an interview from 2015, bell hooks talked about the way she approached life.  She asked herself the question, “What are you willing to give your life for, bell?”  And she said something that resonates so deeply, I think, with the things that Mary sang about.  In the interview, she said, “I believe whole-heartedly that the only way out of domination is love, and the only way into really being able to connect with others, and to know how to be, is to be participating in every aspect of your life as a sacrament of love.”

(https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/12/10/bell-hooks-buddhism-the-beats-and-loving-blackness/)

What would it mean for us to live every moment of our lives as a sacrament of love?  What would it mean for us to embrace the call of our faith, the call to love and faith?  Would we burst out in song?  Would we hope things for our children?  Would we, of little or no account in the world, still be a part of the change of the world?

I believe that every one of you can be hope for the world, but more importantly, God believes that too.  It’s a question of what we’re willing to give our lives for….

Let us give our lives for good, and for God.