As I thought about all of the loss this Christmas, I realized that this isn’t the first time that “memories of Christmas past” have haunted me. When I was a teenager, I longed for the Christmas magic of childhood. When I lived in Europe, I longed for familiar carols in my native tongue. When I moved from Germany to Kentucky, I longed for the cozy joy of candles, hot mulled wine, and charming outdoor markets. When my children grew up, I longed for Christmas traditions with little ones. When my parents died, I longed to see them gathered around the tree.
It seems that Christmas often brings out my longings for what has been familiar tradition. It’s odd, though, this longing for the familiar on the Feast of the Incarnation. Because nothing is stranger than the birth of God’s Son. The words of today’s Gospel are certainly familiar to us—but the story is definitely unlike anything we could have imagined for ourselves. If God had followed familiar customs, the angel Gabriel would have paid a visit to a nice, respectable Roman matron. He would have searched for a married mother of good-standing to bear God’s Son. He certainly wouldn’t have come to Mary, to a girl as powerless and as insignificant as any human being could be. Think about it: Mary is a woman in a highly patriarchal society; she is young in a world in which age brings social standing; she is unmarried and childless in a world where husband and children are a woman’s only source of worth; she is poor and belongs to a powerless, oppressed people in a world with a strict social hierarchy. In a familiar world, we would never call this young girl, “Favored Lady of God.”
As for Mary, in accepting God’s plans, she turns away from all that is respectably traditional. Her life as an unmarried, pregnant girl is one of scandal, risk, and reproach. Mary’s “yes” is an agreement to let go of the familiar: she lets go of her standing and her reputation. She gives up control over her life. She opens herself up to God’s strange vision for the world, where first is last and last is first. While I was studying today’s lessons at my desk, I glanced over at a photo of Michelangelo’s Pieta that hangs nearby. As I read Mary’s trusting reply to the angel, I looked up at her grief-stricken face as she holds her dead son on her lap. The Pieta brought home to me the magnitude of the heart-breaking risk that Mary took as a mother. The powerless young girl holding a divine baby to her breast, and the sorrowful young woman with her grown-up child sprawled lifeless in her lap—They both proclaim the strange paradox of God’s love. God’s love abides quietly, patiently, enduring risk and obscurity. It waits to turn a poor, unmarried girl into the Mother of God, a mother whose own heartbreak gives life to the world.
I’ve never quite understood the disdain that some people have for the song, “Mary Did You Know,” that Elsa sang so beautifully for us today. Many of my clergy colleagues, especially my fellow female clergy, resent the "mansplaining" of this song. They quip, "Of course Mary knew. The Angel Gabriel told her! She doesn't need some male songwriter to explain who her son would become." I don’t see this song as an insult to Mary’s agency or her faith, however. For me, it points to the strangeness of what God was asking of her. Mary didn’t ask the angel how her son was to save his people. The song lifts up the divinity of Jesus: his miracles and his Kingship. But Mary didn’t ask for details on what kind of king he would be. She couldn’t possibly have imagined that he would be a crucified King. How could she imagine a savior who would love and forgive a world that could only send him to a criminal’s death? Mary knew what Gabriel told her, without truly knowing how it would come to pass. Mary’s very faithfulness is reflected in her willingness to give up the familiar world of knowing for the strange world of God.
The question for us in this oddly empty Christmas is not about what Mary knew when she said “yes” to God. The question for us is whether or not we are willing to follow her lead to embrace the strange. Like Mary, do we believe, deep down, that Love is always worth the risk and the pain that comes wrapped up in it? Rowan Williams describes incarnation as “the utter strangeness of God that waits in the heart of what is familiar.”[1] When the “familiar” of our memories is stripped away, can we, with Mary, find God in the strangeness? Can we seek Love in the losses? “In the absence of the trimmings,” will we, as Richard Lischer writes, realize that “Jesus is a real possibility this Christmas?”[2] God, in holy strangeness, comes to us in the familiar—in the familiar of human flesh, of human struggle, of human love. God is here in the emptiness, just waiting for us to utter the risky words: “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”
Anne,
ReplyDeleteThank you for this piece. I love your writing, and this piece really speaks to me.