I am always struck at Gabriel’s announcement to Mary that she is favored by God and will bear his Son. This Son, the Messiah, the King of David’s line, promised to redeem not just Israel, but gentiles as well, from their self chosen and destructive sin. Mary’s response is so immediate that it might throw modern folks, especially of a skeptical, Anglican sort, whose experience of God’s voice might not have been so direct. Mary uses the same words as all God’s prophets who embody God’s call to return to God: “here I am, Lord.”
In that moment, her life fundamentally changes not just because of her attitude or her thoughts. No her life changes because Jesus, who is God, submits himself first to his Father, and then to her, his mother. In Jesus’s submission to her, being nurtured in her womb, being born of flesh, Mary, along with every other human being, is born again, born anew in God.
And in her responsive submission to nurturing him in her womb, bearing him through her flesh, so that all might be joined to his, she becomes the mother not just of Jesus, but all of us who are united to her through him. Who could have predicted what her yes to God; here I am, could possibly mean. You and I today are children of God because of that one, quiet, humble, courageous, mustard seed of a, “yes,” to God.
This yes of Mary’s is prolific in effect. It is not that Mary loved God first; but that God loved Mary, by joining himself to her, and through her, to all of us who are alive today. In this way God made possible not just her joy, “my soul magnifies the Lord, and my soul rejoices in God my Saviour,” but the joy of all who hunger and thirst and humble themselves in obedient submission in the service of God’s love, justice, and peace; but who don’t know where to begin; who perhaps feel their contribution is small, inconsequential, not profound or prolific enough. What utter joy is discovered in the realization that our yes to God doesn’t mean we must be effective on the world’s terms, or even in our own lifetimes. Mary would not have known that you or I would be her offspring, just as Abraham before her did not know about her, or us.
What peace we might find in quiet, humble offering, when we can see ourselves as part of God’s mission, of God’s power transforming all things through time. What capacity to act with courage and perseverance might flow from realizing that it is God’s work that makes ours effective at a far greater scale or scope than we could ever imagine.
What might flow from our faith that God is entering into us, as he did into Mary, to transform not just our attitudes, but our very reality. My own brief, lone encounter with God’s voice calling me back to church was as clear as the disciples’ experience of Jesus’s transfiguration. That one very pedestrian - in comparison to Mary’s encounter with Jesus - moment has been compounded over time as I have recognized my own insufficiencies and have cried out to God to bear himself in me again.
Over time I am coming to trust more and more, to say yes, more and more, to serving God’s church through circumstances of anguish, loss, doubt and complacency that would have caused me to move on from any other relationship in life. Although none of my yes’es have led to monumental gains, I have begun to see a trickle of effects of God’s grace in reshaping my own heart and thoughts, and so also those of the people whose lives I encounter.
And so I ask myself and I ask you: what might we be willing to risk in engaging other people, in praying, in speaking, in learning, in listening if we trusted that our yes to God is made sufficient in Christ, by the Spirit’s working EVEN when we have only two coins to offer because we’re old, or because we struggle with mental or physical health issues, or family who depend on us so that we cannot be there all the time, or because we have doubts about God or about what God is doing. What if our yes, like Mary’s and Elizabeth’s is knitted together with a myriad of others, “Here I am Lord, send me.” AMEN
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