The following quote about Elizabeth and Mary comes from a southern professor and top preacher named Fred Craddock. While Fred is not saying anything particularly new, in December of 2012 I hear the words as if I had not heard them before:
He says, “The two women, [Elizabeth and Mary] not only kin but drawn by
a common experience, meet in an unnamed village in the Judean
hills. The one is old and her son will close an age; the other is
young and her son will usher in the new. Even the unborn John knows
the difference and leaps in the womb when Mary enters [the house].”
Elizabeth’s baby, who would grow up to be John the Baptist, has the
honour and responsibility of closing out the old age. Mary’s baby, who would grow up to be Jesus,
the Christ, has the scary and ground-breaking task of inaugurating the new age.
It is not a gradual change, to be smoothly
transitioned by one person; one ends the old, one begins the new.
Never before have I been so attuned to the idea of a former age closing,
and a future age being born. I know that
one reason for my receptiveness is the
fact that it is two days past December 21, 2012, and we’re all still here!
Though it was mostly picked up in a light-hearted, jesting way, the
publicity about the Mayan calendar ending on December 21st was in
the back of many minds last week. Ron
Semenoff, whom many of you heard preach here back in mid-October, is running a one day seminar I’ll be
attending in January entitled, “We’ve survived the end of the world! Now
what?” And this past Thursday, a blogger
named Helena Andrews posted an item
called “I don’t think the world is ending tomorrow but then I kinda do.” I
think she really captured the uneasy intersection that many of us found
ourselves at: the crossroads of “isn’t this silly” and “yeah, but what if it’s
true?”
In addition to the fact that the Bible DOES anticipate a day
when the world will end, though it says that it will come with no advance
calculations possible, I found myself struggling with the whole Mayan calendar
thing because in the United Church we try our best to be open and respectful in
our dealings with other religions and other cultures. Stephanie Pappas, a reporter for Fox News,
seems to have had the same uneasiness, and had this to say:
“Rumors of an apocalypse
linked to the Mayan calendar emerged only when Westerners got their hands on
the numbers. Theories blew up, largely online, making the Mayan apocalypse one
of the very few grassroots doomsday predictions in history.
“Apocalypse rumors eventually
became so pervasive that they brought the Dec. 21 date back to the attention of
the modern Maya, said Robert Sitler, a professor of Latin American studies at
Stetson University in Florida. Few Maya had given much thought to the calendar,
as it fell out of use more than 1,000 years ago. Now, however, many Maya are
giving the day its due… though not as the end of the world. Most groups
interpret the end of the b'ak'tun as a time of change and enlightenment.”
A time of change and enlightenment, you say, at the end of an age? That sounds curiously like what Fred Craddock
was saying about Elizabeth and Mary and the roles to be played by their
yet-to-be-born babies, doesn’t it?
So we have a Latin American calendar from at least 2500 years
ago, perhaps much longer than that, alerting us to a present time of change and
enlightenment. We have sacred writings
from the Middle East from 2000 years ago, asserting their annual 4th-Sunday-of-Advent
reminder to us to be aware of the end of one age and the start of another. We have any number of authors in this past
decade proposing that the current turbulence within Church and society is due
to an epoch change: for example, Doug
Pagitt’s idea that the Agrarian, Industrial and Informational ages have become
progressively briefer, and have now given way to an age of Inventiveness.
In our nation at this very moment, I think we have one more
source. Between the ongoing hunger
strike of Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence, and the arising of the Idle No More movement, we may well be
seeing the end of one era and the beginning of another in the relationship
between First Nations and the Crown. Chief Spence, specifically, has a simple
request: a face to face sit down with the Prime Minister, to work on solving
the untenable living conditions in her James Bay community. We’re not talking about a broad or
theoretical agenda here: she wants a
meeting, to solve problems revolving around housing that have been known to
government for at least 14 months now.
Perhaps I am over-estimating the power of this movement – time
will tell. But I have great hope for it,
especially in the context of today’s theme of “change and enlightenment”. Demanding a change in the “we’ll talk to you
when and if we decide to” attitude by Ottawa toward first nations, may well be the first step to ending an old
way that does not work, and forging a new way of respect from which will emerge
a completely different power balance. You can agree or disagree with Chief
Spence’s use of a hunger strike to make the point, but clearly, she and her
people have had enough and need some way to break through the paternalistic
silence of the old paradigm.
So we come back to Elizabeth and Mary, their story illuminated
by these other instances of one age coming to an end, and another age emerging
in its place. For both Elizabeth and Mary, the news of their
epoch-shaking children was delivered in person by an angel visitant, but the
responses to those visits were as different as the children they would
bear.
The birth of John the Baptist, we are told earlier in the 1st
chapter of Luke, was announced by a visit by an angel to Zechariah, Elizabeth’s
husband. Zechariah was a priest, and as
a trained religious guy he fell into the trap that a lot of us trained
religious guys fall into: he figured that his own experience and intellect
trumped what God was trying to tell him.
So when it was announced that Elizabeth would conceive and bear a child
who would “go ahead of the Lord” (1:17) and “bring back many of the people of
Israel to their Lord their God” (1:16), Zechariah could barely suppress a
scoffing laugh. Elizabeth was far beyond
her child-bearing years, and this proposal seemed preposterous. In response, the angel did not waver from the
original plan, but did take away Zechariah’s ability to speak until the child
was born – if he could not speak words of faith, he would not speak at all.
The birth of Jesus, as we heard in today’s reading from Luke,
was announced by the angel Gabriel, directly to Mary. Whether God learned that there was no use
talking to the man in these instances and decided to go directly to source,
well, I’ll leave that for you to decide.
Once she got over the initial shock of an angel visiting an adolescent
girl, Mary uttered these unforgettable words (1:38) as recorded in the King
James Version: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me
according to thy word”. Or, in a more modern form (TEV) “I am the Lord’s
servant, may it happen to me as you have said.”
Unlike the response of Zechariah, who put reason before proclamation,
young scared Mary was able to literally open herself to God’s possibilities,
whatever that would entail.
It’s no accident that the writer of the gospel of
Luke reports these events in such a parallel fashion. John the Baptist’s mother is an older
kinswoman of Jesus’ young mother. John the Baptist will prepare the way for
Jesus, and he will be born before Jesus.
John the Baptist’s ministry is lesser than the ministry of Jesus – in
John’s own words, he is “not fit to untie the sandals” of the one who will come
after him – and the parental response to his birth announcement is much less
inspiring than Mary’s response to her news.
Pierce Pettis has composed a wonderful song entitled “Miriam”, which
honours not only what God has accomplished in the birth of Jesus, but the
pivotal role of Mary’s trusting response when told what God has planned:
No banners were unfurled When God stepped into
the world
Held in the arms of a little girl Named Miriam
Laws of nature were suspended, Death sentences
rescinded
Throughout all the world - all
because of a little girl named Miriam
I don't know if you ascended, I don't care what's
been amended
There was one sure miracle; The faith of a
little girl named Miriam
So we have these two children-of-great-promise with clearly
defined missions for their lives. Two
weeks ago, our worship service focused on the roaring, aggressive ministry of
John the Baptist, and the way that he abundantly fulfilled his mission of
calling people to a new standard of ethical behaviour. In his ministry, he kept reminding his
listeners that his ministry was one of preparation – his was not the final
word. He had to keep reminding them of
that, for in his day, as in ours, whoever produced the most volume was likely
to find the largest audience, and John’s message of tearing down our sinful
ways was more belligerent and aggressive and marketable than Jesus’ message of
radical forgiveness. The angel said
that this child would “get people ready for the Lord” (1:17b) by calling them
to end the old ways, and he definitely did that.
When the angel Gabriel went to young Mary, or Miriam, the
message of her child’s mission was this: “He will be called the Son of the Most
High God. The Lord God will make him a
king, as his ancestor David was, and he will be the king of the descendants of
Jacob for ever; his kingdom will never end!”
As Christians, we believe that Jesus fulfilled and continues to fulfill
that mission, and is continuing to work even as we await the new heaven and a
new earth to be revealed at a time not yet specified. But in relation to how we live our daily
lives, I think that the key to the whole thing is not so much what the angel
said to Mary, but what Mary sung in response.
I don’t mean to downplay the importance of Jesus as everlasting
King and Son of the Most High God – without that foundation for our lives, not
much else matters – but in singing the
Magnificat (1: 39-45 TEV) Mary expresses the content of what God will
accomplish in Jesus. Mary names God’s agenda, and in turn, our
hopes as well: God scatters the proud, brings down the mighty, sends the rich
away with empty hands. God lifts up the
lowly, fills the hungry with good things, shows mercy to the family of Abraham
and Sarah. And God does all this through
a lowly servant – the unlikely vessel of the promise, a young betrothed teen.
Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan, in their
book, “The First Christmas”, call the Magnificat, an "overture" to
Luke's Gospel in which he sounds themes that will appear again and again:
Luke’s emphasis on women, the marginalized, and the Holy Spirit are all evident
in the birth narratives [and] Mary, filled with the Holy Spirit, gives voice to
those who are lowly. Or in the words of
Fred Craddock, (p.29) “What God has done for Mary anticipates and models what God will
do for the poor, the powerless, and the oppressed of the world.” Indeed, what Mary says in the Magnificat
states God’s intention and agenda, and the rest of the gospel of Luke tells of
how that agenda is fulfilled.
That divine intention is the same each time we come to a time of
change of enlightenment: the Magnificat can be voiced, word for word, each time
we arrive at these transitions. At each moment of transition, the big
transitions of society or the smaller transitions of our lives, we open our
eyes and our ears and our lives to what God has planned: lifting the lowly,
filling the hungry, showing mercy, scattering the proud, deflating the pride
and influence of the rich and powerful.
Young Mary gives voice to God’s deepest hopes for this world and its
people, and those hopes remain constant each time we perceive renewal in our
midst.
I believe there is a thirst for change in our world. Not just little change, but big, end-of-the-age
change. The fact that the whole Mayan
calendar story got as much traction as it did suggests that at a deep level, we
yearn for something very different than we have at present. In the face of that desire for something new,
listen to God, even now, as intently and openly as Mary did. Hear the
consistent call of our eternal God, for a world of justice, where the humble
are lifted to honour and the proud are sent empty away. In our lives and in the lives of our nations,
may this be so. Amen.
References:
Andrews, Helena. http://www.xojane.com/fun/i-dont-think-the-world-is-ending-tomorrow-but-then-i-kinda-do
Craddock, Fred B. Luke. Interpretation:
A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching. Louisville: John Knox
Press, 1990. pp 28-31 especially p.29
The quote regarding M.Borg and
J.D.Crossan is from Huey, Kate: http://act.ucc.org/site/MessageViewer?dlv_id=34581&em_id=30741.0
Learn more about Doug Pagitt at http://cathnews.co.nz/2011/05/10/its-a-new-cultural-epoch/ or listen to him at http://dougpagittradio.com/
Pappas, Stephanie. http://www.foxnews.com/science/2012/12/20/final-countdown-1-day-until-mayan-apocalypse/
Pettis, Pierce. MIRIAM. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Mi0xsSAfIE David
Noel Edwards has a lovely version of this song as well.
© 2012 Rev. Greg Wooley, Ralph Connor Memorial
United Church, Canmore AB
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