In the name of the God of the Annunciation, Amen.
This is Mary Sunday, as you can easily tell from our Gospel reading. This is the Sunday when we consider Mary’s decision to say “Yes!” to God’s offer to participate as God changed the world.
Have you ever seen a painting of The Annunciation – that moment where the angel Gabriel announced to Mary that God was entering her life in a very new and unusual way? Well, I took to Google this week and started looking at all of the paintings of this event, some by masters and others by folks who painted in relative obscurity. I found that the vast majority of these artistic representations do not come anywhere near showing how I truly believe the event of Gabriel’s visitation unfolded.
Most of these paintings show Mary to be a grown woman. We know from our knowledge of ancient Palestine and ancient Jewish custom, that most women – girls really – married at a very young age. The rabbis of the day held the opinion that twelve was an acceptable age for the girl to be engaged – and that thirteen was a good marrying age. Very few of the paintings show Mary to be a pre-teen or even a thirteen-year-old.
Then there is the really odd commonality in many of these paintings, that they show Mary reading – usually something that we can easily imagine to be Scripture. Remember that Mary was in Nazareth – a backwater town in the armpit of the Roman Empire, in the year 30 BC or so. I am willing to bet that only the rabbi in town could read – and perhaps even he couldn’t. And even if several people in town could read, there is very little chance that one of them was a young girl.
Perhaps my biggest issue with Annunciation paintings, is that they generally show Mary with a beatific smile (many look suspiciously like the Mona Lisa). She is always dressed impeccably, exceedingly calm, and many times wearing what looks to be a nun’s wimple (the white head covering that all nuns used to wear and some still do). In still others, Mary has a halo over her head, indicating that she is holy.
My problem with all of these portrayals, is that they lose Mary’s ordinariness – which, I believe, cheapens the story. Fabrizio Boschi almost got it right. In his painting, Gabriel and the seraphim, are about to bless Mary, and instead of the knowing smile and the total comfort with the situation, Mary is almost recoiling and looking askance at them. This one, as I said, is almost right, but not quite. Again, Mary is too old in the painting, and her expression, although appropriately showing confusion and some level of disbelief, she seems to be asking Gabriel, “What, are you kidding me?”
For my money, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in his 1850 painting, The Annunciation, other than the halo that Mary wears, came the closest to representing the important things about this story. In his work, Rossetti shows an obviously young girl, cowering as far back into the corner of her bed and the wall, as she can get. She cannot bring herself to look at the angel, and the look on her face says, “I have no idea what all of this means.”
You see … despite the way that painters have painted this scene, and despite the way that some religious writers have written about it, Mary’s visitation from Gabriel was an example of the extraordinary intersecting with the ordinary. It was a completely ordinary girl being confronted with the Archangel who, throughout Scripture, was tasked with taking messages directly from God and transmitting them directly to humans, usually with a corresponding power and understanding – and with a call to perform some function for God. That’s the reason that every time Gabriel appears in Scripture, his entrance is accompanied by the words, “Do not be afraid.” Because, let’s face it, if we saw Gabriel right here, right now, we would be petrified.
Mary being initially frightened and later confused, is important, because it means that Mary was just like us. She was NOT born from a virgin mother herself, as some legend holds. There is nothing in Scripture that indicates what Mary’s parents’ names were, much less about her conception and childhood. All of that stuff comes from legend and apocryphal accounts. And all of those legends are designed to make us believe that Mary was different from us, even before Gabriel visited. That is nonsense, and I believe that it does damage to her story.
The true power of the story of the Nativity (which was preceded by the story of the Annunciation) is that the God of the entire universe – indeed, the God of all that is – came to be one of us in a completely ordinary place, to a completely ordinary mother; that is, completely ordinary before Gabriel appeared. Because after the Archangel appeared, nothing in Mary’s life was ever ordinary again'.
Mary’s story is at its most powerful, not in who she was before that day. It is at its most powerful when this completely ordinary, confused, frightened, and shocked young girl looked at the Archangel of God and said, “Okay. I’ll do what you ask.” That is where heaven and earth intersected for a time, and out of which came the Incarnation of God. Without Mary’s, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” none of the rest would have been possible.
Episcopal priest and extraordinary author, Barbara Brown Taylor, said,
"Mary wins her place in history not for her cleverness, nor for her beauty, nor even for her goodness. She becomes the most important woman in the world simply because she is willing to say yes to an angel’s strange proposal without a clue where it will lead her. Doing so, she becomes the prototype for all of us who are also invited to bear God into the world."
And that is really the point of Mary’s story, isn’t it? She received a call from God that was decidedly more dramatic than most of ours. But make no mistake, we are all called to bear God in the world. And how we answer our own calls dictates whether or not that part of God’s mission in the world will be accomplished.
Sometimes when we get a call from God, it can seem that it is not really a call from the Almighty. After all, the work that God calls us to do can seem so ordinary: handing out bulletins, cooking for a potluck (or even more important, cleaning up afterward); setting up for, or clearing after a Eucharist. In some cases, our calling seems somewhat higher: teaching a Sunday school class or being a church musician. But as we all know very well, everything God calls us to do can be a struggle, so that sometimes we wonder why we bother. The point of the story is that everything we are called to do: the high and the low; the ones that bring adulation and the ones no one notices; those that seem irreplaceable and those that feel completely unimportant; all fit into God's scheme of things in ways that we cannot understand, any more than Mary could fully understand what Gabriel told her. And just as it was with the totally ordinary Mary, it matters less whether or not we execute our tasks with skill and gracefulness, than it does that we approach them with devotion. I read recently that, “God desires, not the skill of our hands, but the love of our hearts. The person who has only the ability to love God and neighbor is all important [to] God….”
When God asks, say “yes.” Then dive in and watch what wonders God can work. Amen.
[Advent 4B Sermon 122020, 2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16; Canticle 3 or Canticle 15; or Psalm 89:1-4, 19-26, Romans 16:25-27; Luke 1:26-38]
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