Picking up on this theme, a noted Protestant scholar, Ronald Goetz wrote in an article title, "The Mary in Us All", "The great Reformers didn’t give much theological attention to Mary. Yet, because God’s sovereign predestining grace was central to their faith, their attention to Mary should have been central and not peripheral. For who better than she illustrated the fact that every one of us is a passive … recipient of God’s purpose and calling? Christianity is the religion of what God has done for us and to us."*
"Christianity is the religion of what God has done for us and to us." I would only add to Goetz’s sentence, "and through us." Christianity is the religion of what God has done for us and to us and through us. Today, then, even though we’re not Catholics, I suggest that we focus on Mary as the great example of faith and happy response to God. Though she was still a teenager when she received the word about her place in salvation history as the mother of the Savior of the World, she’d already enjoyed enough of a relationship with God to recognize God’s will in the angel Gabriel’s message: "Hail, Mary, the Lord is with you. Do not be afraid, for you have found favor with God. You will conceive and bear a son and you will name him Jesus." And Mary responded, "Here I am, the servant of the Lord. Let it be with me according to your word." Mary consented to being used by God for the sake of the world. Through her would come the Jesus, the savior of the world. All she had to do was be the willing channel.
"Christianity is the religion of what God has done for us and to us."---and through us. We cannot achieve it; we may only receive it. Yet, such passivity rubs against the grain of our American activism. We are the can do people. If there’s a problem, by gum, we’ll fix it. In fact, we think we can fix everything! Instead of Mary, we’d rather be Caesar Augustus, ruler of the world, and thus we betray the deepest conviction of the holy Scriptures: human beings are not achievers of God’s favor, but receivers of God’s favor, and for no reason other than the mysterious kindness of God. And how blessed we are when this realization comes true in us.
I called my mother yesterday to thank her for the beautiful poinsettia she’d sent us. She told me was having such a wonderful time this year enjoying sending a few presents out and writing cards. She seemed so happy! Then she told why. She’d been at a store the other day when a young man in his mid-twenties sidled up to her and asked, "Maam, may I give you something?" Like any of us might be, Mom was immediately suspicious, but said anyway, "Sure, why not." He gave her a little poem he’d written. It was about giving his life to Christ a few years back when he’d hit bottom and needed God. Mom’s heart warmed as she listened to him, and then remembered and told him about her own experience of this some fifty years earlier, when, at the bottom of a desperate time of suffering, she too had given her life over to Christ. The result of that young man’s gift so lifted her spirits that as she walked out of the store, she dropped all her change into the Salvation Army bell can. Later at a cafˇ, she said, she saw a donation display for the Humane Society, and she gave more. She just felt like sharing what she had with others. Her tone of voice said to me that she’d had her faith renewed, all because of the simple, non-pushy testimony of a young man. He was like an angel, bringing good news. Maybe he was angel!
Surprised by grace, filled with God. Isn’t that what Christmas is all about? According to the scholar Goetz, whom I quoted earlier, "At the root of everything is God’s initiative and grace. We cannot create ourselves, we cannot redeem ourselves… Everything that is comes from God. Every hope we have for the redemption of all things comes from God."*
Mary sang of this in her song. God is about huge and important things: mercy for the faithful, justice in the social order, putting down the arrogant, raising up the oppressed, food for the hungry, and help for us all, as God fulfills the promise of blessing to the world. But our task, Mary saw and sang, is to stay open to the possibilities of God’s helping, saving presence. Mary is what the life of faith truly looks like: empty of self, full of Christ.
In her beautiful humility Mary shows us that we’re at best poor peasants at the fountain of grace. Even if an angel visits us we’d best lift up the battered, empty bowls of our souls saying, "Here I am, the servant of the Lord. Let it be with me according to your word."
To wish us a M.A.R.Y. Christmas is therefore to pray we will be open to God, and greatly expectant. Everything is about what God has done and will do for us and to us and through us. Life is not about what we can achieve, but about what we may receive. Even, most wonderfully, Christ born in us today. The hope of that is surely something to sing about. Mary Christmas! Amen