Monday, December 19, 2011

Mary

As a young girl, I played Mary over and over again in a small but simple opera that my mother wrote. We traveled from church to church performing this opera for congregations of all different denominations. The result of all this was that I really began to think about Mary and what must have been going on in her head. Here is my theory about that young girl and what she went through on that fateful day that changed the world forever, that day when the angel came to visit and announced the birth of a Savior who was to be her Son and God’s son.


When the angel came to Mary, the Scripture tells us that she went through a variety of emotions. The first word used to describe her feelings means to be startled or greatly agitated. Mary was upset by the angel, there is no way around that. This was not what she expected. It may not even have been what she wanted. The Scripture is very clear that she is UPSET by the angel telling her that God is with her. It is not so much the physical appearance of the angel that frightens her, it is what he is about to say. Mary seems to instinctively know that her life is going to change forever. And she is not sure what she wants.

Mary does not ask the angel who he is. It makes me wonder, had she seem him before? She does not seem frightened by his appearance (most people are blinded, frightened by angels). Rather she is troubled because she knows that something tremendous will be asked of her.

We always depict Mary as this placid Virgin, always calm and pretty. She is never disheveled, never nervous or unsure. Just passive and peaceful all the time. But that is not how it reads in the original greek of the New Testament. In fact, it is strange to me how almost all of the English translations play down her emotions, her responses. In the original language, Mary is not so passive.

I would like to suggest that our responses to God when God enters our lives, enters our hearts, are very similar to the responses of Mary. And, like Mary, when God comes to us, we don’t just feel one thing. We feel many emotions at once. But, most commonly, the first thing we feel is fear.

The second thing that Mary feels is confusion. When the angel explains that she is going to have a baby, she is confused. She cannot conceive of how this is possible, given that she is a virgin. This seems so far beyond anything that she can even contemplate. She is honest with her confusion and is not afraid to ask the angel how this will all work. I love her for that. She does not try to impress or pretend that she understands. She does not nod stupidly or turn glassy-eyed. She stops the angel and makes him explain.

“How can this work?” she asks. “How can this happen if I am a virgin?”

We often ask the same question of God. You mean that you want me to do what? How will that work? What do you mean?

The idea of having God’s child was definitely NOT in Mary’s life’s plan. She wanted to be a mother, yes, probably, since that was the highest goal of every woman in Jesus’ day. But I’m sure that she had never conceived of this.

When the angel explains that God will simply overshadow her, she accepts this without further explanation. And then she says that greatest words of all.

Here I am.

Throughout the Old Testament, these are the words of the most faithful people. Abraham spoke these words when God told him to leave his country and go to another land. Jacob spoke these words. Joseph, Moses, Samuel, Saul and even David spoke these words. The prophet Isaiah said these words to God, Here I am, Lord, send me.

The most faithful of God’s people in the Old Testament said these very words. They are the words of the soul who is ready to let God’s will be done. They are the words of all of us who realize that God’s plan may be better, larger, more comprehensive and more beautiful than anything we could possibly imagine. These are the words that we all strive to say to God. Here I am.

And so the soul moves from fear to confusion to eventual trust, just as Mary did.

This morning we will hold the Christmas pageant as the liturgy of the Word at both the 9 and 10:30 services. A young woman will play the part of Mary. Her name is Amelia and she is very special. Amelia was born with a rare condition. She has no cholesterol. She is home schooled by her devoted mother. She is loved by our youth group. Cases like hers are very rare in the world right now and she is doing beautifully. When I look at Amelia, I see another human being who does not really know what the future will hold but who nevertheless says, Here I am Lord, do with me as you will.

It is scary to think of God being in charge of your life, scary to think of what might happen if we were to let go of our ambitions and expectations and allow God to enter us and act through us. It makes me scared just to think of it. But Christ is born when we step out of the way and allow God to do something radical and new with our lives. This kind of discipleship is very rare for we must listen deeply in order to hear God’s will for our lives. And many of us don’t have the patience to listen.

There are just seven days to Christmas. Each day, let’s say these words to God

Here I am Lord, let me be with me according to your word.

Amen.

Saturday, December 03, 2011

Advent

I was nine years old when they first asked me to babysit. Nine. The couple who lived right down Willow Street had a toddler girl. She must have been close to two years old. I came over at 6 and her parents were so happy to go on a date. I fed her supper, we played. I put her to bed. And then I was alone in a strange house. I remember it vividly.


First I watched the Wizard of Oz, but when that was over, I had nothing to do. I sat on the sofa in the living room. Everything smelled funny. The grandfather clock made so much noise. The minutes seemed to last an eternity. I kept waiting for the sounds of their footsteps on the front porch. What if a robber came? Where was the telephone?

The sounds grew louder and I became more watchful. Ten o’clock came and went. It was well past my bedtime. What if they had been in an accident? What if they never came home? What was that sound? Why did the shadows look so large?

At 11, I called my dad. I asked him to come over and wait with me. He was a good dad. He got out of bed and walked down the street and sat with me. It was not so hard to wait with him. Nothing seemed scary when he was with me. Just the fact that I was not alone seemed to help so much.

They came home some time later. Now that I look back, it must have seemed strange to these young parents that their babysitter had her dad there. But what were they thinking? I was only nine!

Jesus is coming again but we don’t know when. We have no idea when, it could be hours, days, years, millennia. We just don’t know. But we know that he is coming and his arrival will be something else. In the gospel for today, the first Sunday of the Christian year, we hear about how he will come. It sounds scary to me, with him riding on clouds, swooping into our mundane world to turn everything upside down. The sun will darken like an eclipse. The moon will give off light and the stars will fall from the sky. There will be cosmic signs such that we have never seen before. Christ will come in the clouds and he will send his angels to come and gather us up. It sounds like an earthquake with shooting starts or some kind of nuclear event. The heavens will be shaken, Mark writes. The heavens will be shaken.

You would have to be blind, deaf and dumb to miss such an event. So why then does Jesus say, in just the next breath, that we are to stay awake? He says that we are like slaves in charge of a house that does not belong to us. Like house-sitters or baby-sitters, we are to sit up and watch for the coming of the Master. The only problem is that we have no idea when he will come.

Why do we need to stay awake? Doesn’t this kind of cosmic arrival mean that everybody will be shaken, that everybody will wake up and see the Second Coming? How could you possibly sleep through that king of event? Why does it matter if we sleep before hand?

And what is so wrong with going to sleep? Why is that a bad thing? If I had not been so young and so scared, I might have gone to sleep at my first baby-sitting job. Would that have been so bad? The parents would have come home to find me asleep but in one piece and still on call for their baby-girl. They would not have been mad. It does not mean that I was not there or did not care. Sleeping is just something that we humans need to do from time to time. Why does God need for us to be awake?

The state that Mark describes is watchfulness. I don’t think that it has to do with how many hours a night that you sleep. It is about awareness. It is about how you live, not how much you sleep. How you live your life, about whether or not you are fully alive. What Mark is talking about is a state of mindfulness. It is about being fully alive. Our relationship with God and the eventual state of our souls has something to do with our mindfulness. It has to do with how alive we really are.

There are many things in life that lull us to sleep. A routine schedule, the daily work grind. A relationship that is long-standing and so comfortable that we are inclined to take it for granted. Many marriages fail and when you ask them what happened, they just say, “Oh, we drifted apart.” It is as if they got so comfortable together that they stopped working on being married. They expected it to come easily and soon it didn’t come at all. Studies show that couples that fight, not physically, but argue and disagree, tend to stay together. Because they are awake and paying attention to their relationship.

When you think about it, we humans try to be as comfortable as we can. We design our lives to take the sting out. We structure things so as to remove spontaneity. Most of us prefer to eat at similar times, exercise at similar times. Babies are happier when they have a routine and grownups are the same. We just like things to remain the same.

My father has been doing the stair-master every morning for ten years. Even though doctors and trainers all tell him that he needs to use different muscles each day, that he needs to mix it up a bit, he does not want to. He likes the routine. So he has very in-shape calves and a nice beer belly. But he is comfortable with his routine. Change, mixing it up, now that is just scary.

We lock our schedules in so that it seems that our life is repeating itself, like a broken record. Then we are shocked when our child grows or we see signs of ourselves aging. We structure our lives to make it look like all was comfortable, but it is not. God just keeps mixing things up and waking us up, startling us out of our comfort zones.

Illness wakes us up. Joblessness wakes us up. Depression, suffering, death-they all serve to shake us up. People tend to come to church for the first time when something happens to shake things up in their lives. They realize that they are no longer comfortable and that they need God.

The enemy of God is not fear, it is comfort. The enemy of God is the lulling sense that you don’t need God and the way that we forget that we are fragile beings hurtling through space. The sleepiness that Jesus speaks of is not physical sleep but spiritual malaise. It is when you stop being fully alive.

There is one thing that lulls us to sleep more than anything else: our busyness.

When you are racing from here to there, consumed with the minutia of urgent daily business, where is your mind? It is focused on the minutia and not aware of the big picture. As I drove my two boys hither and yon in search of a certain kind of sneaker, I could think of nothing but the traffic, my bad mood, the fact that the car was getting dirtier by the minute, my boys were fighting and if I was going to get them to their guitar lesson on time. I was moving fast, racing at 50 miles an hour down the highway to be exact, but I was lulled into nothingness. And I guarantee that everything that consumed and worried me at that moment on a Saturday afternoon will mean nothing to me in just a few days. And in a year, I will remember none of it.

At this season, the world will tell you to get busier. Buy lots of stuff! Wake up at midnight and shop til you drop! Christmas is about buying things and racing around to parties. Do and do and do and you will successfully never think about what this all means or why we wait for Christ to come at all. If we stay busy, years of our lives will go by, getting the box of ornaments out and packing it back in year after year. Soon we will realize that we have lived for decades and we do not know God any better. And we will wonder where the time has gone.

What are the signs of your times? What are people hungry for? Are you spending your time worrying about mundane things or are you actively asking God to guide you? If you are not asking God for guidance, if you think that you know what you need and you spend most of your time asking God for things, then you are still asleep. Mindfulness, watchfulness is marked by listening to God and to your fellow human beings. That is what it means to be humble, to leave room for the other.

I think that one of the reasons why we run around so much like chickens with our heads cut off is that we are afraid of standing still. When we stand still and begin to listen, we realize that we are empty and that realization is so scary that it keeps us on the move. But God cannot fill you if you do not acknowledge your own emptiness. And once God begins to fill you, well, then you really wake up.

When I look back on the churches that I have served, there is much that I cannot remember. Days went by with business and I can’t remember so much. But I do remember one place in each church with vivid recollection. I remember the chapel, the place where I prayed. I remember every detail of that room, the way the furniture felt, the icon or cross, the sound outside, just like I remember the living room of that house where I babysat for the first time. I remember because I was awake .

Ironically, when we sit still for a moment, we are more fully alive. The more we rush, the more we go to sleep inside. Stop the car. Breathe. Don’t let the precious moment pass you by. Jesus was just asking us to be alive. Don’t let yourself die inside. Wake up! Wake up!