Scripture: Luke 1:26-38
I have given a number of sermons on Mary over the years, sermons based primarily on the two advent scriptures most famously connected to Mary: the words we heard this morning commonly referred to as the Annunciation, and the passage known as the Magnificat, which I will quote from in just a moment. One of those previous sermons on Mary was just last year, and I remember beginning that sermon by commenting on how in spite of Mary’s prominence in the scriptures leading up to Jesus’ birth, in spite of Mary having this central part in the story and playing a central role in the devotional life of many Christians, nevertheless she is generally portrayed in an essentially passive manner. She is not the one who acts but the one who is acted upon. Her significance in the annunciation is simply that she receives the news of her pregnancy: “And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High…The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you…”
Mary here is the mere vehicle, the receptacle of God’s favor. The power is not hers. The power belongs to God and to the Holy Spirit, which will overshadow, overwhelm her. Her greatness is only because of the greatness of the one to whom she will give birth. And her virtue is the passive virtue of submission to the will of God, of being willing to be used by God in whatever way God wills. “Here am I,” she says, “the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your will.” It is not even that she will do whatever God wants, go wherever God calls. It is more that she will let herself be acted upon by God. Mary, this central female figure in the gospels and the devotional life of many Christians, this ideal of Christian womanhood, is not a figure of strength, action, initiative, boldness but of willing obedience. I not only made that comment in my sermon of a year ago. I objected. I said—this is a direct quote and I am a little embarrassed about quoting myself, but you will indulge me, I hope—I said, “I want to protest the passivity of Mary.”
I have also noted in other sermons that Mary doesn’t just speak words of acceptance, obedience, and praise. Her passivity, as it were, is more a product of how we have portrayed her, more than how the scriptures have portrayed her. People tend to overlook or not take very seriously, for instance, the words she spoke about a new social order that she knew she was to be involved in bringing about. “For the Mighty One has done great things for me and holy is his name…He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich empty away.” Not the words of a meek and mild Mary. Not the words of some unearthly Madonna sanctified by a halo and removed from the cares of the earth. Not that I want to make Mary out to be some kind of revolutionary, but she does need to be rescued from many of the paintings of her and many of the impressions we have created of her. I have protested against the passivity and the saccharine, angelic images of Mary on more than one occasion in the past.
Today I want to praise the passivity of Mary. It’s not that I’ve changed my mind. I’m not taking back what I’ve said before, just adding to it. I suppose I could have saved myself the need to explain why I am unapologetically contradicting myself by just not mentioning what I’d said before, but I wanted to say it again, if only briefly, because not only am I not taking it back but I want to re-emphasize what I said before especially in light of what I have in mind to say this morning. Besides, whether I mentioned what I have said about Mary in other sermons or not, I suspect that just saying that I intend to praise the passivity of Mary would mean that for many of you in this crowd I would have some explaining to do anyway. So let me explain myself…or try.
I think it is safe to say that passivity is not a character trait that is particularly admired in our culture. And so when, because of gender stereotypes, we imagine women to be less capable of the more active virtues, when we think of it as unfeminine or unwomanly to be aggressive, adventurous, ambitious, strong, actively intelligent in the sense of having ideas that one is willing to state forcefully, argue for, and defend, when we as a culture, men and women, restrict women to the more passive virtues, we not only restrict the social roles they are likely to fill, we restrict the fullness of their humanity. This was a large part of the context for my wanting to protest the passivity of Mary. I don’t want her being used to reinforce passive stereotypes of women, and I don’t want those stereotypes determining the way we read the Bible.
At the same time, I don’t want our culture’s bias toward what I am calling those more active virtues to go unexamined or unquestioned. Aggression and ambition are not necessarily bad things, but they are not necessarily good things either, and what makes them good is, of course, decidedly not whether they are practiced by men. And to think of more passive qualities such as compassion—taking into one’s own heart the sorrow or trouble being experienced by another—or being a good listener—taking in the words and the thoughts and feelings that go along with them of someone else—to think of these qualities as being even a touch unmanly restricts the full humanity of men as much as other stereotypes may restrict the full humanity of women.
That’s part of the context for my saying this morning that I want to praise the passivity of Mary. It a kind of extension of thoughts left over from past sermons. But what really caused me to think along these lines more were some reflections I was led to have on the notions of blessing and being blessed. Those notions are inherent in the act of baptism. They are also part of the Mary scriptures. In the Magnificat Mary explicitly exclaims, “Henceforth all generations will call me blessed,” but all through both passages—the Annunciation and the Magnificat—is this sense of Mary’s that she has been blessed. She has received this anointing, this gift, this wondrous news, this blessing from an angel sent from God.
Blessing also happens to be the title of a chapter in a book I was leafing through recently for other reasons. The book is called “An Altar in the World” and is written by a woman named Barbara Brown Taylor, whose various writings I have benefitted from in the past. This book is about spiritual practices, something of an unconventional book about spiritual practices because what Taylor chooses to write about are in general not what might be thought of as spiritual practices in any traditional sense: things like prayer, meditation, keeping of Sabbath, keeping of silence, fasting, scripture reading, and so forth. Taylor’s book, like several others in recent years, approaches the matter of spiritual practice more as something that can be embedded in the rhythms of daily life, and that is as much a way of seeing things from a certain spiritual perspective as it is a matter of some specific activity that is supposed to bring you closer to God. She has, for instance, a chapter on “saying no”, a theme I have come across in other books of this nature as well—it seems to be a common theme in the times we live in— the idea being that it is a spiritual discipline to be able to say no to the varied demands made upon us thereby filling lives up with activity but not necessarily with clear purpose, to be able to say no for the purpose of simplifying life and leaving space for the things that really are most important to us.
But to get back to the theme of blessing, Taylor suggests in her chapter on the subject making the pronouncing of blessing a spiritual practice that anyone can do and that can be built in to the way we live. There are all sorts of reasons why the act of pronouncing blessings, the practice of pronouncing blessings randomly and profusely is a good thing for anyone who does it and for the world in general. It nurtures a compassionate approach to people and a reverent approach to all that is. It reduces the judgmental tendencies we may carry within us—concentrating on blessing rather than cursing or criticizing. It encourages forgiveness and takes forgiveness one step beyond itself. All of this is true enough, but there was also something just a little bothersome to me about much of what Taylor was saying. Mostly, it seemed to me, she seemed to be buying in to a kind of activist mentality that urged on us the goodness of doing this good thing, this undeniably good thing. But alongside all the encouragement she was trying to offer us to be people who would bestow blessings on others, who would bring blessings and be blessings, almost hidden alongside all that kind of language were a few quiet statements that I found to be closer to what we really need to hear, what I really need to hear anyway.
Referring to a poem by Wendell Barry, who by the way will be speaking at the university on Thursday, Taylor writes: “Reading him, you come gradually to understand that the key to blessing things is knowing that they beat you to it. The key to blessing things is to receive their blessing.” Which is why I say that I want to praise the passivity of Mary today. Although—not to cut too fine a point with what Barbara Brown Taylor has to say—it is not even that the key to blessing things is to receive their blessing. It is more that being able to receive blessings, being open, being receptive to being blessed is an end in itself, not something we do in order to be able to bestow a blessing, but an end in itself. To put it in the language I was using earlier, it is a matter of the fullness of our humanity. To think of ourselves as always in the active mode, to think that it is somehow our calling to be doers of good, or doers of the word as scripture says, bestowers of blessings in word and deed, is a somewhat limited notion of who we are. It’s ok, I suppose, to think of that as our calling, if we don’t get too high fallutin’ about it, and if we don’t think that’s all of who we are. But if we do not allow ourselves to become passive as well, if we do not allow ourselves to be open and receptive to being blessed, then we are restricting the fullness of our humanity.
I don’t mean to be preachy about this, even though I am giving a sermon, and I don’t have a lot more to say than just some words of praise for what I am referring to as Mary’s passivity, which I also mean of course to be words of praise for the same kind of passive qualities in our own lives. Maybe passivity isn’t exactly the right word. Maybe for reasons I’ve alluded to it has too many negative connotations. But words of praise then for the receptive places in our spirits where we know ourselves less as the blessers and more as the blessed. In that sense what I am referring to as Mary’s passivity has much to teach us.
As I say, I don’t really want to elaborate too much on this thought, but let me sneak in just one thing before I close. Blessings don’t always come to us in immediately recognizable form. We are not always very good at recognizing what is a blessing and what isn’t. It is a good spiritual practice to be about blessing even and especially people who are troublesome to us. For all we know, they may already be in the process of blessing us in some way that we won’t recognize or appreciate until somewhere much farther down the road. Being open to the receiving of blessings is not only about being open to the most obviously good and welcome things in our lives. It is about being open to being blessed sometimes in what at the time may seem difficult or unwelcome ways, and it is certainly about being open to being blessed in an enormous number of unpredictable, unanticipated, unexpected, inexpressible ways. It is about much more than not taking for granted the things that make life easier or more pleasurable.
But it is about giving thanks. We don’t give thanks in any very deep sense without having spirits that are open to the ways, the many ways, in which we are among the blessed. And so some Advent-ish words of praise for Mary’s receptivity to blessing on this day that is also part of Thanksgiving weekend, seem appropriate. Even more appropriate for us here at Sojourners on this day when Emma and Maggie, who have been part of the Sojourners family from the very beginning, have become part of the larger Christian family and have received signs of blessing from others that are at the same time signs of God’s blessing, and on this day when Emma and Maggie and Paula and Beverly have become officially members of the church, even more appropriate for us here at Sojourners on this day is for us to be able to say we are blessed. Emma, Maggie, Paula, Beverly…we are blessed. We are blessed. Let the people of God say…
Amen.
Jim Bundy
November 29, 2009