Full of Grace

Micah 5:2-5a; Luke 1:46b-55; Hebrews 10:5-10; Luke 1:39-55

Elizabeth said to Mary, “Blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.”

As Brian Zahnd likes to say, we modern Christians are the product of an ancient divorce. Around 500 years ago, the Catholic and Protestant branches of the Western church split up, with good reason, of course. But there has been a deep and unhealed division within the Christian family ever since. And it’s always important to say to the children of divorced parents, It’s not your fault. So it’s not our fault. It’s just the way things worked out.

Now when our parents split up, part of the settlement was that Protestant Dad got the Bible, and Catholic Mom got to keep the saints and especially Mary. And just as Catholics read the Bible and take it seriously but are always a little hesitant about exactly what to do with it, Protestants have typically never quite known what to do about Mary.

For me, as a Lutheran pastor with a Catholic upbringing and Catholic theological education, there’s nothing that quite highlights the impact of the great divorce between our two traditions than the subject of Mary. Over the years I’ve certainly heard a lot of things about Mary that have raised some red flags for me, as they did for the Reformers.

I’ve heard men who claimed positions of great authority in the church say that Mary is a model because she said yes and did what God told her to do and didn’t ask questions, and I’ve been angered about the abuse of power so often justified by that kind of theology.

I’ve heard celibate men wax poetic about how Mary is the ideal woman – a virgin and a mother – in ways that are, well, creepy. And quite demeaning to women besides. And I’ve actually heard people say that we ought to pray to Mary because it makes it more likely God will listen to us – Jesus might ignore me or you but he has to listen to his Mother.  That’s the one that really set off Luther and the other reformers – not because it’s wrong about Mary but it’s wrong about the nature of God and the purpose of prayer. God always hears our prayers, God already knows what we need and God desperately wants our flourishing and our happiness – God doesn’t need anyone else, not even Mary, to convince God to care about us. And prayer isn’t about convincing God to do what we want – prayer is much more about shaping us to see ourselves as God does, to get us to want the good things God wants for us and the world.

The Christian tradition is unfortunately full of all kinds of abuses of Mary, and recognizing this, Protestants have generally downplayed the role of Mary in the Christian story. And that’s unfortunate, because the Mary of the gospels, the Mary of the Bible, is actually a wonderful illustration of what Luther and the other reformers were trying to say about grace and Christian faith. And every year the Christmas story gives us an opportunity to remember Mary as the first person whose life was changed by the gospel, Mary the first of many whose lives would be transformed by Jesus.

When the angel Gabriel comes to Mary, they greet her as “full of grace.” Before Mary does anything, before she agrees to do anything, Mary is already favored by God, already loved by God, not because of anything she has said or done or believed – she starts out already full of grace before she has the opportunity to do or say or believe anything.  And she doesn’t know this by looking in a mirror or contemplating the nature of existence – she knows this because the angel comes to tell her this. She hears a word from outside herself, a word ultimately from God, informing her, giving her news – good news – that God has already favored her and blessed her. All she has to do is to accept it and believe it. God does everything else, and indeed God has already done everything else.

And when Mary believes the word from God that she has heard, when she lives her life by trusting that the word she has heard from God is true, then she can experience God working in and through her in ways that she could never have expected and cannot fully understand. She is invited to carry the presence of God into the world and make that presence physical, material, fleshly, in her own body. It’s not something she has to do in order to be blessed by God – the story starts with her being already blessed and beloved by God and full of grace. But it’s something she gets to do. God invites her to participate in God’s action to save the world and set all people free; she gets to participate in the creating and creative love of God that blessed her and filled her with grace in the first place.

And, as we read in today’s gospel passage, the first thing that Mary does after her encounter with the angel is to visit her relative Elizabeth. Luke doesn’t tell us why Mary goes to visit Elizabeth, but I think it’s easy enough to understand. Mary has to talk to somebody about what has just happened to her, but who’s she going to talk to? She can’t talk to Joseph yet, about this baby who’s not going to be his. Who’s going to believe her story? So she turns to the wisest person she knows, her elderly relative Elizabeth, who – the angel told her – has also recently been inexplicably blessed by God in a similar way. Elizabeth will understand, Elizabeth will help her understand, Elizabeth will know what to do. So in her trust but in her confusion and need, Mary goes to visit Elizabeth.

And the moment that Elizabeth hears Mary’s voice, she is overcome with joy. Who am I, she says, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? Mary comes to Elizabeth in her need, Mary comes to Elizabeth looking for help, but it’s actually Mary who is going to help and bless Elizabeth. And this is what happens when any of us come to believe and trust that what God says about us is true, when any of us come to believe and trust that we are blessed and full of grace and beloved by God and invited to participate in our own way in the saving action of God making the whole world new. We look to others for help to understand and figure out how to live this grace we’ve been told we’ve been given, and without even trying to, we wind up helping them understand and find joy in the grace they have been given. This is what the life of faith looks like – for Mary and for Elizabeth, yes, but also for you and for me.

The life of Christians coming together in worship and in life looks like Mary and Elizabeth – two women, one of them much too old to be doing what she’s doing and one of them much too young.  Two women, with no hierarchy to authorize them to be doing what God has called them to do – Elizabeth’s husband Zechariah, if you remember the story, was told by the same angel of the grace being given to both of them and didn’t believe it, and for his lack of faith was left unable to speak until the baby was born. And Joseph is of course nowhere to be found. These two women, full of life in inexplicable ways without the permission the world tells them they should have gotten, these two women being present to one another, speaking to one another, and rejoicing with one another about the amazing grace that God has given to them, and to the whole world, and who is inviting them to take part in it. That’s what church is supposed to be.

And from this encounter with Elizabeth comes the song of Mary praising God for all of this grace and goodness. Grace that will change and utterly transform the world that human beings have made. Grace that lifts up those the world calls lowly and fills the poor with good things. Grace that topples the mighty from their thrones, that exposes the pretenses of everyone who claims the authority to define “the ideal obedient woman” or “biblical manhood and womanhood,” grace that leaves empty every effort to enrich oneself at the expense of another. Mary welcomes and celebrates all of this – even the casting down of the mighty and the sending away empty of the rich is cause for joy and wonder and delight. Not just because it lifts up the lowly and fills up the poor, but because the freedom and blessing of grace is so much more joyful and delightful than the so-called freedom to control or exploit others.  If you want to know where Jesus got the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus learned Blessed are the poor, blessed are the meek and the humble of heart, he learned it from his mother. She already knew it before he was born, because she believed and trusted in God’s word of grace and blessing.

The Mary of Scripture is a Mary who is not a model of obedience or purity or the feminine ideal. The Mary of Scripture is a model of Christian discipleship, a model of salvation by grace through faith, if you will. The Mary of Scripture heard a word of good news – you are already beloved and favored and full of grace, not for what you’ve done but because of who God is. The Mary of Scripture trusted that God could do more through her than she could possibly understand, that God was inviting her to take part in an adventure she could never have aspired to or come up with on her own. The Mary of Scripture reached out for help in living this grace and gave help to others without even trying. The Mary of Scripture celebrated and delighted and rejoiced in the amazing wonder of what God was doing, and is doing, for her and for all the world. I can think of no better example of what we are all invited to be than Mary the mother of Jesus, Mary by grace the mother of God.