Mary, did you know?

A Sermon on Luke 1: 26-38

It's been a habit for me since I was very young, every time I moved to a new church, school, or city, to find a choir to join. If you are ever looking for a way to connect socially, I highly recommend this strategy, because it has resulted in some of my best and most lasting friendships. In fact, this habit is so well engrained in me that even by sixth grade I was already utilizing the choir strategy to make friends after moving to a new school. That year, we were slated to participate in a big statewide choir festival, and the song chosen for us was the classic, frequently lambasted “Mary, Did You Know?” This song begins “Mary, did you know that your baby boy would one day walk on water? Mary, did you know that your baby boy would save our sons and daughters? Did you know that your baby boy has come to make you new?” The chorus then repeats about 600 times “Mary, did you know?” Contrary to popular belief about the bewildered and meek response of a fair, mild mannered, subservient maiden, Mary did, in fact know. And she was skeptical as all get out.

Although I deeply love many of our classic Christmas hymns and songs, including the number one mansplaining hit of the century, much of our popular portrayals of Mary paint her as a silent, passive recipient of the angel's news. Images depict her unrealistically fair face turned down in humility, gaze averted, or cast down upon her silent, sleeping infant, who is somehow miraculously not covered in vernix or spit up. We never see depictions of an absolutely flabbergasted and overwhelmed Mary, or a concerned and tense Joseph, or a screaming newborn searching for a breast that hasn't yet started producing milk. We so often portray only the most beautiful and ideal parts of the Christmas story without hardly touching on the complex emotions and reactions these people are having to this absolutely bonkers situation. It turns out that rather than being quiet and accepting of the news, Mary was skeptical from the moment the angel appeared. The translation we are using says that Mary was “perplexed” but the Greek word here is actually more accurately translated as “greatly troubled”. So here is Mary, a young woman from a little town who is minding her own business doing whatever it is young unmarried ladies do, probably some kind of hard work, and she is interrupted by an angel appearing before her. The angel barely gets out an intro and already Mary is greatly troubled and trying to understand what the heck is going on.

Clearly, the angel can read the look on her face, and says “Do not be afraid” which is a standard angel greeting because biblical angels are actually kind of horrifying, and then he gives her a lengthy list of things that are going to happen. He tells her 1.) you have found favor with God 2.) you, an unmarried virgin, will conceive a son and by the way throw out your baby name book because you will call him Jesus, and 3.) he will be great, and will be the Son of the Most High, and 4.) he will be the fulfillment of the promise God made to David that your people have been waiting for for centuries. She blinks slowly, her jaw dropping...

So Mary's eyes are crossing and her eyebrows have just shot up to her hairline and she has six thousand questions. First of all, what? How have I, of all people, found favor with God? And also why is this happening? And also excuse me, did you just tell me that my son will be the one foretold who will free Israel? That he will be literally God? That he is going to free us from the empire that oppresses us? And that this reign will continue forever? Ummm... But in light of all of this extensive information the question that pops out of her mouth is, look I know where babies come from and there is something missing from this equation. So she settles on the most pressing issue. We often read it in a tone that gently, delicately says “how can this be for I am a virgin?” but if it were me, it would sound more like “HOW can this BE?! For I am a virgin!!”

To understand exactly how scary this must have been, you have to know a little bit about the context of the world this is happening in. Mary was very likely quite young, somewhere between 12 and 16 years old based upon the traditions of the time. She was a girl, which meant that in terms of economic security, most of her value came from her ability to reliably produce heirs that were certain to be biologically the sons of her husband. Turning up several months pregnant before she had even possibly met her husband would significantly impact her prospects. At best, she would be quietly folded back into her family, her betrothal broken. At worst, she would be expelled from her family and left to fend for herself. This good news of great joy probably sounded an awful lot like will I die a sex worker or pretending my first born is actually my little brother? Not just “how can this be?” but also “why is this happening to me?” and maybe a little bit of “can you please find favor with somebody else?”

The angel continues... “The Holy Spirit will come upon you and your child will be the Son of God.” I suspect that contrary to the song, Mary did actually grasp the magnitude of this statement. She was a descendent of David, as I'm sure she knew. She would also have known of the Messianic prophecies stating that a ruler greater than David would come, and what that truly meant. For centuries, her people had been overtaken by large empires: the babylonians, assyrians, and now the Romans. She would have known of the promise given to Abraham that her people would be great and numerous as the stars, and she would have learned all about the revered king David and what he did for Israel with God on his side, and yet the people had again succumbed to the rule of empire, and here was an angel standing in front of Mary telling her that the child she was to bear would be the Son of God, which could only mean one thing: that the government will rest upon his shoulders; that he will gather up the diaspora of Judah and unite them; that he will rule over them in wisdom and truth; that he will be the chief cornerstone; that he will be bruised for our inequities and that by his wounds all people would be healed. Mary, did you know?

The angel goes on to explain that Mary's cousin Elizabeth has also conceived a child despite having been assumed to be unable to conceive. Then the angel ends this pronouncement by saying “nothing is impossible with God.” What a comprehensive statement that is. When I read this story, I think of all the times in my life that my world was completely upended and the amount of kicking and screaming I did about it. All of us has a story in our head about how this life thing should go. Maybe the story is that we should make a certain amount of money, or marry a certain type of person, or have a certain kind of family, or that we will have certain career paths open to us, that we will be able bodied, that we will be quiet and not make waves, or that people will see us in a certain way.

We all sort of pre-write our stories based on society's expectations, or our hopes, or what sounds fun or easy or manageable, and I have to say I don't know anybody whose life has gone as they expect. We don't expect to lose a job. We don't expect to lose a loved one. We don't expect cancer. We don't expect to never meet “the one.” We don't expect to be a refugee, or a prisoner, an outcast, a killer, or one who has betrayed or been betrayed by another. Mary's story of marrying a nice Jewish fellow and having a couple of very ordinary children was just thrown out the window, and I think it's important to really think about how disorienting this all must have felt to her, even though in theory she was being given a great gift.

In my experience, we sometimes even rail against the good things presented to us, because they feel like too much, or too hard, or like I am not the right person for the job. Moses argued with God about his calling; Jonah hopped on a boat and ended up becoming fish vomit, a story I very much identify with. Mary, this woman from a nowhere town amongst a nobody people in the midst of a vast empire was faced with the call of the Lord, and right when any sane person would start packing a bag to assume a new name in a new town and get out of this insane situation, the angel assures her that her cousin and friend Elizabeth is also in an unexpectedly miraculous situation, and that with God it isn't all so impossible.

I imagine her sitting for a long time. The Bible never tells us how long these reactions take, but I am imagining a long, forgive me for saying it, pregnant pause. And then she takes a deep, shaky breath, and swallows hard, and somehow, with the courage of ten thousand warriors, this little brand new adult in this little place accepts the call, saying, “Here I am.” Here I am, Lord, I will take it as it comes. Here I am, willing to be your vessel. Here I am, willing to have my future absolutely shift under my feet. Here I am, Lord, send me.

An anecdote I have probably shared before is that moments after waking up in agonizing pain from my first cancer surgery, I opened my eyes and blearily saw the name tag of the nurse taking care of me. It said Emmanuel. And in that moment I knew there was hope. I knew that whatever this mission was that God had handed me, the power of the Holy Spirit and the presence of God would be made known to me; the impossible would become possible somehow. We all glimpse our own mini annunciations, through scripture, through the love of our communities, through the words of wise people, and sometimes, for the less subtle of us, through a name badge smacking us in the face.

The story of God with us is the promise that in light of the overwhelming realities of this world: all the tragedy and ugliness and brokenness, and grief; that in the face of the impossible, insurmountable odds, the callings and paths we walk even when we don't want to, we hear this incredible, outrageous, terrifying news that we have been given this child, this prince of peace, the one who will redeem, the one who calls us beloved; the one that calls us from now to not yet. And because he came, we will never be alone. I think Mary DID know. I believe she fully grasped the implications of the angel's appearance, and that is why she was perplexed, or greatly troubled, why she pondered and questioned. And yet, in the end she accepted that this absolutely wild situation would and could be okay, because she wasn't alone. Emmanuel means “God with us.” Here I am, Lord, may it be according to your will. Amen.

The kingdom of God is like...

 May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be always acceptable in your sight, my strength and my redeemer. Amen.

I have a couple houseplants that are giving me a run for my money, but not in the way you would think. The first one, which was a gift from somebody shortly after the start of the pandemic, is a small begonia. Despite a year of benign neglect, somehow this plant began flowering. First, one or two, and then a ton, flowering and dropping their flowers so fast that little wilted buds littered my kitchen counter even though the entire plant was still regularly blooming. After a while, the plant went so wild that I had to clip it off into another, and then another, rooting the cuttings and creating even more full sized plants. The other plant is, I think, a pothos. I got the plant when I was in graduate school, the first of my houseplant collection, and after we moved to the new house, the little fellow exploded. Long tendrils draped over my mantel and hung down to the floor. Periodically one of my kids would roam past and grab a handful of leaves, which I would then throw in water and, you guessed it, get more houseplants. I now have so many baby pothos' around my house that I'm running out of room. Soon, my house will be a jungle of pothos plants and begonias, with no room left for people.

I love preaching parables, because these stories give us images to wrap around our faith life; concrete examples when a lot of what we hear in the gospels is a little abstract. What is the kingdom of God like? It's like a sower, it's like a field with wheat and weeds, it's like a mustard seed, it's like yeast, it's like a pearl, it's like treasure buried in a field. All of these different metaphors are Jesus' attempt to explain something intangible and difficult to understand to people who have a limited basis of experience. In my sermon at Saint Anne's last week, I said that parables can also be tricky, because sometimes in our attempt to parse apart every aspect of the parable we can miss the forest for the trees. Parables weren't really intended to give us concrete answers, but to give us a frame of reference for some of our questions. This set of stories in particular gives us two big questions to chew on: first, what is the kingdom of heaven like? Secondly, once we understand it, what do we do?

Agricultural imagery is particularly useful in parables, because apart from some technological advances, a lot of growing has stayed the same. I may use a grow light now, but the hearers of a story would understand about planting for optimal lighting in 33 AD or 2023. The same goes for bread making. Yeast, it turns out, has not changed much in the last two thousand years. You still mix a little bit in, and with some time and heat your flour and water become bread. Both of these stories, and several of the previous parables we have read the last couple weeks, are seeking to get to the bottom of what exactly the kingdom of God is. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but here are a few ideas I'd like for you to chew on.

First, the kingdom of heaven is transformational. Like my plants that went from being tiny, half dead little things to a massive jungle in my house, the kingdom of God transforms. Although the kingdom begins as one thing: a tiny seed or a bit of yeast, it becomes something else. Something bigger, something which, when mixed with some other elements, changes its nature and makes all of the other things greater than the sum of their parts. A seed is just a seed, but when mixed with soil and trace nutrients, water, and sunlight, it becomes a tree, something which provides shelter, a home for birds, and food. A little bit of yeast mixes together with flour, water, sugar, and seasonings to become a loaf of bread, more than any of those things are on their own. The kingdom of God, then, is gestalt: it makes us and the world greater, more useful, more nourishing than what we were before.

Next, the kingdom of heaven is directional. By that, I mean the kingdom is moving toward something. It isn't stagnant, like a seed tossed on the ground to wither away in the sun, or a jar of yeast sitting on a shelf losing potency. It is moving toward something, toward becoming something, toward engendering life, toward offering protection, growth, nourishment.

Third, the kingdom of heaven is mysterious. Although through modern science we understand a lot more about what makes a seed grow and what makes bread rise, anybody who has ever baked something the exact same way as all the previous times and had it turn out differently knows that there is a sort of magic to the process. You throw some yeast in a bowl with water and somehow the water activates it and causes all sorts of chemical, bubble releasing things to happen. We don't know entirely why this works, or why sometimes it doesn't work, but I can personally say that I stand in awe anytime I try a new recipe and from a gooey sludge on my counter end up with food.

What else is the kingdom of God? Vital? Inspirational? Hopeful? Powerful? What do you think? The kingdom of God is all these things and more. When reflecting on the reign of Christ and all the ways that we see God at work in the world, I am frankly awe struck. If the kingdom of God is like a mustard seed, and the kingdom of God is in you and me, what incredible things are happening below our surfaces? What amazing things are we moving toward?? It's pretty cool to think about!

Now, the second two parables in this reading are concerned not with what exactly the kingdom of God is like, but, once we recognize that we have found something special, what do we do? The kingdom of heaven is like treasure buried in a field, that upon recognizing the value of it, the person sells all their possessions and buys the field; or it's like a pearl that a merchant sells all that he has to buy. Jesus has a habit of asking people to leave their families and homes and comforts to follow him, and these parables are no different: these people recognize that they have something special and they risk their stability and livelihood and everything else to stake a claim on this remarkable thing. There has been a lot of speculation about what it means to follow Christ. Do we really have to give up our families and everything we have known in pursuit of this kingdom? Or is it perhaps that once we find this jewel, this incredible thing, we begin to recognize that much of what we put our faith into: power as defined in this world, security, stuff, money, prestige, recognition, these things are actually meaningless by comparison?

This is where my good old Lutheran theological background always helps me wrap my head around these things. The kingdom of God is here, but it's also not yet. The kingdom of God is active, but we have not seen the fruition of it. I imagine that the culmination, the eschatological finale, if you will, will be incredible. It will be the end of all war and violence, it will be valuing all people equally, it will be an end to suffering, to hunger, to disease, to discrimination, to cruelty and hatred. We don't live there yet. But the kingdom of God is out there, and it's also in here, inside you and me. And that's why I started thinking about my house plants. They started out as just one plant, not even very impressive or beautiful plants. And despite not taking very good care of them at first, through nurture and care and intentionality, I've been able to propagate many more plants so that now not only are the original plants beautiful and strong, there are many more of them, in my house and other people's houses as I give away the cuttings and other people nurture them. When I started tending the plants, I certainly did not foresee the outcome, but the care and tending created strong roots and allowed me to break off pieces to give away to others.

That's a little bit like the kingdom of heaven. First, a little seed is planted or a little yeast is mixed in. Then with the right water, sunlight, ingredients, mixing, soon you have so much sourdough starter that it's taking over your fridge! Soon you have so many little pothos plants you don't know where to put them! And so what do you do? You give them away! How could you not? There's more bread than you could ever consume; more plants than shelving. You are standing on street corners with all this extra and soon somebody comes by who wants your plants and maybe it's just a little cutting, but they take it and they put it in water and nurture it and soon it's going wild and they have to start making more shelf space and pawn off their cuttings on everybody they know until the whole world is beautiful; until everyone has bread.

So this begs the question for me of how do we nurture it. Obviously, conditions need to be right. We learned this in the parable of the sower. And to some extent, the kingdom does what it's going to do. But, I think, the beauty of all the agricultural metaphors is that it invites us to take some accountability for what happens. Prayer, reading the Bible, gathering for worship, coming together around the table, feeding the hungry, visiting the sick. These things cultivate us; make us a habitable home for that little something that God has planted in us and in the world. And when we keep cultivating it, when we make space for the new blossoms, we are transformed, and in turn we transform those around us.

That's the beauty of these metaphors. Nobody really knows exactly what the kingdom of God looks like, tastes like, smells like. But we know what it acts like, and so we can prepare ourselves for it, and we can open our hearts to its transformational, forward moving, mystical power, and in doing so, we ourselves become the seeds and the yeast. Thanks be to God.

The Parable of the Weeds

 A sermon on Matthew 13: 24-43

When I was in graduate school, I started writing a novel. Set in a universe where multiple worlds were connected by a magical network of roads, and those with the know-how and the power could traverse it, my characters jaunted through many universes, some beautiful, some terrifying, some profoundly ravaged by illness or war, some utopia. As they traveled, they became aware of a deep corruption in the web of worlds, and they began to search for a cure for the brokenness that threatened not only their worlds but all worlds. I began writing this story in graduate school for psychology, at first in my off hours, and then soon I found it to be a consuming project. I scribbled notes for my book in the margins of cognitive psychology and quantitative methods. I typed away over lunch, between classes, pausing in my grading to write down more ideas. Soon it was not one book, but a trilogy, and I was spending hours every day working on it.

During this time, I was also miserable with what I was doing. I was running experiments, doing literature reviews, grading papers, tutoring students, taking classes, the things I had worked so hard to do. And yet I was deeply unhappy and unsure where to go. It took a very insightful friend, who pointed out that all the joy I was experiencing in my life seemed to come from thinking about, writing about, and talking about theology for me to realize I was unhappy because I wasn't doing what I was meant to do. When I go back and look at the stories I wrote at that time, I am struck by the obvious theological themes permeating every scene, every character. Each character represented both virtue and shortcoming, now and not yet; each plot and sub plot wrestled with the reality of sin and the need for redemption.

Our stories reflect things about the story tellers in ways that are probably more honest and clear than the plain histories and texts of the time. Storytellers share, in the telling, their biggest fears, their most authentic needs, their most secret hopes. In writing my story, I was longing to explore the eschatology and sotieriology of my own faith life. Although the stories told a tale, they also told something about who I was at the time, and who I longed to be.

The parables of Jesus are in many ways no different from the stories we tell one another. Fairytales about princesses and kingdoms, heroes and magic, they paint a picture of a world that makes clear what we value and believe to be true. In this chapter of Matthew, Jesus tells not only this one parable but seven parables. In each of these stories, Jesus is trying to put words around a deeper reality, from seeds to trees to treasure and yeast, the theme is Jesus attempting to explain some deeply intangible subject to his disciples. The parable of the weeds is a little bit of a tricky story, even though Jesus clearly explains what each part of the story represents. A sower goes out and plants good seed, and in the night an enemy comes and plants weeds that look very similar to the good seed. In the morning, the servants see what has happened and the sower says to leave the good crops and the weeds to grow together, because uprooting the weeds would destroy the good seeds. Later, when the crop is harvested, the bad stuff can be separated out from the good.

This story raises a lot of questions that I want to draw your attention to. Some of my questions are:

Why didn't the sower do something to protect his field from enemies?

Do the weeds have any negative impact on the good seeds?

Do the good seeds have any impact on the weeds?

What does it mean to be thrown into the fire?

Does this mean that some people are just bad weeds and some are good seed?

The text gives us a little bit more by way of explanation than some of the other parables in this text. Jesus says that the sower is God the Father, the good seeds are the children of the kingdom, the weeds are the “children of the evil one,” and the enemy that sowed them is the devil. Historically, this text and the previous parable of the sower have been used to justify a lot of exclusivity within the church. I won't lie, this text and similar ones make me a little uncomfortable at times. I hate the idea that there are some people that are “in” and some that are “out.” I hate the idea of predestination, and worse, double predestination. I very much dislike the implications when this parable is taken too literally and drawn to the seemingly logical conclusions. It's so easy for us as humans to put our own interpretations, usually laced with a heavy dose of self-interest, into parables. We can cast ourselves as the heroes; the sowers or the servants, or more typically the good seed. But one of the beautiful things about the art of parable is that the meaning is ever shifting, as we cast ourselves in the different roles, as we work through one perspective, and then the next.

I will say a couple of things about some of the facts and perspectives in this story. Jesus doesn't actually say that the “children of the evil one” are other humans. The text says that at the end the reaper will come and collect up all causes of sin and evil-doers. I think the way this passage has been used to divide is, perhaps, a bit of wishful thinking on the part of people who want to keep their churches and societies looking in a certain way that benefits them. I also think it might be a mistake to assume that the children of God and the “children of the evil one” are always binary things. Other passages, such as the wheat and the chaff, suggest that we are multi-faceted humans, each with life giving parts and each also with sinful parts that God can and will separate out. I do think there are some interesting conclusions about our faith that we can draw from this text. We do sometimes shy away from thinking about what happens at the end of our lives and the end of the universe. We mainline Christians hate that, but it is a question we can and should ask about our own role and destination in this walk of life. But ultimately, whatever conclusions we draw from stories like this, we must always explore the meaning first, with great humility and an understanding that had Jesus wanted us to take away concrete conclusions, he would have given us unambiguous answers, and secondly, we must do so with the context and heart of the story teller in mind.

We can do that by looking at the character of the sower, and more importantly, Jesus himself. In the story, the sower seems mostly unsurprised by the attack upon the field that resulted in the weeds. Although he planted good seed, he seemed to have a sense that the weeds were just part of the agricultural process and could be dealt with by the professionals. The sower also stops the servants from making premature judgments. In that part of the world, there was indeed a particular type of weed that closely resembled the wheat. Although pulling the weeds out with the young wheat would result in destroying the healthy plants, leaving them together to be harvested was safest. This is such a beautiful truth and one that we as a church would do well to remember: we don't know the hearts of those around us. The harvest is in God's hands alone, and any attempt to “weed out” people based on our own assessments will be clouded by our own misconceptions, assumptions, and inability to see the future. The sower is saying that the right thing to do is to protect everyone because things may not be as clear as you think. This is a bit of a radical idea at the time, and an even more radical idea now given our massively divided culture. The other interesting thing I noted is that the sower is actually not the one doing the reaping and neither are the slaves of the house. The “Son of Man will send his angels” to the harvest, and therefore not only is it not safe for the slaves or even the master to do the reaping, it's downright not their job. The job of the sower was to plant the seed, the job of the seeds was to grow, the job of the servants was to watch over the field. I don't want to presume to understand all of what this means, but overall from the story, my sense is that the sower, who here represents the divine, is most concerned with engendering and preserving life, not with the harvest or subsequent destruction of the weeds.

Lastly, I think we are meant to connect Jesus' own story and character to the sower and to the tale. Jesus, although he definitely shared his understanding of how to be a servant of God, also very much lived this idea of seeing people as multi-faceted and capable of being nurtured into something other than what they were before. Jesus recruited the least likely people to be his followers. A woman of ill repute, some stinky fisherman, a tax collector. Jesus himself transformed people from sickness to health, from sin to service, from death to life. I think if we get caught up in, excuse the pun, the weeds of the passage and draw too many strict conclusions, we miss who the story teller is. The story teller is one who is preaching humility in not judging those around us; the story teller is encouraging prudence and thoughtfulness in our cultivation of the world around us; the story teller is trying to reveal the importance of certain ways of being and living, not for his own sake but for ours, to help us live better. And so when we read this parable and others, it's important to remember that the story teller is one who loves us. Who plants good seed to feed the world. Who encourages valuing that which is eternal over that which is fleeting. Who came down from on high to be among us and with us.

When we look to the character of the sower, we understand just how valuable and loved we are. And that is what I hear when I listen to these parables. Here is one who seeks to grow us, who wants to guide us from darkness into light, from slavery into freedom. Here is one who wants to reveal to us the power and glory of God so that we don't stumble around blindly harming when God's intent was for life. What I see in the parable is a world of imperfect people who can only be known ultimately by the one who sees beyond surfaces, who calls us into a different reality, and who cares very much for the whole field. And so, I refuse to draw simple, moral conclusions about this parable and others, because that's not what parables are for. Parables are there to make you question, to think, to wonder, to cast yourself in one role one day and another role the next. And ultimately, what matters most in these stories is that the one who told the story told did it for our benefit, because we are so loved. Amen.