December 13, 1987, 11:06 a.m. Worship Service
John M. Buchanan
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Scripture
Buke 1:26-33

“Aud the angel came to her and said, ‘Nail, 0 favored
one, the Lord is with youl'" ~-Luke 1:28 (RSV)

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever is a delightful book about some
children and their Sunday School Christmas pageant and it is about the
llerdmans, who the author describes as “the absolutely worst kids in the
history of the world. They lied and stole and smoked Cigars {even the
giris) and talked dirty and hit little kids and cussed their teachers and
took the name of the Lord in vain." [Barbara Robinson, p. i]

The horrible Herdmans have decided to be in: the Christmas pageant,
but they don't even know the Christmas story. So at the first rehearsal
the director decides to begin by reading to the children from the nativity
story in the Bible. The narrator is a youngster - whose mother is the
Christmas pageant director.

Mother read, “Joseph and Mary, his espoused wife, being great with
child..." .

"Pregnant!" yelled Ralph Herdman.

Well, that stirred things up. All the big kids began to giggle and
all the little kids wanted to know what was so funny; and Mother had--to
hammer on the floor with a blackboard pointer. "That's enough, Ralph,” she
sajd, and went on with the story.

“E-don't think it's very nice lo say Mary owas pregnant," Alice
whispered bo me.

"Bul. she was,” 1 pointed out. In a way, though, T agreed with her.
it sounded too ordinary. Anybody could be pregnant. "Great with child,”
sounded better for Mary.

“Um nol supposed te talk aboul people heing pregnant.” Alice folded
her Rands in her lap and pinched her lips together. “I'd better tell my

?

mother .'

"Teld] ber what?"

“That your mother is talking about things like thal in church. My
mother might nol want me to be here.”

I was pretty sure she would do it. Jer mother, Mrs. Wendleken,
didn't even want cats to have kittens or birds to lay eggs, and she
wouldn't Jet Alice play with anybody who had two rabbits. Mary was
pregnant! Mary had a baby.

But there wasn't much T could do about it, except pinch Alice, which
{ did. She yeiped, and Mother separated us and made me sit beside Imogene
Herdman and sent Alice to sit in the middle of the baby angels." [Ibid.,
p. 41-42]

Mary was pregnant! Mary had a baby. Try as we might, we can't deny
it, hide it - or even disguise it. She may be a stranger to us, but she
was undeniably pregnant.

“Hail Mary, full of grace! The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou
anong wornen, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary,
mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.
Amen."

Every Roman Catholic knows that prayer intimately. Jt is/has been
prayed more frequently than any other prayer with the exception of the
Lord's Prayer. It is not prayed by Protestants. As a matter of fact,
other than playing a supporting role in our nativity tableaux and Sunday
School pageants, Mary is virtually ignored in Protestant piety, theology,
worship, and sermons.

Protestants have two problems with the whole topic.

The first is that around this topic there are and have been
Significant differences between Protestantism and Catholicism. At the time
of the Reformation, Luther and his followers swept away centuries of
accumulated tradition about the veneration of the Saints. Mary was a
casualty of that process. Luther himself said some nice things about her
bul in liturgy and Protestant practice and theology, she virtually
disappeared. And, as happens frequently in history, action stimulates
reaction: the more vigorously Protestants dissented about the topic, the
more vigorously the Roman church advocated it. .

Now, if you are a visiting Roman Catholic, excuse us while we catch
up on a topic which is familiar to you... In the middle of the 19th
Century the church declared the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, that
Mary, like Jesus, had become conceived immaculately, without sin. A
century dater, 1950, Pope Pius XTI proclaimed, with full Papal
infallibility, the Bodily Assumption of Mary into heaven. Int
Protestantism, the criterion for the truth of a doctrine is the Bible.
That's what makes us Protestant, in a sense. Roman Catholicism uses as a
criteria for trath, Seripture hut alse the church - its traditions,
counciis and now, the Pope when he speaks “ex-cathedra." We play by
different rudes here.

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The point is that Catholics have seemed most Catholic around the
topic of Mary. And so - we have become most Protestant by ignoring her,
which is too bad.

The second problem comes from within our own family. The Virgin
Birth itself has become a litmus test of orthodoxy for many Protestants.
In the early part of this century, in reaction to whal seemed Jike a wave
of easy liberalism, a series of books appeared which set out to define the
"Fundamentals of the Christian Faith." Among those "fundamentals" were the
“Innerancy of Scripture, and the Virgin Birth." The term "Fuadame ntalist"
was first used to describe the partisans of this approach. One of the
unfortunate products was that Mary's virginity became far more important
than it is in the Bible. It became a test case. If you believed it - you
were a Christian. If you had trouble with it - you were not.

The Bible is less than definitive on the topic. The Old Testament
passage in Isaiah 7 which is cited as a prophetic proof text is unclear.
"Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son." The original Hebrew
read "a young woman shall conceive." Somehow, when. Hebrew got translated
into Greek, “young woman" became "virgin."

In the New Testament,-not much is made of the topic. Mark and John
do not mention it. It appears that Paul never heard of it. At least, the
New Testament does not held it up as a test of faith.

What gets lost in all-of that is the power Mary had maintained across
the centuries. She has inspired some of the most sublime art in all of
history. It is impossible not to contemplate the Pieta, a replica which
stands in: St. Patrick's in New York, without being deeply and profoundly
moved, Shrines to the Blessed Virgin continue to be very popular.
Furthermore, the piety is often politically revolutionary. Our Lady of
Guadalupe is a partisan of the poor and oppressed. And Polish officials
know that-the annual pilgrimage to the Shrine of the Black Madonna is
avertly nationalistic and patriotic and therefore potentially violent:
Polish officials watch it very carefully.

On the other hand, psychologists have pointed out that all of the
church doctrine about Mary came from the hearts and minds of celibate men
who, at least in the Middle Ages, were committed to the notion thal sex was
evil. in a particularly good book, from a feminist perspective, Alone Of
All Her Sex, the author, Maria Warner, observes thal “men who denied
themselves women needed a woman on whom to pour out love, while women,
suffering beneath a social system which denigrated womanhood, needed a:
woman's Compassion to ease their pain.”

“Had ] Mary" ~ today? Presbyterian Robert. MaAfee Brown suggests that
Catholics and Protestants - particularly Protestants, ought to recover

something of the Mary of the Bible. We may not want to call her Queen-of
Heaven, or Mother of God, but she was, after all, the Mother of Jesus
Regardless of whatever else you believe aboul her, or cannol believe about
her, she carried him in heer body. She gave him life. She fed, hathed,
nurtured, sang lo, laughed wilh - Jesus. "O Lhon whe hela the world in
thy embrace, I dandled thee," Madeleine L'Engle has Mary say... She

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deserves our attention. She is our link with sowelhing very important in
the whole story. Without Mary, our faith is inclined te become too
ethereal, too philosophic, too unearthly. (Mary, Ralph Herdman reminds us,
was pregnant!) She is a link between this story and our humanity.

When we pursue the Mary of the Bible, what we find is the first
disciple. Think of it... -A teen-ager, probably early teens, engaged to a
carpenter, suddenly and mysteriously pregnant, bearing that shame, somehow
managing to keep the obligation to Joseph; delivering her child in the
middle of an arduous journey, in a barn,. dark, smelly, cold. Think of her
faith through all of that, the faith of a child... Frederick Ruecliner has
a wonderful picture...

"She struck the angel Gabriel as hardly old enough Lo
have a child at all, let alone this child, but he'd been
entrusted with a message to give her, and he gave it

"He told her what the child was to be named, and who
he was to be, and something about the mystery that was
to come upon her. ‘You mustn't be afraid, Mary,! he
said.

“As he said it, he only hoped she wouldn't notice that
beneath the great, golden wings he himself was trembling
with fear to think that the whole future of creation
hung now on the answer of a girl." (Luke 1:26-35)
{Frederick Buechner, Peculiar Treasures, A Biblical -
Who's Who, p. 39] :

Think of her later: Joseph is dead, and her strong carpenter son who
was her support, walks away from that Nazareth home to do what? —-to preach
and teach and heal throughout Galilee. She never understood that very
well. She keeps appearing on the edges of the story, gently trying to
remind him of something; perhaps simply to tell him that she is there,
that she will always be there for him, and that there will always be a home
for him in Nazareth if he ever comes to his sense. Think of her, following
her son for three years. Think of her, this mother — now perhaps in her
middle or late 40's ~ at the cross, as her son dies, humiliated, abandoned
by all, alone, life ebbing out of him... She is there with him, and for
him... How much poorer our faith is without those images. Protestant
thinking does not include pleading with Mary to “pray for us at the hour of
our death" as the Hail Mary prayer requires. But that is a very powerful
image and it is a very suggestive idea of a divine love which is real ~
particujarly in the hour of our death.

{ will never forget the day in July of 1944 when we learned that my
uucle Jack had been killed in Saipan. J was only six. My grandmother was
iuconsolable. 1 had never witnessed prief like that. It upset me and I
asked my mother about it. JI still remember her telling me, "It's the worst
thing that can happen. Tl's worse than dying - to have one of. your
chitdren die."

Hail Mary. Blessed art thou among wamnen.

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And the Mary of the Bible is a dreamer, a visionary, a revolutionary.
When she and Elizabeth pel together they talk about the meaning of their
pregnancies and Mary comects the coming of the Messiah, her baby, with a new
world, a new order of things. She is the first Christian activist. Her
Magnificat is a revolutionary song about a new kind of society. It is more
comfortable in Latin, obviously, because Mary Sings about the powerful
being scattered and the poor elevated, the hungry fed and the rich sent
away empty. "What Mary does," Robert McAfee Brown points out, “is put. the
mandate for radical change centrally within the Christian story."
{Christian Century, 6/3-10/87]

And -so, if Christian sacial activism makes you nervous, and if. you
find yourself thinking that the Gospel is not related to issues of justice
and peace and hunger... If you don't want to have connections made between
your assertion. that God's Kingdom is now in our midst-and the fact that
there are homeless and hungry people walking the. streets of this city in
greater numbers than ever - you are going te have to make your case with
Jesus' mother, who believes her son has to do precisely with a new order,

a new world in which the poor and the rich will receive justice.

When we recover the Mary of the Bible we find the first Christian
disciple and the first social activist. We also gain a theological
insight, which IT believe is at the critical heart of the matter. When we
recover Mary we gain the awareness that Jesus was born — just as you and I
were born, just as babies are being born this very minute at Cook County
Hospital, in ghettoes, villages, clinics, huts all over the world. It was
the same for him; and that undramatic insight,. I submit, is ane of the
most important and one of the most gloriously good pieces of news there is.

We are inclined to disembedy Christ and separate him from our own
humanness. We are inclined to believe that the physical world is not a
good place to be; that this tangible, sensual world is a tempting and
suspicious and dubious piace, and that our calling is to keep it at arm's
length. Left to our own theological devices, we are very much tempted to
conjure up a Christ who descended full-grown from heaven in an ethereal
white robe, who levitated over the dusty roads of Palestine in order
not to get his feet dirty, and who was an Eastern holy man, blissfully
innocent of the flesh and the body.

Mary is the corrective. She was pregnant. Jesus was born.

That's what the Apastles' Creed intends to celebrate in the phrase,
“conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary." What the early
church was celebrating was the fack that he was conceived; and that he was
born - like everyone else. The theological and emotional accent is on the
word -— “conceived,” and the word "born." That's the miracle

Our Jewish forbears knew that life is God's gift; that God's breath -
and Gad's spirit are what animales us. Phat is the beauty of the Genesis
creation slovy. They knew what caused conception. They didn't understand
why some occasions of sexual intimacy resulted in pregnancy and some did
nol. But they knew thal wheu dife occurred there was 4 sense itp which it
is always “conceived by the Holy Ghost."

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A lovely ancient Jewish saying expressed it: oe

“There are three partners in the production of any
human being - the Holy One, blessed be He, the father
and the mother.”

-The miracle occurs every time life begins. That is the miracle we
celebrate. God chooses human life. God chooses that most human, worldly
and earthy function - human birth -- as the way to send a son among us.

The Fundamental miracle is not a Virgin Birth. Madeleine L'Engle
suggests; "far more mind-boggling (is) the Power of Alli Creation stooping
so low as to become one us us." [A Stone for a Pillow, p. 107,108]

Mary is the one person in this drama of Christian faith who reminds
us that the world is our home. When we start believing that religion ought
to be delivering us from this world, Mary reminds us that she bore Gad's
son in her womb and save him birth.

Mary is a reminder that the creation is good: that God is still
creating, that every human birth is a conception by God's spirit and
therefore full of enormous promise and potential.

Mary is a reminder that the Savior of the world was a child once and
lived-in a family, and. in that. family learned. about his own humanity.

Mary is a reminder that our faith is in Jesus, who once laughed
around a family dinner tabie and played with friends and learned to lave
the world by living in it, and on occasion being overwhelmed by it - just
as it is for you and me.

Mary is a reminder that our Lord learned about enormous patential and
the wonderful healing power of human love, and how it overcomes the fears
and anxieties. of childhood and adolescence -.in relationship with his own
mother.

Mary - bore him, loved him, nurtured him, corrected him, laughed with
him.

Mary stayed with him and somehow watched him die and in a very real
way gave him to you and me.

My deeply ingrained Protestantism won't quite allow me to ask her to
pray for me at the hour of death, but I know what it means - and I am
grateful for the reminder at the profound love of God to which it bears
eloquent witness.

And T have no qualias about affirming her and thanking her for her son
aud I invite you to salute her...

Hail Mary, full of grace’ The Lord is with thee surely. Blessed
art thou awong women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Amen.

G6
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