December 24, 2006
(Fourth Sunday of Advent)

Getting Surprised by God

by The Rev. Dr. Michael Johnston

Micah 5:2-4  •  Psalm 80 or 80:1-7  •  Hebrews 10:5-10  •  Luke 1:39-49(50-56)
(From The Lectionary Page)

In those days Mary...went with haste [and] entered the house of Zechariah... When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, she exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.”

Just earlier in Luke’s story there is, of course, another visitation, another greeting, and another exclamation. In that case, it is Gabriel who comes to the Galilean hill country. He greets the unsuspecting Mother of Our Lord with the words, “Do not be afraid, because you have found favor with God.” And Mary exclaims, “Be it unto me according to your word.”

Not immediately, of course. There’s a little back-and-forth between the virgin and the angel concerning Mary’s suspicion of her unlikely election, but eventually, in the end, she gives way to “Be it unto me according to your word.”

Countless centuries of Christian piety have looked backwards to this single sentence of Our Lady as the model of Christian posture and behavior.  For generations, her words have been taken to reflect those virtues – humility, meekness, acceptance, and obedience--that culture has used both to idealize women and to hold them hostage to patriarchy.

Men have been largely free of the demands of these values, unless, of course, they have opted to relinquish autonomy by, say, joining the military or a monastic order--or maybe submitting to the parish priesthood.

In any case, it strikes me that these virtues are not particularly Christian ones--especially humble acquiescence and passive obedience.  If fact, while the word "obedience" and its derivatives turn up eighty-seven times in the NT [I counted], the word mostly belongs to Paul. Jesus never utters anything like it.”

That is not to say that Jesus didn't make harsh demands. To him, however, obedience was not a matter of following orders. Rather, it was a firm decision in favor of what God reveals in any specific and concrete situation. The will of God is not always, maybe not even frequently, made manifest in a law you are meant to obey. Instead, God normally reveals Godself in such a way that ordinary consciousness is caught off-guard by a startling turn of events. Revelation tends to creep in through the backdoors of our lives with a totally unnerving proposition that demands a response. Consider this one...

Let me call it PROPOSITION ONE: "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God."

RESPONSE: "Be it unto me according to your word."

This is not humble acquiescence to an autocratic Deity. It is a spontaneous and creative reaction to the unexpected in-breaking of God's presence. Actually, I suspect that Mary was a little less spontaneous than Luke wants us to believe. An unwed pregnant teenager probably needed some time to process Terrifying Announcement into Good News.

In either case, I submit that when she does respond to Gabriel, Mary cedes not to authority but to surprise. And, God knows, that particular revealing, that angelic proposition, must have come with considerable surprise--especially given the context.

If Mary really were the pious Jewish girl we've made her out to be, then she will have been socialized into knowing that access to the Divine Presence was available only through the established religious hierarchy: its Temple and Torah, its priests and scribes, its burnt offerings and sacrificial systems. And none of that was directly open to her.

You couldn't get much lower or more removed to the margins than to have been a woman in a society completely run by men, a Jew under Roman occupation, and a peasant in a land where 2% of the population owned 90%of the means of production.

If there were vacant thrones to be occupied by new kings, Mary is unlikely to have imagined her womb as one of them. But that gives us...

PROPOSITION TWO: "A poor, Jewish woman in occupied Palestine will bear the gift for which all of the oppressed world longs."

RESPONSE: "Be it unto me according to your word."

Every year on the Fourth Sunday of Advent we read some portion of these texts devoted to Mary and Elizabeth. And they are full of surprises. When the first chapter of Luke's Gospel opens, we find that God is not in repose in heaven, but busy and restless, the innovative Creator, working some very strange sides of the street.

This God speaks first to old people, which alone is surprising--especially if you've been socialized into a narcissistic culture where power and potential are afforded only to the young, the connected, and the fertile.

I think it is also fascinating that the surprise comes to Zechariah while he's about his ordinary and familiar business of attending to the shrine, simply doing his old duty. This Annunciation about the birth of John the Baptist comes to the old man while he is attending to his priestly tasks in the Temple. Amid the rising smoke of the incense, which it was his turn to offer, an angelic messenger proposed that God is about to reverse Elizabeth’s history of barrenness.

I suspect that Zechariah was so captured by his routines--arranging the charcoal as he had always done it; laying out the lavabo towel at exactly the right angle; lighting the seasonal candles in the right order--that he missed the surprise. Held hostage to the familiar of priest-craft and the barrenness of his expectations, he cannot connect past with promise. And so he is struck dumb, and remains speechless until the boy is born. If it isn't according to plan, he can't imagine a response.

But the final surprise, of course, is reserved for Mary's own message, called the Magnificat. As the hymn tells it, this restless and imaginative God is about to accomplish not just two astonishing conceptions but a stunning reversal of all things.

And that gives us PROPOSITION THREE: “The arrogance of power will be shattered, and the future given to the powerless.”

RESPONSE: “Be it unto me according to your word.”

The lowly will be lifted up, and the exalted cast down. The hungry will be filled with good things, and the rich sent away empty. Beware, you powerful! No more thrones! Rejoice, you powerless! The seat is now yours. Take a chair.

There is nothing in these words about obedience to authority. It is a song of liberation, sung in praise of the God who executes a new social order of justice and plenty. And if you are alert, as Mary was, to the surprising God who enters the reality of colonial woman, Jew and peasant, it follows that something touching and changing your own situation is about to unfold miraculously. The mountains of your exploitation are about to be cut down, and the valleys of your oppression are about to be filled in. Your rough places will be made plane. The entire landscape of life is about to be rearranged.

And since you bear all of these promises in your womb, you are likely to sing with spontaneous exultation that all generations will henceforth call you blessed. Some posture of meekness! Some obedience to the expected order of things!

It occurs to me that we cannot resolve the questions concerning what God wants from us by recourse simply to Scripture, Law, Theology, or Tradition. We must consult, as Mary did, the signs of our times and the unforseen in every situation. And that requires spontaneity, liberty and the use of creative imagination. Obedience is a matter of having our eyes open--and risking our ordinary expectations and our ordinary selves to the adventure of a God who speaks surprisingly into our now--what today’s collect calls God’s “daily visitation.”

I am afraid that we have programmed surprise right out of Christmas. Reaping the rewards of a society that pretty much secures our autonomy, our power and our satiety, we give and receive gifts based not on needs but on wants and desires. And if we don't want what we get or it doesn't fit...well, then, we can always exchange it for something more in line with expectation.

But what if Christmas were about real surprise? Something we do not expect at all or even want, a gift we can't give back? What if we allowed God to red-pencil our wish-lists or edit the big hints we drop? Now that would be Christmas!

So my prayer for us during these next few hours, as we move this year hastily toward another birthing, is that we can linger awhile with the mother of Our Lord--if only to learn how better to receive God's surprising gifts. And when we are able to recognize the angelic proposals amidst the mess of our carefully managed lives, perhaps we too can respond: “Be it unto me according to your word.”

If God can come to Bethlehem of Ephrathah, one of the least of the clans of Judah--and I’ve been there; it really is little; it’s really shabby; and not at all inspiring of awe–if God can come to Bethlehem, then surely God can come to us as well.