Sermon, 2021.8.15: "Mary, The First Christian"

 

August 15 : The Feast of Mary the Virgin, Mother of God

Isa 61.10-11 · Ps 34 · Gal 4.4-7 · Luk 1.46-55

Ben Miller

“Mary, the first Christian”

A sermon preached at Christ Episcopal Church (Lead, SD)

Sunday 2021.8.15

Today’s feast asks us two questions today:

One: Who is a Christian? 

And two: What kind of God is the God of Israel? 

Maybe you take these questions for granted because they seem obvious to you. 

But the thing about being a disciple, though, the thing about following Jesus, is that you often need to be challenged on the things you think are most obvious. And this is the gift of reflecting on the the Virgin Mary today. Mary is someone who challenge’s the Church’s expectations because it is by Mary’s assent to the will of the Father that his Eternal Son was able to be conceived by the Holy Spirit and enter this world as a flesh and blood human being. 

This is all to say that it was by a poor, scared, and faithful Palestinian teenager’s assent to the will of God, that something that had never been seen before could occur: God in the flesh. God Himself entered the world in the humility and majesty of human flesh. 

In the words of the Letter to the Colossians, The [visible] image of the invisible God. 

Or in the words of Paul’s Letter to the Philippians: 

the One who, 

though he was in the form of God, 

did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, 

but emptied himself, 

taking the form of a servant, 

being born in human likeness… 

being found in human form… 

This is all to say, that we owe it to ourselves to reflect on those two questions in the light of the Virgin Mary’s unprecedented, astonishing encounter with the God of Israel: 

Who is a Christian? 

What kind of God is the God of Israel?

… in order to receive answers that can come to us as unprecedented, and astonish us.

First: Mary shows us who a Christian because Mary was the first Christian. Maybe you don’t think about it that way, but it’s true! 

Mary was the first Christian because she was the first human being in history to say Yes to Jesus. And this answers our question today. A Christian is a person who says Yes to Jesus. 

And saying Yes to Jesus isn’t just a matter of your words. It is a matter of your life. It is a matter of your whole being. Because saying Yes to Jesus begins your salvation. It transforms you. You cannot expect that God would send His Only Begotten Son, his very own Self and Light and Life, into our world and not have you and I remain the same. That is tantamount to saying No. Your Yes to Jesus is a Yes to salvation, and a Yes to salvation is a Yes to a new way of living that will astonish you, confront you, and heal you.

This is why the Old Testament reading from Isaiah today begins: 

I will greatly rejoice in the LORD, 

My whole being shall exult in my God. (Isa 61.10)

And Psalm 34 today:

I will glory in the LORD.

Proclaim with me the greatness of the LORD. (vv. 2, 3)

And this is why Mary proclaims: 

My soul magnifies the Lord, 

my spirit rejoices in God my Savior. (Lk 1.46)

Mary echoes the prophet: to say Yes to Jesus is to have your whole life, the very core of you who are, transformed from the inside out. It cannot be otherwise because we deal with God here. A Yes to something of human origin can always fail to make a real difference. But not so with the Lord!  

A Christian is someone who says Yes to Jesus because a Christian is someone like Christ’s Mother, Mary: you are given God’s own Self, His Only Begotten Son, to receive. 

And in that gift from the God of Israel you are encountered with a choice: 

Will I receive? 

Will I accept? 

Will I take this gift, and, in spite of all my fear, all my doubts, and all my weakness, allow the gift of God to transform me, come what may? 

That is what Mary did in her Yes to Jesus, the first Yes in human history that would burst forth a flood of Yeses, as if from a womb. 

And that is what you are to do, beloved, in your Yes to Jesus. 

Question 2: 

What kind of God is the God of Israel? 

Mary answers this today in the Gospel lesson, the Magnificat that is so engrained in the Church’s tradition of worship and music. Have you listened to the words? These are not ordinary words. They are the words of prophecy. Why do I say this? Because in today’s Gospel lesson, Mary tells us the truth about God. And that is what a prophet is. You can’t reduce prophets to magical spiritual people with crystal balls predicting the future. No, they’re people sent to tell the truth about God. God sends prophets to tell people the truth about Himself. 

He has regarded the lowliness of his servant.

The God of Israel, the One who created you in infinite love and nurtured His chosen people Israel out of Egypt like a Son from among the nations, is the One who loved you so much in your condition of sin that He would not just remain in heaven, but come down to transform this world from the inside out by becoming a participant in it. 

God looked down from heaven and saw us in our slavery to sin. 

Like Mary says today: 

He regarded our lowliness, this lowliness that sin creates.

 

He saw the material and spiritual poverty it creates.

He saw our world, its violence, its cruelty, its neglect of life and the common good, its degradation of people and environment, and in His hatred of the sin He saw, He chose to remember his committment to love. Because nothing would change God’s character. 

Hear the words of today’s Psalm: 

The LORD is near to the brokenhearted

and will save those whose spirits are crushed.

… The LORD ransoms the life of his servants.

That is the God of Israel. He remembered His commitment to Israel; which is a way of saying that nothing would change God’s eternal character and commitment to love humanity back to wholeness. And He would do this by being with us as a Human Being, who would experience all the vulnerability, all the poverty, all the neglect and violence, that Sin has wrought in this world. What does the Church hear every Christmas? Emmanuel: God With Us.

And what does the apostle Paul say today in Galatians (4.4–7)? 

God sent forth his Son, born of a woman… that we might receive adoption as children. And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” So through God you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then an heir.

No longer a slave to sin, but a child of God, and if a child of God then an heir to all the love and salvation that God desires for you.

And what more does Mary say today? I will quote the Magnificat in the familiar words of the Prayer Book:

He hath shown strength with his arm 

he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts

He hath put down the mighty from their seat

and hath exalted the humble and meek

He hath filled the hungry with good things

and the rich he hath sent empty away.

This is the truth about God. This is the kind of God who is the God of Israel. Not just the One who loves you in your lowliness and sinfulness, not just the One who comes down to be with you in the flesh as Emmanuel, but the one who then upends all that you take for granted about the world and about your life so that salvation will come. 

The God of Israel is a God who yearns for justice. He hungers for justice with the same (no, greater!) intensity that the poor and oppressed do. And the God of Israel knows that this justice requires reversals of material conditions, rectifications of material inequity. He yearns for a world where the proud, the rich, and the mighty will understand that their reigns are nothing compared to God’s. This is what it means for the proud to be scattered in the imagination of their hearts. Because make no mistake, when you are wealthy, you become proud, and you imagine in your heart that your comfort is neutral and makes no demands of you. And God must come down as a poor carpenter from Nazareth to scatter this pride, to upend your imagination, and your material and spiritual condition.

Mary proclaims this in the Gospel. Mary understands what kind of God is the God of Israel because she said Yes to Jesus. 

And we the Church sing this truth in beautiful hymns and settings of the Magnificat that span the centuries. We sang one of them this morning! (“Tell out, my soul,” Hymnal 1982 #437)

But are we listening?

Are we listening to Mary’s prophecy?
Are we listening to how Mary, meek and mild, Mary, the Mighty Mother of our Lord, confronts us with our two questions today?

Who is a Christian?

What kind of God is the God of Israel? 

In her encounter with God, her incredible Yes to receive Jesus in her body and her life, Mary helps us to ponder in our hearts the answers. 

But more than pondering, Mary’s encounter with God proclaims our salvation. And this salvation is astonishing. It is unprecedented. But it is what we need because we cannot do it ourselves. We cannot even desire it on our own without the intervention of God and His bountiful loving Spirit.

And it can be scary to ponder this. Yes, it can be as scary as it was for a young, poor Palestinian girl to be met by an angel 2000 years ago. But the Yes, that Yes to the gift of God’s Son, changes everything. It changes how you relate to God. And when you are open to changing how you relate to God, you are really being changed into a new type of person. 

So maybe you receive Jesus, the Lowly One, the Crucified Emmanuel, into your being. 

And, as Paul says, cry with your whole voice, your whole being, your whole soul, that word of ultimate love and ultimate rejoicing, “Abba! Father!” (Gal 4.6)

And magnify the Lord.

Word count: 1757