Becoming Like Mary, Full of Grace

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Second Sunday of Advent by the Very Rev. Tyler Doherty, Dean & Rector.

Advent is a season when we cultivate, open to, stillness, silence, and simplicity. Just as the sap of a tree gathers from the extremities of its branches into the trunk at the first cold snap, so we are gathered out of a culture of distraction addicted to speed, spin, spending, to come home to ourselves, to the one who has made his home in us: See, the home of God is among mortals. He dwells with them and they are his people… God himself is with them (Revelation 21:3). We often speak of Advent as a time of watching and waiting. But watching and waiting for what?

There’s a tendency to think of all the apocalyptic language of Advent as pointing to some far-off and distant future when things will be set aright. That is meet and right and joyful Christian hope--that all things be restored to God’s original intent for creation where children play nonchalantly over the asp’s hole, the lion lays down with the lamb, and the bear gives up meat for good and munches contentedly on pesticide-free straw. Primordial peace instead of wars and rumors of wars, casting out, and us versus them. 

But Christian hope is not simply confined to the distant future. Advent is a season when the staggering reality of God with us--here and now--is calling out like a trumpet blast to be embraced, embodied, and enacted by each and every one of us. Try this on for size: In the first year of President Biden, when Spencer Cox is governor and Mendenhall mayor of Salt Lake and Jenny mayor of Salt Lake County under the priesthood of Russell M. Nelson… the word of God comes to us. That’s Advent. This is Advent.

Or do we suppose that the peace that passes understanding is a quaint phrase with a nice ring to it that signals the start of coffee hour? The early Christians, after much theological wrangling and some fisticuffs, agreed at the Council of Ephesus in 431 A.D. to call Mary, the Mother of our Lord--theotokos (God-bearer). “Well, bully for Mary!” we might say. “Good on ya, Mare!” And right there we make the mistake we always make--thinking that scripture is telling a story about someone else in a bygone era, in a town long buried under the sands half a world away. Martin Luther had it right when he said of the Bible, “It’s about you!” 

We practice listening and reading in such a way that we see ourselves in the characters, stories, and situations of Holy Scripture. “Who are you in the story?” the Godly Play teachers ask the children each Sunday. And just a heads-up: if we find ourselves always seeing ourselves on the side of the prophets--the goodies as opposed to the obstinate, stiff-necked, fleshpot-pining, squabbling gossips--we probably ought to “give our heads a good shake,” as my mother likes to say.

With Francis Ford Coppola we learn that scripture is telling us not just about apocalypse then, but Apocalypse Now. That towering temple of the imperial ego “I” that tries to run the show and arrange everything for its own comfort and benefit needs to come tumbling down so that the new thing God is doing in Christ might be manifest in us, through us, for others. That virgin birth? It’s pointing to the purpose of our human life in the short span of days we have allotted: to become God-bearers. That love might melt us open in giving birth to Christ in the manger of the heart. Meister Eckhart--a practiced hand at waking us from the slumber of comfort and spectatorial passivity through heresy-skirting hyperbole--puts it this way:

We are all meant to be mothers of God. What good is it to me if this eternal birth of the divine Son takes place unceasingly, but does not take place within myself? And, what good is it to me if Mary is full of grace if I am not also full of grace? What good is it to me for the Creator to give birth to his Son if I do not also give birth to him in my time and my culture? This, then, is the fullness of time: When the Son of Man is begotten in us.

It’s all well and good, Eckhart says, for God to give birth to his son, but the whole point is for us to give birth to him here and now. Absent that, the Christian faith and parish life is a clubby exercise in fond nostalgia whose primary purpose is to confirm us in our comfortable blindness. No wonder I heard so many archaeologically-themed sermons in my youth. It’s what G.K. Chesterton is getting at when he writes in What’s Wrong With the World,  “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.”

Why difficult? Why untried? Well, I suppose, for starters, there’s that whole “Know Thyself” piece. We’d rather know who is sleeping with whom in the celebrity circus and what Harry and Megan are saying about their terrible parents than look into our own hearts and minds. We’d rather be outraged at some politician and share our outrage on social media with a carefully curated group of people who magically agree with us than look at our unexamined anger, our grief, our resentment, our loneliness, our easy participation in a culture of casual cruelty. Becoming full of grace, like Mary, is predicated on the clear recognition that we’re often full of something else…. Requirements of how life should be rather than what it actually is, demands, imperious judgments of ourselves and others, delicious unforgiveness, deserving entitlements, addictions to comfort, security, control in a world of contingency and risk.

Advent is that time, when as children of God committed to Becoming Beloved Community gathered around Christ the Beloved, we stop, come home to ourselves, and see what’s here. Too often, we watch for the Son of Man descending in a cloud as a way of avoiding all those parts of ourselves that we don’t want to acknowledge, or of which we are ashamed. Instead, we commit to looking in the mirror and being honest with ourselves about what we see there. We observe ourselves. We gather the facts of the situation. What we think. What we feel. That’s the “watch” part. Gently, tenderly, with loving-kindness and humor-tinged curiosity (life’s too serious to take seriously) we see and experience bodily how it is with us. Looking in the mirror we learn to smile at and embrace whatever’s there--we practice seeing ourselves as God sees us; we practice loving ourselves as God loves us.

That’s what the radical acceptance of the Gospel actually looks like. We can say God loves us unconditionally until the shepherds come home, but if we’re always tearing ourselves down, splitting off what we don’t want to see or acknowledge, “distracting ourselves from distraction by distraction” as Eliot says, thinking the next purchase, next drink, next relationship is going to complete us, it’s difficult for the Divine Physician to her work. It’s like standing under a waterfall of grace and mercy with an umbrella up and complaining all the while that we’re not getting wet. The divine healing that takes place when we know in our bones that we are loved just as we are requires our willingness to stop, see, be, allow, and receive the love that loves us into loving. 

That being loved into loving takes time and frequent exposure. Small glimpses many times. That’s the wait part. Our job is to make space for God to get at us, or be willing to get in God’s way if you like--through Holy Scripture, praying the daily offices, wasting time gracefully with God in squirmy silence, serving others in the spirit of sacrificial love, weekly worship in community, maybe a formation class, a quiet day, a bible study, or a weekday mass. There are innumerable doorways to grace, but they have to be knocked upon, opened, stepped through. “What good is it to me if Mary is full of grace if I am not also full of grace?” Eckhart asks. Do we dare be filled with grace? Or will that remain something too difficult and left untried for another Advent? 

What a precious invitation! To join the Wise Men on their journey to the creche at the center of the soul! We stop, wait, watch, and sooner or later wake up to discover ourselves held in the arms of his warm embrace. Love erupts, mercy breaks through the shame, the blame, the story of not enough, the fear, the scarcity, the lack… And what do we see in the muck, and the straw of our ordinary lives? The dawn from on high breaking upon us shining on we who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death. The Son of Man begotten in us and guiding our feet into the way of peace and Christmas still weeks away. All that time remaining suddenly to be gift for others, and not just get gifts. Take it up. Appreciate this precious life.