Luke 1:26-38
In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin's name was Mary. And he came to her and said, "Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you." But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. The angel said to her, "Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end." Mary said to the angel, "How can this be, since I am a virgin?" The angel said to her, "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 holy; he will be called Son of God. And now, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren. For nothing will be impossible with God." Then Mary said, "Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word." Then the angel departed from her.
How many of you have ever heard of Stefani Joanne
Angelina Germanotta? I suspect that most of you probably never even heard the
name. What if I told you that she could teach us a thing or two about Mary?
Here is something written by Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta:
That’s right, Stefani Germanotta is none other than Lady
Gaga (Here begins your requested Lady Gaga Sermon).
But as strange and outlandish as Lady Gaga might be she
reminds us that like Mary, underneath the makeup and glitter and "outrageousness" is an ordinary person called by God to be part of something extraordinary.
Whether we like it or not we serve a shocking, outrageous
and unpredictable God that goes well beyond meat suits and over the top
incandescent high heels.
You see the thing about Our Lady and Lady Gaga is that
God doesn’t often call the powerful and the exceptional God calls the ordinary.
Mary was not chosen to be the mother of Jesus because she was special. She was
chosen because she was the spitting image of ordinary; A young girl of
marriageable age, living an ordinary life in an ordinary town in an ordinary
country with nothing to special or exceptional about her. There were probably
hundreds of other girls who could easily have taken Mary’s place.
But yet each year around this time we ponder the
question; Who is Mary? Depending on your background there are a million
different ways to answer that question. Mary is either to be held up as being
almost divine or simply the mother of the greatest man that ever lived. To our culture Mary is by and large a distant
figure, silent, immobile, gazing at the manger; plastic. She is there
untouchable. We don’t often see her as a real person; we see the image of her
that we have created.
When I was growing up we had a little plastic nativity
set that was carefully stored away during the year and lovingly unwrapped
around Christmas. The figures were nothing special; they were made out of cheap
hard plastic with paint. But to me those figures were priceless. I loved the
ritual of taking those little figures out and placing them somewhere near our
little plastic tree (no Douglas Firs in Barbados). But of all the figures I
like Mary the best. The plastic look on her face that conveyed such love and
hope and devotion for her little plastic cast son in a manger was endearing and
engaging all at the same time.
I have no idea what happened to those plastic figures but
they tell a story of how to connect with the Divine. That little blue and white
figure of Mary, as plastic as she was made her a real person to me; She was
much more than the Mary I knew from the prayers (Some of you can probably
recite with me without much thought “Hail Mary full of Grace the Lord is with
thee, blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb. Holy Mary
Mother of God pray for us sinners now and in the hour of our death.)My little
plastic Mary took her from the realm of being the big, awesome Mother of God
and made her human for me. She was more
than the Mary of prayers.
This ordinariness is what makes the Mary’s story so
extraordinary. How could someone so common give birth to a child that would change
the world? How could a child that would reflect the Divine be born into such
ordinary circumstances, grow up under such plain-jane parents, and do such
ordinary work (carpentry)? The answer, I believe is simply this: God’s Reign,
God’s presence, God’s very self does not come through extraordinary people.
God’s vision stands or falls on ordinary people embracing it and living it out
in their daily lives.
What was significant about both Mary and her son Jesus
was the Reign of God that came into the world through them. This is why Mary’s
song never once mentions Jesus. It praises God for the justice and grace, the
love and peace that God is bringing into the world through her (See Luke
1:46-55). None of this is intended to deny the unique nature and mission of
Jesus. It is simply a challenge for us to recognize that if Jesus’ incarnation
was an extraordinary thing, that was done to us, it would have little impact on
our lives now.
If Jesus came as some sort of superhero swooping in to
save us, then he would have had no need to call anyone to follow him. The
Gospels are nothing if not a call to ordinary people to embrace the vision of
God that was present in Jesus’ life and to live it out as Jesus did in lives of
compassion, grace, love and sacrifice. Scripture is filed with ordinary people
going about their lives and together reflecting all the awe, and beauty and
hope and joy and peace and grace of an awesome and awe-inspiring God. From Adam
right down to YOU God is in the business of calling ordinary people to the work
of extraordinary love.
What this means is that Mary was not a unique human being
who was uniquely chosen, and who we must simply watch and celebrate. No, Mary
is all of us – ordinary, loved and called. We are all visited by God. We are
all overshadowed by God’s Spirit. We are all parents of God’s Reign. Which
means that it is time to stop waiting for the fantastically and extraordinary
to save us. Mary reminds us that it is time for us all to accept the
“calledness” of our ordinariness, and begin to give birth to God’s Reign in our
own small way. It is time for us all to choose, daily, to bring Christ and the
Reign of God that Christ revealed, into our world.
Mary was not extraordinary. Stefani Germanotta is not
extraordinary. We are not extraordinary. Beneath the myth of Mary, the makeup
of Lady Gaga and the masks we create for ourselves lay the truly ordinary
people that God has called by name. It is not the extraordinary people that God
needs. The history of God is filled with ordinary people who recognized what
God was doing and joined the movement.
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