Harvard's Memorial Church Welcomes Presiding Bishop
Episcopal News Service. December 18, 2005 [121805-1]
Underscoring the role of Mary in a morning sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Advent, Presiding Bishop Frank T. Griswold preached December 18 at the Memorial Church of Harvard University (full text follows). Griswold is an alumnus of Harvard, having been graduated in 1959. He was welcomed to the Memorial Church's pulpit by the Rev. Dr. Peter J. Gomes, who serves the congregation and the university as Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister.
In the evening, the 96th Annual Christmas Carol Service presented by the Harvard University Choir featured the world premiere of "Welcome the Morning Star," written for the service by Bruce Saylor, composer of operas, symphonies, oratorios and chamber music. The work is Saylor's second setting of the Presiding Bishop's 2003 Christmas message.
The Memorial Church
Harvard University
December 18, 2005
The Most Rev. Frank T. Griswold
Presiding Bishop and Primate
The Episcopal Church, USA
Revised Common Lectionary
Advent 4
Year B
I am grateful for the invitation to occupy the pulpit this morning here in Memorial Church, and for the privilege of breaking the bread of God's word in a place of worship noted for its preachers. For the most part, my liturgical life is lived within the Episcopal Church and other provinces of the Anglican Communion where certain commonalities obtain: among them the use of a lectionary, that is: a fixed pattern of Sunday and Holy Day readings from the Bible that oblige preachers to fix their attention not upon what they might prefer, but upon what has been appointed for a particular Sunday or Feast Day. I have lived with this discipline for so many years that when I am, from time to time, invited to choose passages of scripture for a service at which I have been asked to preach, I invariably turn to the lectionary.
And therefore when I received a letter from the Associate Minister of this church asking what readings I would prefer, I looked to the readings appointed for the fourth Sunday of Advent.
The Advent season is a time during which we reflect upon events preceding the Incarnation by way of making ourselves ready once again to celebrate Jesus' birth. The gospel reading appointed for this morning draws our attention to the figure of Mary, or more particularly the Annunciation to Mary by the Angel Gabriel. This event has been the subject of many a sermon and has also received the attention of iconographers and painters across the centuries. In icons Mary is depicted in a state of hieratic calm and quiet submission. In western painting she is frequently perched gracefully upon a prie dieu in an attitude of prayer as she receives her angelic visitor. These renderings, as affecting as they may be, stand in contrast to the report given in the Gospel of Luke that at the moment of encounter Mary was "much perplexed."
The King James translation tells us that she was "troubled" while the Greek text describes her as "greatly disturbed."
The depiction of the Annunciation I find most engaging is one that hangs in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It was painted in the late 19th century by Henry Ossawa Tanner. In it Mary is seen sitting on her bed in her night clothes. Sheets and blankets are cast aside as if to suggest a sudden and startled arising. The expression on her face is one of discomfort and anxiety as she looks toward a column of light representing the presence of the angel Gabriel who had just made the unsettling and unsought announcement.
Mary had every right to be disturbed. Annunciation, whether mediated by angels or by all too human others, can be a fearsome and profoundly disturbing experience. However, it does appear to be God's way with us, which is why hearing and listening are, according to Scripture, the fundamental stance of persons of faith.
"Hear O Israel…." Moses commands the people as they journey through the wilderness. "Speak Lord, for your servant is listening," cries the boy Samuel in response to the mysterious voice that wakes him in the night. "I will listen like one who is taught," declares the servant of the Lord in the Book of Isaiah. "You have given me ears to hear," declares the Psalmist.
Mary was born of a people shaped by God's word; she had listening bred in her bones. Sarah and Hannah and other faithful listeners were her forebears, and throughout the land certain piles of stones, wells, caves and mountain peaks marked the places where divine discourse had overtaken some childless couple, or shepherd, or vine dresser, or scribe or priest and made havoc of their lives. Mary had doubtlessly heard the stories and been shown some of the sites where the word of the Lord had laid hold upon this or that unsuspecting person.
According to Luke, Mary pondered what she heard in her heart: she did so at the departure of the shepherds after her son's birth, and again when Jesus, at the age of twelve, slipped away and was later found by his anxious parents in the temple discoursing with the doctors of the law. Mary took things deep within and let them rest there until they came to full term and were ready to be born into the living form of God's intention: until they were ready to take flesh and to happen. (And here it is worth observing that dabar the Hebrew for "word" carries with it notions of event, occurrence: a word is not simply spoken, it happens.)
According to the tradition of the Christian East – shaped by elements drawn from the extra-canonical infancy gospel of James, which also left its mark on the Qur'an – Mary was drawing water from the communal well in Nazareth when the angel Gabriel first addressed her. She rushed home in terror, took up a purple thread and began to spin – doubtless to calm herself and recover her equilibrium.
As she spun her thread the angelic messenger appeared again, this time it would seem with greater attention to Mary's state of unsettlement. Perhaps his initial, "Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you" had been a bit overwhelming. So this time around he adds, "Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God." Then, taking Mary's measure Gabriel decides that it is safe to proceed: "And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus." "How can this be?" Mary replies in confusion, and likely drops her purple thread. How can this be, indeed, as everything else in her world ordered to a nice village wedding to a nice village man falls to the ground as well? And yet something in her troubled spirit overleaps the strangeness and terror of it all and she manages to stammer out her response: "Let it be to me according to your word." And thus, Mary has declared her availability to God's unfathomable and mysterious ways, which are often clothed in contradiction, ambiguity or paradox.
But in the passage we have just heard, before Mary utters these words; Gabriel adds to his announcement further information. "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." Did Gabriel sense that Mary needed to know that she was not alone in being drawn out of her tidy and circumscribed world into the strange ways and workings of God? Did Gabriel know that before she could say "yes" with every fiber of her being she needed, in addition to an angelic voice, a human voice to address her and loving and familiar arms to embrace her? And so it is that as soon as the Angel departs, Mary, goes "with haste," as we are told, to a town in the hill country of Judea to Elizabeth whose greeting becomes a further annunciation, "Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb." Elizabeth's words give Mary the courage to cry out with joy, "My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior; for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant."
Jesus' birth is by no means the end of it all. In fact it is only the beginning. There is that terrible moment in the temple when Mary and Joseph present their firstborn before the Lord and old Simeon says to Mary, "This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel." What confirming words for her to hear. But then he adds, "A sword will pierce your own soul too." This was another annunciation, possibly more disturbing than the first. Simeon's words might very well have come to Mary's mind when Jesus was twelve and she thought she had lost him in the crowd.
Indeed, there must have been many moments of panic and worry along the way, each one requiring from her a fresh response, another "Yes, " – another declaration of "let it be to me according to your word."
When the adult Jesus declared in Mary's hearing that his mother and brothers and sisters were those who heard the word of God and kept it, she knew what he meant and the cost of it all. She might also have called to mind what God had said through the prophet Hosea, "(I have) lashed you with my words." (Hosea 6: 5). But Mary also knew that she could do no other than to welcome the word, because it wasn't primarily about task or function, but about her very life and who she was called in grace and truth to be. It was through her progressive and ever unfolding "yes" that Mary entered into the mystery of her own identity and became herself.
God's word, no matter what it may set before us in terms of a task or something to accomplish is always personal and identifying, calling us more fully into being.
Mary's "yes" takes her to the foot of the cross – where the sword pierced most deeply – and through the cross into the resurrection and the wind and fire of Pentecost. In every event and circumstance, in suffering and in joy, she remained faithful, "Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word."
Annunciations, often in strange and unexpected forms, can come upon us when we least expect them. One of the reasons I am standing before you today is because of a roommate in my ninth grade year collapsing on his bed with laughter as he reported that the school chaplain had remarked that I should be ordained. I laughed too at such a bizarre idea. Nonetheless it did take hold. Thus, my 9th grade roommate remains for me to this day a Gabriel and an Elizabeth rolled into one.
God's way with us, as it was with Mary, may be ambiguous and paradoxical and confute our notions of order and rightness. What could be more ambiguous in human terms than a young girl engaged to be married becoming "great with child," as the older translations so delicately put it? What could be more paradoxical than divinity and humanity – two opposites – made one in Mary's womb?
"Consider the work of God," declares the author of Ecclesiastes, "who can make straight what God has made crooked?" And yet that is precisely what many of us seek to do: make God's ways straight according to our own sense of propriety and rightness. But as God reminds us, speaking through the prophet Isaiah, "My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor your ways my ways." The divine imagination overleaps all the boundaries we set to contain it. To encounter it, or to be overtaken by it is like finding ourselves on "insulas extranas," "strange islands" as St. John of the Cross expresses the encounter with the divine.
When we find ourselves, as it were, on strange islands and the known, the familiar, the safe, are left behind we become more permeable to God's passionate and longing love – God's will – that is what God most deeply desires for our well being and full flourishing. Mary experienced that will, that longing, loving desire of God. Her spirit was large enough to receive it without fleeing in terror or defending herself against its contradiction of all that she had foreseen as the wife of a small town builder and carpenter.
Mary stands as an encouragement to us all. Following her example we need not be afraid when our tidy plans are overruled by sudden and often unwelcome outbreaks of what appears to be divine unreasonableness. "How can this be?" and the confusion that followed were where Mary had to begin to sort and sift her way haltingly toward "yes." Why should it be any different for us?
At such moments we must remember that God's word is always a word of life, though it may require a kind of dying to our hopes and plans in order to receive it. As T. S. Eliot, following St. John of the Cross, observes: "In order to possess what we do not possess we must go by the way of dispossession." Relinquishing in order to possess, losing in order to find, becoming foolish in order to become wise. These are all part of the paradox of encountering and giving room to God's address to us in its various forms.
As we look ahead to Christmas next week let us consider our own response to the Word who seeks to dwell within us and to express his reconciling love for the world through us. May we be encouraged by the example of Mary, our sister. And, may we, in the communion of saints, be supported by her prayer. May her availability to God's desire, God's will, give us the courage to make her words our own: "Here I am, the servant of the Lord; let it be to me – and to each one of us here this morning – according to your word."
Amen.