Advent 4, Year B – Readings here
For the past couple of months, I’ve have been slowly making my way through a book series about Jesuit priests who travel through space to meet singing aliens.
While these books, The Sparrow and Children of God, sound pretty lighthearted in their premise, they are actually extremely intense. They follow a Jesuit and linguist named Emilio Sandoz through the thrill of discovering alien life, the tedium of the long journey to another planet, the awe of taking that first step into completely foreign territory, and the surprising joy of engaging meaningfully with another sentient species.
Throughout the books, Sandoz is depicted as a person of wavering faith. Though he has devoted his life to God, he still grapples with life’s most difficult existential questions.
Questions like: Am I really doing what God wants me to do? Where is God in all this suffering? How can beauty and pain exist simultaneously?
But here’s the question the story seems to ask more than any other: If I had known what I know now, would I have followed God’s call on my life?
Early on in the first book, Sandoz has an experience of God so profound that those witnessing it say his face was shining like a saint. But that moment of spiritual certainty is overshadowed by years of tragedy, loss, and physical disability. Sandoz spends the rest of his life wondering what it could mean to have received divine reassurance that God has a plan for him, but to still be grappling with the confusion, doubt, and discomfort of not really knowing what will happen next.
Because I have been living in this alien world with Emilio Sandoz for so long, I can’t help but imagine Mary grappling with the same divine reassurances, and the same difficult questions.
But before I get into that, let me give you a bit of background on what we might call the “Mary Discourse.”
For the past few years, it has been trendy for preachers to riff on the popular Christmas song: “Mary, did you know?”
The song, which we’ll actually hear during the Offertory, goes like this:
Mary did you know
That your baby boy
Would one day walk on water?
Mary did you know
That your baby boy
Would save our sons and daughters?
Did you know
That your baby boy
Has come to make you new?
This child that you’ve delivered
Will soon deliver you.
Though the song was released in 1991, a parody called “Yes, I freaking knew” was shared online in 2019. That song uses all the same words from the original, except each repetition of “Mary did you know?” turns into an exasperated declaration: “Yes, I freaking knew.”
The parody song set off an ongoing conversation about what, exactly, Mary knew when she consented to God’s call on her life. We know that almost immediately after Gabriel’s visit, Mary sings a song about empires falling, and God keeping God’s promises. We call it the Magnificat.
But even though her words are forceful and prophetic, we often talk about Mary as meek, mild, and mostly silent. In other words, there is a disparity between her own words and the church’s historical characterization of Mary.
I mean, look at the hymn we just sang (“The angel Gabriel from heaven came”):
Out of 4 verses, Mary only gets one verse with a speaking part. This, despite being the one who bore Jesus Christ, the Savior of the World, in her own body! The fourth verse has the nerve to give us a speaking part, which doesn’t really seem fair to Mary, since we weren’t there for any of it.
I think the “Yes, I freaking knew” parody is right to point out that Mary wasn’t just a passive part of the story. At some level, of course she knew that saying yes was a big responsibility, with world-changing repercussions.
For us today, Mary is not a “most highly favored lady” because God sent the angel Gabriel to have a little chat with her. We remember her today because she boldy said YES to God’s call on her life.
Today’s passage is all about what it looks, sounds, and feels like for God to call us to something, and for us to respond.
The narrative follows the structure of a classic call narrative. Like the Old Testament prophets and patriarchs, Mary is brought into the terrifying presence of God’s messenger, who shares a bewildering and improbable message:
You will bear the son of God. You, little old Mary, from a region about the size of Houston, Texas, are being asked to consent to something that will risk your future, for the sake of the whole world.
This experience must have been unlike anything Mary could have imagined for herself, a young, poor woman from a marginalized religious group. Like Emilio Sandoz encountering an alien world for the first time, I imagine that Mary felt equal parts joy and wonder as Gabriel told her that the story of salvation was, at last, coming to pass.
She knew, in that moment, that God was at work in the world. And everything would be different.
In the near presence of God, of course she said yes: “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”
So, it seems clear that Mary freaking knew, at the moment of her call, that she would play a part in God’s plan. Jesus was coming and nothing would ever be the same.
But could Mary have possibly known…everything?
Could she have known the jumbled beauty and pain of childbirth? Could she have known that Jesus, once he was grown, would put her own people at odds with one another, almost immediately? Could she have known the intricacies of his ministry, and the difficulty of navigating the needy crowds? Could she have known the intense horror and grief she would feel when her son was murdered by the empire?
As Mary sat at the foot of the cross, her son gasping his presumed last breath, do you think she really knew what saying yes to God would mean? Do you think she wondered if she had lost the plot somewhere along the way?
Indeed, even after Jesus’ resurrection, the fledgling church looked nothing like the empire-destroying world Mary sang about in her Magnificat.
Are you there, God? It’s me, Mary.
At the end of Christ’s earthly ministry, I wonder if Mary secretly pondered a question she dared not say out loud: If I had known what I know now, would I have followed God’s call on my life?
I don’t mean to be bleak, but in this last reflective moment of Advent, I do mean to be honest.
When we, like Mary, say yes to where God is leading us, we can never really know what that means for our future. In following Jesus, we are not promised a roadmap. We are not guaranteed glory or safety or a simple life. We are not even promised rational answers to our existential questions.
But, what we are promised is that everything will change, for the better.
As we look forward to celebrating God coming near to us, in the form of a human named Jesus, what we can know is this: It wasn’t enough for God to be at work in the world, in a vague and distant way. It wasn’t enough for God to be just out of arm’s length.
No! For our sake, God wanted to be a baby we could hold, a person we could embrace, a fellow citizen in an unjust empire, a cousin who cries with you at your kitchen table, a friend who tells jokes and calls you on your crap, a son who loves his mom.
We worship an incarnate, em-bodied Savior who calls us, like Mary, to use our own body, mind, and spirit for the sake of the transformation of the world.
He reminds us that, even in our human frailty, we are stronger than we know. Empires will be toppled, and the lowly will be lifted up. And God is, truly, with us.
When we answer the call of the Gospel, we can never really know where Christ will lead us.
But I hope, when Jesus’ tiny hands reach out to you from the manger this Christmas, you can hold him close to your heart, and say: YES.
Amen.
Leah Wise 