A Sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Advent, Year C

 

Blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb.

From this day all generations shall call me blessed.

 

Elizabeth calls her young cousin “blessed” when she comes to visit her in the midst of her pregnancy.  In the hymn we’ve come to know as the Magnificat, Mary sings her joy that because few what God has done in her, all future generations shall call [her] blessed.  And, I’d bet, that all makes sense to us.  Mary is about to become a mother, and she is rejoicing with a relative who is also unexpectedly pregnant.  The sharing of such natural human joys – even if they’ve happened in unexpectedly divine ways as they have for Mary and Elizabeth – is a blessing we recognize in our own lives.   Family and friends, the beginnings of new life, the support of loved ones, the sharing of joys --  these are much of what we think of when we think of the blessings of our lives.  We can identify with Mary’s sense that she has been blessed by God. 

 

Yet if we push further into Mary’s experience, we might discover that her blessedness is not quite what we first imagine it to be.  To start with, Mary is an unwed teenage mother – and in a world where that was a much greater stigma than it is today.   She’s been sent to stay with her older cousin Elizabeth so that her unintended pregnancy can be hidden from prying eyes and wagging tongues back in Nazareth.  This isn’t exactly what most of us would call blessed. 

 

The child she will bear will hardly be popular, even though crowds will follow him for a while.  He will, as Mary proclaims in her song, be a preacher who seeks to cast down the mighty from their thrones and [lift] up the lowly; to [fill] the hungry with good things, and [send] the rich away empty.  That kind of talk wins powerful enemies.  Mary’s son will become so caught up in the new family he is forming with his disciples that he will at times ignore his mother, brothers and sisters when they ask for him. And at the end, she will see him die a painful, tortured death.  It is no wonder that when she brings her baby to be presented before God in the Temple at Jerusalem 40 days after his birth, old Simeon tells her that a sword will pierce her soul, also.

What kind of blessing is this?

 

Mary has said “yes” to God’s desire to be born in her and in that she is indeed blessed. 

But Mary’s blessing is a costly blessing, a blessing that somehow includes pain as well as joy.  Somehow wounding and blessing come together in her saying yes to God.   How can we make sense of that?

 

One way is through another biblical story.  The patriarch Jacob on the night before his feared encounter with Esau, the brother he tricked out of his birth right years ago when both were young men, wrestles in the darkness with an angel.  He will not let the angel go until he blesses him, even when the angel painfully dislocates his hip.  Finally, as dawn breaks Jacob receives his blessing..  But he walks away with a limp he will have the rest of his life.   He is both wounded and blessed.  

 

A play on words between English and French takes us further, as novelist Jeannette Winterston writes: ‘The French verb "blesser" means "to wound."  Original etymologies from both Hebrew and Anglo-Saxon [connect] "bless" with a bloodying of some kind—the daubing of the lintel at Passover, the blood smear on the forehead or thigh of a new young warrior or temple initiate.   Wounding—real or symbolic—is both mark and marker.   It is an opening in the self, painful but transformative.'  [i] So, too, blessing is an opening in the self, that can be painful and  transformative.   

 

The Latin word for “wound” , vulnera, helps us see yet more deeply how such openings in the self can blessing and wound at once, for vulnera  is the source of the English word vulnerable.`  To be vulnerable is indeed to have an open self.  Such openness is risky and can lead to wounding.  But such vulnerable openness also leads to blessing.  And sometimes, blessing and wounding are one and the same.

 

That is what has happened to Mary.  Mary said “yes” to God in the most vulnerable way possible.  She opened herself to the painful, transformative blessing of having an other grow within her body and to give birth;  an Other who is not just her child, but the Incarnate God who will change the world – and her life – utterly. 

 

By allowing herself to be blessed in this way, she became a blessing to all the world.  Mary's openness to God's desire to be born in her made our life in Christ possible.  She made herself available to and for God, and humanity.   She allowed herself to be transformed for God's purposes.  She was wounded and blessed for our sake.  No wonder Elizabeth exclaims, Blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of  your womb!

 

So the question comes for us:  Do we dare allow ourselves to seek this kind of blessing from God  --  blessing not just as celebrating the joys of our lives, but blessing as the painful but transformative opening of ourselves to God and, for God's sake, to the needs of others? Can we live Jesus' words,  It is more blessed to give than to receive? Can we allow ourselves to be vulnerable as Mary was – to say yes to God even when that yes may be costly? Can  we let ourselves be transformed for God's purposes so that the fruit of our lives, like the fruit of Mary's womb, might change the world?

 

Mary made that choice because she trusted that costly as her yes might be, there would truly be blessing in it;  that being the vehicle of God's work, seeing the difference her yes made in the world would be worth the pain her vulnerability entailed.  That is why she could sing her joyful Magnificat of praise.  

 

As we come to celebrate the birth that Mary's yes made possible, the birth that blesses us beyond measure, may we trust God enough to yes like Mary, and become  blessing tot he world ourselves.