“The Minute . . .

When She Could Still Refuse”

Then Mary said, “Here I am, the servant of the Lord,

let it be with me according to your word.”

(Luke 1:38)

A sermon by Siegfried S. Johnson on the Fourth Sunday of Advent, December 24, 2006

(Volume 1, Number 25)

And so our Advent nears completion.  In the span of these four weeks the gradually growing flicker of a single candle on our Christmas wreath has grown, and tonight will be fully ablaze with the glory of the Incarnation, a light which we will pass among ourselves to symbolize the light of God come to the world.  Tonight, when the liturgies and readings and songs and meditations and the sharing of Holy Communion have been completed, there will be a sacred pause of breathless silence, a moment of stillness to mark our solemn transition from Advent to Christmas.  And Christmas, I believe, will be more meaningful because we’ve waited. 

Yes, we’ve waited.  But can we imagine a moment in this story of Word-become-flesh when GOD waited?  Can we, reading between the lines of Luke’s gospel, detect a breathless moment when the Holy Spirit might be said to have waited for Mary’s consent?

I suppose one might read Luke in a way which makes Mary’s role one in which she had no choice, nothing more asked of her than to be passive and obedient.  I read Luke otherwise. Denise Levertov (an English poet who died in 1997 at the age of 74) addresses this question in her inspiring and thought-provoking poem about Mary, Annunciation:

We are told of meek obedience.  No one mentions courage. 

The engendering Spirit Did not enter her without consent. 

 God waited. 

 She was free to accept or to refuse, choice integral to humanness.

Can it be that Mary had a choice?  If so, was there, as Levertov writes in the section of the poem from which I derive my title, a

minute no one speaks of,

when she could still refuse.

A breath unbreathed,

Spirit,

suspended,

waiting.

Was there “a minute . . . when she could still refuse?”   The word “waiting” as referring to the Holy Spirit whom the angel announced would “overshadow” the virgin, is stunning.  Until Mary’s courageous consent, is it fair to say that God’s relationship to Mary was as “a breath unbreathed, Spirit, suspended, waiting?”

Or are we to understand God’s role in the Incarnation as, well, a puppeteer waiting for no thing, for no one, for no decision, pulling all the strings?  Such theology would remove this untidy notion of God waiting.  You see, if Mary could refuse, we have to come to terms with a God who waits, a God who, entering time, waited.  In the Nativity story God, the One transcending our dimensions of Space and Time now experiences both.  This, God’s participation in the human experience of Space and Time, is the Wonder of the Incarnation.

The beginning of the poem borrows words from the Akathistos Hymn, a liturgy written in the 6^th century to lead worshipers to rejoice with Mary at Gabriel’s announcement.   We used excerpts from that famous liturgy this morning.  Perhaps the most startling words of the ancient hymn are those with which Levertov begins the poem: “Hail, space for the Uncontained God!”  What wonder!  That God, entering human experience, now needed Space (Mary’s womb as a vessel of the divine, called in the poem a “slender vase,” and pictured by a lily, a token in Christian symbolism of a vessel filled with hope and promise and resurrection).  

And God enters our world, not only of Space, but also of Time.  Mary’s womb provides the Space.  As Levertov beautifully writes, she bears “in her womb . . . nine months of Eternity.”  God who cannot be contained by Space needs the Space of a womb.  God who transcends Time enters Time.  In this way, the all-powerful becomes all-vulnerable. 

I’ve emphasized this morning Mary’s consent and her courage.   To be sure, as Protestants we don’t give Mary much thought, certainly not in the way our Catholic and Orthodox friends do.  We don’t usually allow Mary to figure into our prayer life, nor do we allow her to play an important role in our liturgy and preaching, nor certainly in our art and architecture.  In fact, except for a starring role in the Christmas story, we could go through our entire church year and barely notice Mary. 

And that, I think, is a great loss, to remember Mary as little more than a Christmas decoration for the creche or as an actor for our seasonal pageants, to regard her in a merely sentimental way, happily overdosed by Hallmark scenes of the mild figure kneeling reverently at the manger.  In this we are, I fear, diminishing one of the most inspiring stories in all of scripture.  Listen, once more, to Denise Levertov:

Called to a destiny more momentous

than any in all of Time,

she did not quail,

only asked

a simple, “How can this be?”

and gravely, courteously,

took to heart the angel’s reply,

perceiving instantly

the astounding ministry she was offered: 

to bear in her womb

Infinite weight and lightness; to carry

in hidden, finite inwardness,

nine months of Eternity; to contain

in slender vase of being,

the sum of power –

in narrow flesh,

the sum of light.

Then bring to birth,

push out into air, a Man-child

needing, like any other,

milk and love –

 but who was God.

Simple language, this.  Mary, holding within her womb “nine months of Eternity,” at last to “bring to birth, push out into air, a Man-child, needing, like any other, milk and love – but who was God.”  The images conjured are not theological but, rather (we might say) clinical, exposing a lack of theological nicety which better captures the natal wonder. 

This is the value of art.  Sherry and I took our family yesterday to see The Nativity Story.  I recommend it.  You see, art does what theology naturally resists, what theology is not well-adapted to do.  Art reads between the lines and fleshes out the text, transforming text into story.  Art, then, is another medium for the Word to become flesh. 

So again, was there a moment “When She Could Still Refuse?”  Perhaps it’s easier for you to think of Mary as obedient rather than courageous.  Yet, if she is nothing more than a good Hebrew girl, intelligent enough to realize that God was making her an offer she couldn’t refuse, then she may as well, for her own sake, acquiesce, with no question, no offer of protest.  In such case the words we have used of Mary – Choice and Consent and Courage – would be misplaced.  Obedience would nicely sum up her actions without such words.  Were she not able to refuse, Mary’s “Here I am, the servant of the Lord, let it be with me according to your Word,” would be, I think, no more admirable than those of an actor following a script written by another.

In every choice there is that Minute When We Could Still Refuse, when things could go the other way.  Sometimes, when the path we took seems, in retrospect, to have been the wrong choice, we look back – perhaps in shame and guilt, perhaps in pain, often in regret – to that Minute When We Could Still have made a different choice.  Our language then sometimes becomes, “What if?” or “If I had only.”  Still, as Levertov says, even when we make poor choices, “God does not smite.  Ordinary lives continue, but the gates close, the pathway vanishes.”  In other words, the poet reminds us that the possibilities a wiser choice might have engendered are now lost forever.  The choices we make are important.

Maybe you have been like Mary, called to make a change in your life, called to do something new, to embrace what before was unthinkable.  Maybe you felt unprepared.  Maybe the change didn’t fit your plans.  Maybe you are Mary, right now.  Annunciations can be big and bold, leading us to momentous change. Or, they can be quieter, harder to hear, a thought merely that keeps tugging at us, something that won’t leave us alone.  Are you playing Mary’s role just now in your life, hearing something calling to you, announcing a new path, a new way of being?

Life keeps putting us in the places that are dark and scary – into the cancer ward, or an unexpected funeral, or a jail cell, or a war torn city, or an unemployment line –places which seem likely to swallow us whole.  In those places, like Mary, we hear the angel saying, “Do not be afraid.”  Odd, isn’t it? How, in scripture, angels always say that.  Don’t they know anything of human vulnerability?  Can’t they see how fragile we are? 

In a touching scene from The Nativity Story Mary and Joseph, on their arduous journey to Bethlehem, are sharing their individual visions of the angel, remembering that the angel said to each, “Do not be afraid.”  Mary asks Joseph, “Are you afraid?” 

“Yes,” he admits.  “And are you afraid?” 

“Yes,” she smiles. 

How true.  I wonder if perhaps the angels say, “Do not be afraid,” because they know we must be.  Frightened we are of the unknown, and frightened of the consequences our decisions bring.

 She did not cry, “I cannot, I am not worthy,”

nor “I have not the strength.”

She did not submit with gritted teeth,

raging, coerced.

Bravest of all humans,

consent illumined her . . .

Consent,

courage unparalleled,

opened her utterly.

 “Opened her utterly.”  The last three words of the poem.  May our consent to God’s working in our lives do the same, opening us utterly to the wonder of the Living Christ, opening our hearts as yet another Space for the Uncontained God.