The Rev. Alanna Sullivan, Associate Minister and Director of Administration, the Memorial Church. File Photo by Jeffrey Blackwell/Memorial Church Communications.
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By the Rev. Alanna C, Sullivan
Associate Minister and Director of Administration
The Memorial Church of Harvard University
(The following is a transcript from the service audio)
Let us pray. May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts and minds be acceptable in your sight, oh God, our rock and Redeemer. Amen.
In our gospel lesson this morning, read so beautifully by Dori Hale, Mary has just been visited by an angel and learns that she will give birth to the son of God, and upon receiving this startling news, Mary's first instinct is to go visit her relative, Elizabeth. And when Elizabeth hears Mary's news, the baby in her womb jumps in acknowledgement, and her first instinct is to prophesy and bless Mary. Their responses differ from that of Zechariah, Elizabeth's husband, whose first instinct was to ask for proof when he was visited by the angel, although for many of us, wouldn't this be our first instinct as well?
By greeting Mary immediately and enthusiastically, Elizabeth overturns the conventionalities of the day. It would've been conceivable, even expected, for Mary to greet ... for Elizabeth to greet Mary with judgment and shame, but Elizabeth knows all too well what it means to be ridiculed and ostracized. In her case, it is because she has not yet conceived a child. So, Elizabeth capsizes social norms further by not only welcoming Mary, but also blessing her. And it is the love and grace that Elizabeth exudes that invites Mary to embrace the news of her pregnancy with joy and integrity. It's not until Elizabeth has shared her blessing that Mary can claim it for herself.
Developmental psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner once said, "Every child needs at least one adult who is irrationally crazy about them." And if you spoke to a neighbor or relative of Elizabeth after she had welcomed Mary into her home, you might have heard just that. "She's irrational. She is crazy for loving Mary like that." For let us not forget that Mary is in fact a child herself. She is a child with child. We do ourselves a disservice if we sanitize the circumstances of either of them.
Social theorist Pierre Bourdieu conceives of human action as a complex negotiation of an imagination that is always analyzing the possibilities for success. Only in folklore and fairy tales are there social worlds where every possible is equally available to every person. The truth of Mary's world, and sadly ours as well, is that we do not all have access to healthcare or housing, food, education, a fair living wage, family planning freedom. Bourdieu posits that each of us internalize possibilities, and these internalized possibilities guide our imaginations, so each one of our actions is thus preceded by an unexamined subconscious calculation that asks, "Is that possible for someone like me?" And when that answer is "No," hope fades and possibility withers.
Elizabeth's audacious welcome and scandalous blessing invite Mary to not only face but to embrace what lies ahead of her. Elizabeth helps Mary expand her vision for what is possible for someone like her. Mary is cared for and called, and that empowers Mary into seeing and imagine a world where God brings down the powerful from their thrones and lifts up the lowly, fills the hungry with good things, and sends the rich away empty. She can claim that she, Mary, is carrying the Son of God and Savior of the world. Love makes the impossible possible.
Belle hooks, a modern-day prophet and black feminist, died this past week. Hooks helped us to understand that womanhood cannot be reduced to a singular experience. She expanded our conceptions of feminism to encompass and center the voices of black and working-class women, thereby creating a new and more inclusive movement. Now, if this seems like conventional wisdom, it is in large part because of the enormous impact that hooks has had on the feminist movement as a whole, and specifically for black women, many of whom resisted aligning with the movement previously because it had ignored or sidelined their experiences.
At the core of hook's prophetic imagination was the transformative power of love. In an interview, she said, "We've always thought of our heroes as having to do with death and war. The whole idea of the heroic journey, it's rarely a journey that's about love. It's about deeds that have to do with conquering domination, and living as we do in a culture of denomination, to truly choose to love is heroic." Hooks knows that the power of the love that Elizabeth has for Mary, it is the kind that can topple empires. And when Elizabeth welcomes her and blesses her, she embodies the same kind of inclusive and expansive love that Jesus will later show to prostitutes and tax collectors and those living on the margins. Elizabeth shares that transformative love with Mary, who thereby shares it with Jesus.
Jesus may be the Son of God, but have you ever wondered where he learned what God's love and mercy looked like? His mom. And if you listen closely to Jesus' first speech in Nazareth, the words echo Mary's prophecy in the Magnificat. "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because He has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free." Jesus didn't come up with this out thin air. He wasn't making it up on the fly. His understanding of the purpose of his ministry reiterates Mary's understanding of God working in her life. Jesus is articulating what his mother taught him, what she lived, what Mary shared about who she knows God to be. It's what her life of faith has embodied. So, Jesus readily shares these familiar words that are written on his heart because he has heard them since he was in the womb.
Elizabeth, Mary, and Jesus demonstrate that no matter how small an act of love might be, it has the potential to change everything. A child born in a stable in a forgotten corner of a big world becomes our access to the larger realities of life, including the largest of all realities that we call God. An itinerant preacher on a hillside speaking of few and small things gives a new direct action to history.
Desmond Tutu, the South African social rights activist and former Archbishop and head of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, once was asked what was a formative experience of his life. And he said, "One incident comes to mind immediately. When I was a young boy, I saw a white man tip his hat to a black woman. Please understand that such a gesture is completely unheard of in my country. The white man was an Episcopal priest and the woman was my mother."
The love that Elizabeth shares with Mary, and Mary imparts to Jesus, and Jesus shares with the world may be scandalous, but it is not naive or cliche. Its power does not derive from sentimentality overcoming trauma or romance-lancing agony. The power of this love is that it holds both joy and pain somehow at the same time.
In her Magnificat, Mary embodies what is called a "bright sadness" in the Eastern Orthodox tradition. Tish Harrison Warren, an Anglican priest and author, writes, "Bright sadness means how gladness and grief are never easily disentangled, how we taste both longing and delight simultaneously in every moment of our lives." She goes on, "Love and loss are a double helix of this side of heaven. You can't have one without the other. God's calling on our lives will inevitably require us to risk both. We know this dappled reality is the most meaningful parts of our life, in struggling through marriage or singleness or celibacy, in loving and raising children, in our work, in serving church, and in our closest friendships."
Each year as we ponder Mary's story and the story of her son, Jesus, we confront this dappled reality of which Warren speaks. In their story, which of course is our story, gladness and grief, love and loss are inextricably intertwined. And this year, the intermarriage of gladness and grief takes on an additional dimension as we learn to live with a new stage of this pandemic. We celebrate the coming of the light of the world, while at the same time, the world and this university takes steps to mitigate some of darker realities of disease and isolation.
It's a lot to take in, it's a lot to hold together, and gratefully, it's not all up to us. The power of God's love is that it holds all that is too much for us to confront or contain. It cannot be overcome because there is no one that God cannot embrace, no circumstance God cannot transform. No matter how much that might be beyond our wildest, even most prophetic, imaginations, there is nothing that can separate us from the love of God. This good news has always been true, and it is particularly welcome right now. Amen.
Amen.