"THE POWER OF LOVE"
Last week I noted that at the heart of the Christmas celebration are the twin themes of love and justice. These themes are difficult to weave together because the sentiment of love is often clashing with the demands of justice. Yet each tempers the other - justice prevents love from becoming captive to sentiment, and love prevents justice from placing punishment and retribution over humanity.
At the heart of the Christmas story is God's love. "God so loved the world," as John's Gospel puts it. God comes into our lives in the Incarnation - God becomes flesh in a human being. At the center of this Incarnation is a young unmarried woman named Mary. She is engaged to be married and in that waiting period, she has a vision from God. The vision asks Mary to allow herself to become pregnant with the Incarnation, with the baby who will be Jesus. The church as put a high value on this "virginal conception," often calling it the "virgin birth." The important part of this story is not Mary's virgin status, but that it is God who is the initiator. Mary will be the vessel for God's love. Yet, the story also recognizes that Mary has agency - she can say "No" to God. She is not the passive and pure vessel that she is often portrayed to be. Though she describes herself as a "handmaiden" of the Lord, this is no "handmaid's tale." Mary recognizes that in saying yes, she has placed herself in a precarious position: pregnant by someone other than her fiance (a death penalty offense), turning her life upside down - but believing in the power of love that she sees in her vision.
The love that Mary experiences in her vision is demanding. Will her fiance Joseph accept her? Will he have her stoned or beaten? Will he disavow her and send her back to her father? The love of the Incarnation is also demanding in another way. God is not coming to us as a superhero who rises from the sea or who descends from the sky. God is coming to us as a baby, as a vulnerable human being unable to walk or talk or feed themselves. God will depend on the love and dedication of Mary (and Joseph) to develop this vision and this baby. In this Christmas season, it is important to remember that love asks us to be vulnerable, and that may be the most difficult task of all. God's Incarnation is a partnership from the beginning. God's agency meets our agency, and let's see what develops from there.
Mary does say "yes" to this invitation, but it is a scary venture. Luke's account tells us that she makes a trip to see her cousin Elizabeth, who has just become pregnant in her old age with her first child. Mary goes to Elizabeth for comfort, for encouragement, for strength to carry out this decision. When Caroline first got ordained (the 21st woman in the former Southern Presbyterian church), her friend Murphy Davis gave her the sculpture that accompanies this blog. Murphy got it at Grailville, Ohio, which is a women's center dedicated to the empowerment and justice for women. The sculpture depicts the two vulnerable women in an embrace, showing us the power of love, a power that gives us courage and vision and hope in the midst of difficult times.
Mary is strengthened greatly in this communal sharing with Elizabeth. It is a reminder that love calls us out of ourselves into the life of the world, into the lives of others. Love asks us to consider our own humanity and the humanity of others. Strengthened as she is by the communal sharing with Elizabeth, Mary's vision grows and deepens. In this process, she shares one of the most powerful calls to justice in the Bible, and we'll look at it next week. In this Christmas season, may you and your loved ones know this transforming power of love.
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