Disciple: Be Fierce
An Advent Meditation
By Bishop Jennifer Brooke-Davidson
Alleluia; he is coming;
Alleluia; he is here!
What will you make of Advent this year?
Christmas comes, ready or not, on December 25. The world offers up many options for getting ready (or killing the time). On social media and television, Advent means “24 shopping days until Christmas.” For others, it launches the annual arguments over whether the candles in the Advent wreath should be purple or blue.
[Image: “The Almighty Has Done Great Things for Me” Artwork by Maria Lang, used by permission]
For children in Godly Play (and for most of us), Advent is the time for getting ready to come close to the mystery of Christmas and to enter into the stories about the holy family from Luke and Matthew. Clergy and lay leaders long for a quiet, mystical season as the darkness builds toward the coming of the light, but they actually work twice as hard so that they can create that space for others. For a few, according to Facebook, Advent means working through 24 airplane bottles of whiskey.
People wait in different ways. People get ready in different ways. Some of it depends on for what you are waiting or getting ready. The arrival of Santa Claus by sleigh, the arrival of challenging relatives by car and plane, the arrival of a revolutionary reframing of the relationship of human beings to God and to one another—these may call for different strategies!
With all that swirls around the social and retail trappings of the holidays, the Christian people claim the time to ponder the meaning of the Incarnation, the “glorious impossible” that God the Son became human in the birth of Jesus. And, naturally, this brings our focus to his mother, Mary, an Israelite teenager engaged to a respectable and honest man.
THE FORMATION OF JESUS
Mary actually has a personality, a sense of self, that comes through various passages about her, many of which were written by Luke. He seems to know her well enough that some people have theorized he was her doctor. We don’t really know. But the small bits of information we do have about her have not stopped her sons’s followers from projecting all kinds of cultural and psychological preferences onto her.
In most Advent and Christmas music, Mary is gentle, meek and mild. In art, her eyes are downcast, or she’s kneeling before the crib. She’s pretty, but not too pretty, and she seems entirely passive. This is not the Mary we meet in Scripture.
I read an essay once that argued Mary’s pregnancy was a paradigm for how Advent should mark a passive, receptive time because pregnancy is a passive experience. The writer meant, I think, that pregnancy itself usually proceeds without conscious effort, but I don’t know anybody who just sat placidly for nine months and waited serenely.
Especially for a firstborn, massive planning and preparation take place. Furniture gets rearranged, equipment is gathered, and clothing is found for the mother and baby. Advice is given, names are discussed, and doctors and midwives are consulted. Sometimes there are hurried weddings.
All that was the same for Mary, and then some. She also had a fiance to negotiate with, and doubtless parents and others. She made an extended visit to her cousin Elizabeth, also pregnant with a miraculous child announced by an archangel. These two had much to discuss.
When Mary arrives at Elizabeth’s house, neither of the women makes any reference to scandalous questions around Mary’s pregnancy. There is no outpouring of shame, no expression of fear, nothing about what the neighbors might say. Elizabeth does not chastise or console Mary; instead, she asks what she has done to merit this visit. Mary doesn’t lower her eyes and whisper, she sings and shouts, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my savior!” (Luke 1:46-47) That is not what you’d expect to hear from a girl in this situation. She isn’t meek. She isn’t mild. She’s excited, and she’s fierce: “The Lord has brought down the mighty and lifted up the lowly,” she says about her situation. “He has scattered the proud in their conceit. He will fill the hungry with delicious abundance; he will send the rich away empty-handed. He is keeping his promise to the descendants of Abraham and David, and he has chosen me to make it happen. I will be known for this throughout all time.”
Not meek. Not mild. Mary spends months with Elizabeth. Maybe Advent can be a time to wonder what their conversations were like. What did these faithful women of Israel discuss and plan for their extraordinary sons, who would shape the future in ways nobody could imagine? What was most important to teach them? What values would they instill? How would the boys master the Hebrew Scriptures? What places should they take their sons? How would Mary and Elizabeth foster the family relationships?
In short, how did Mary and Elizabeth plan to form Jesus and John in the traditions of their faith for the work the angel had announced? It’s not as if the work was done when their bodies had been formed in the womb; nobody imagined that they would spring forth like Athena from the head of Zeus. Jesus himself, when grown, is annoyed by people who speak of his mother as if she were simply passive body parts producing another human. It’s not about the birth and nursing, he says; it’s about the teaching.
There is no question that Jesus’ words are his own, but he would have learned the foundation at Mary’s knee. Mary and Joseph were careful to do the things that faithful parents do to prepare their children, as best they could, for the lives they would lead. There are clearly things that his parents could not teach him. But it seems reasonable to imagine that Mary was chosen because of her capacity to do the formation work he would need.
And Mary was fierce. She claimed a revolutionary, world-changing, triumphal role for her son. She persisted after the social awkwardness of the pregnancy, after a prophecy that a sword would pierce her own soul, after having to flee for their lives to Egypt, after realizing that Jesus was ahead of the temple scholars at the age of 12, after wondering aloud if he’d lost his mind with some of his teaching. She stayed with him until they put his dead body in her arms, and she stayed with the movement through Pentecost and beyond. She was a woman on a mission from God.
MAKE ROOM
You and I are also on a mission from God. We are sent into all the world to share the Good News of the Incarnation we celebrate this season and the Crucifixion, Resurrection and Ascension in the coming seasons. I pray that we are as fierce as Mary about that. I pray that amid the quiet contemplation or the shopping or the celebrations that mark this season, you find some moments to think and talk, perhaps with a trusted friend or relative or teacher, about your plans to continue the formation of Christ in your own soul and heart and mind. In baptism we are born again, it is true. (The Book of Common Prayer says so.) But Mary and Elizabeth show us that the work of formation does not end there. It’s really just the prologue of the story.
What will you read? What stories do you need to hear? What people do you need to meet? What rituals do you need to learn and practice? What sacred places do you need to visit? When Christ is born in you, how will you grow “until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ?” (Ephesians 4:13).
Advent is a good time to rearrange your pile of books, your podcast playlist, your appointment book or your busy mind full of practical arrangements. Make room for your own formation as you work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, and relief, and joy.
And do not be meek and mild. Be fierce. Like Mary.
Alleluia, he is coming;
Alleluia, he is here!
Peace,
Bishop Jennifer Brooke-Davidson
Bishop Jennifer Brooke-Davidson is the assistant bishop of the Diocese of North Carolina.
Tags: North Carolina Disciple
