Luke 1:26-38 "Mary: Woman of Faith"

Well, we ended up canceling church last Sunday because of ice. So my Advent season is going to be very short. Next week we are having our children's Christmas program and then we have one more Sunday in Advent. I will finish up this series on Christmas Morning with our Christmas service. This sermon is somewhat racy as it talks about an unwed mother. Also, I mention it in the text, but I'm using Scot McKnight's The Real Mary quite seriously in this sermon series.

I. Why Mary

This year I plan to spend the Advent season looking at Jesus’ mother, Mary. This can be a dangerous place to go. Catholics through the centuries have built Mary up to such a place, put her on such a pedestal, that she is barely human anymore. They have called her the mother of God, they have prayed to her, they have talked about her faith being perfect in a way that human faith cannot ever be. They have exempted her from original sin, which afflicts every human. But Protestants have protested this goddess worship of Mary and have gotten back to a more scriptural version of a young woman who was chosen by God for great things. But in rejecting the Catholic extra-biblical ideas about Mary, many of us Protestants have rejected Mary altogether. We don’t want to make the same mistakes that the Catholic church made in regard to Mary so we’ll avoid spending much time talking about her.

And yet Mary is the center of the Christmas story. It is her faith that allows Christmas to happen in the first place. We are told throughout the Gospel of Luke that Mary pondered these things in her heart and we realize that Luke is telling us that he talked to Mary when writing the Gospel, giving her a chance to tell of Jesus’ birth as she experienced it. When, in the fullness of time, God was ready to send his Son, it was Mary whom he chose to be Jesus’ mother. Mary was not a goddess, but she was special.

I am reading a book by Scot McKnight, a professor at North Park University, called The Real Mary: Why Evangelical Christians Can Embrace the Mother of Jesus and it truly is an inspiring book. In the book we see that when we don’t place Mary on such a high pedestal, we discover that we can learn from her faith and her life. We can see how she was faithful to God and God was able to use this to bring about great things in the world.

So, this Advent season, let’s set aside our fear of being too Catholic and instead look at Mary and see what she can offer to us as Christians. We can definitely learn from her and grow in faith as we see that she was a woman of strong faith and great faithfulness.

II. A Difficult Situation

I don’t think we truly allow ourselves to understand Mary’s great faith until we allow ourselves to understand the world she lived in. The fact that she went along with what Gabriel told her in today’s scripture is quite amazing. You see, by agreeing to be the mother of Jesus, Mary was agreeing to begin a path down a long and difficult road, one that would make her an outcast, one that would eventually lead to her watching her son die on a cross at the young age of thirty-three. Of course she didn’t know that she would experience her son’s death. She probably believed that her son would be an earthly king, just as so many others believed.

But she did know that she would be ostracized and gossiped about when people found out that she, an unwed and engaged mother, was pregnant. You see, life has changed much in the last 2000 years. We treat unwed mothers much differently than they were treated in Jesus’ day. In fact, in Jesus’ day the laws were set that if a woman was pregnant outside of wedlock, they could be killed for this.

So, when Mary agreed to be Jesus’ mother, she was acting out in faith and facing death to do so. It gets a bit worse, though. You see, in Mary’s day, women would argue that they weren’t responsible for their pregnancy, and when they argued this they would be forced to participate in the bitter waters test. The bitter waters test was not a pleasant one. Mary, if Joseph had asked it, would have been brought before the priest, and be placed under oath and told to drink “bitter waters”: a mixture of dust, holy water, and a written curse that the priest would have written out in ink and put in the water. The written curse would say this, “may the Lord cause you to become a curse among your people when he makes your womb to miscarry and your abdomen swell.” It was believed that if the woman was guilty she would become sick. If she didn’t become sick, it was believed that she was not guilty of adultery.

But this also isn’t the worst of it. You see, in Mary’s day, this was practiced in front of large groups of people and the suspected adulteress would be paraded in front of them in full humiliation. Furthermore, the bitter waters that they would drink would often cause them to become sick and even miscarry.

By agreeing to God’s plan to bring Jesus into the world in such an unusual way, Mary was face this possibility in her life. But Mary trusted God. She trusted that God would not ask something of her and then betray her. And so she responded to Gabriel with words of faith: “may it be to me as you have said.”

III. Great Faith allows God to do Great Things

There are two traps that people tend to fall into when they see this faith of Mary. One is to take it for granted and undervalue it. We do that when we ignore the risks she was willing to take to be faithful to God. We do that when we convince ourselves that anybody in Mary’s situation would have done the same thing. We do that when we allow ourselves to think that Mary’s faith was easy. Having faith, being faithful to God when circumstances are against you, is not meant to be easy. It is meant to be difficult. It is meant to be work, to be hard. Faith is not supposed to be simple. It asks much from us, sometimes our very lives.

The second trap that some fall into is to elevate Mary’s faith up to such a height that we put her in a place that no other mortal could possibly reach. We elevate her to the place of goddess and look at her faith and faithfulness as superhuman. When we do this we miss the truth that we are all called to this great faith that Mary showed when Gabriel appeared to her.

You see, Mary isn’t someone to look up to as the perfect example that we can never reach. Instead, when we see her step out in faith, we realize that we are called to the same kind of life-risking faith. Without faith Mary would not have accepted the words that Gabriel had for her. She would have told God that she was too young or not ready. She would have said no to God’s great plan for her life and Jesus wouldn’t have been born. Think about that for a minute. God relied on the faith of one woman, Mary, and because of her faith he was able to bring us his Son, Jesus.

When we step out in faith, when we respond to God in the way Mary did, saying “may it be,” God is able to bring around great things in our world as well. It’s a strange thing, the way God works. He continually looks for ways to find faithful followers to work through. He continues to call to people and ask them to step out in faith and move forward. And when they do he then uses their faith to change the world, to save it. He did it for Mary. He saved the world through her. And he can do it for us as well.

And so we can look at Mary and see her as a woman of true faith. We can see her resolve in a difficult situation. We can see that she was willing to step out in faith even though it would take her to a very difficult place. And we can find it in ourselves to do the same thing. Maybe we might not have an angel appear to us and tell us we are going to be the parent of the Savior of the world. But we do have God asking us to step out in faith. How are we going to respond? Amen.