Today I want to pay particular attention to her spiritual maturity and readiness. I know that sounds strange: Mary the peasant girl, mature and ready for her role? She was ready – long prepared for it.
Being made ready is a deceptively long process, and when somebody is being made ready for some heavy spiritual work it is a process that begins long before the fruits are visible.
An example of this fact can be seen in our land in the person of Martin Luther King. People like to fetishize his “I have a dream” speech. Every year in January and February young folks today hear it, actually only one line of it, and imagine that he just rose up out of nowhere to be some towering moral figure – that he just stepped into the breach, made some speech, stood for justice and everyone just watched justice roll in like a mighty stream.
There is little sense of the grounding, the depth and the back story for such work.
That stream had a deep source in the Gospel. His grandfather was the revered pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church from 1914 to 1931. His own father MLK Sr. was pastor at Ebenezer from 1931 serving some thirty odd years. And I have heard that innumerable prominent preachers, teachers, actors, artists or activists that passed through Atlanta, always found a place at that family dinner table. That table was a place of great spiritual wisdom, and intellectual ferment. It was King family practice that the children weren’t excused from the table but were kept there to listen to and gain the wisdom of those travelers. They sat there with the all that wisdom washing over them learning to see the world with the aid of their wizened eyes. So when Martin King Jr. left Boston University and Crozier Seminary and took up his own post at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery in the midst of the pathology, segregation, and tumult of the times, he was ready.
God had prepared him, through those many evening discussions that may have seemed like a chore at the time; they trained him to take the world’s measure with God’s eyes of justice, mercy and compassion – it didn’t happen overnight.
Likewise with Mary, the story of her preparation began long before her. Even as a simple young Jewish girl Mary would have known the stories about women like Sarah wife of Abraham and mother of Isaac; Deborah the powerful Judge over Israel, who sang the praises of another woman; Jael, who had been instrumental in the defeat of the army of Sisera that threatened the Israelites.
Especially Mary would have heard about Hannah, mother of Samuel who, while barren poured out her soul before God in prayer for a son, and whose words, when her prayers were answered, foreshadow the Magnificat:
My heart exults in the LORD;
my strength is exalted in my God.
Those who were full have hired themselves out for bread,
but those who were hungry are fat with spoil.
The LORD makes poor and makes rich;
he brings low…he also exalts.
He raises up the poor from the dust;
he lifts the needy from the ash heap,
to make them sit with princes.
So when Gabriel appeared to Mary, telling her to take her place in that long line, perplexed though she may have been, it must have made an odd sense. She was ready because she knew in her heart that God worked with what is low, base, ordinary all along. Now the work would move through her.
Mary was ready! She would use the ordinary material of her life – her self, her soul, her body – and set God loose in it.
Preparations have long been made for you and for me, we have been made ready, our presence here today testifies to that. Over one hundred and fifty years ago people began to worship here and kept all this together; the music, the ministry to actors, to the poor, the constant prayer, the constant recitation of the Gospel – all this has been continuing in trust and preparation waiting for your arrival, it really has. It has continued so that you might have a place to be held in your walk with God toward God. Being ready doesn’t mean that you’re perfect; that you aren’t petty, that you don’t hurt, don’t fear, that you aren’t in so many ways a broken vessel, it means that you have a willing heart, that you desire God.
The stage has been set for you right here to put that desire for healing in song, prayer, in the form of hands outstretched to receive bread and wine on this altar. So today on this day when we celebrate Mary do like that little girl and yield yourself up, take the offer to set God loose in the ordinary circumstances of your life: in every corner of your self, your soul; your passing body. As you do so, God will fill you with all goodness and healing in accordance with the promise he made to our ancestor Abraham so many years ago.
