Handmaid of the Lord

Luke 1:26-38

December 10, 2006

Rochelle A. Stackhouse

Some years ago this church forced Mary to go into the closet. Literally. Last July I had Jeff Owens, our sexton, take me on a tour of the church, and when we poked into a closet upstairs, this painting fell out of a broken frame in a closet across the hall from the old offices. Although it is not titled, everyone who has walked into my office and looked at it has said, “Mary!” She’s quite dirty and neglected, and the presentation is rather traditional, but something of her vitality absolutely shines through in this painting. I have come to love it, and I eventually hope to get someone who knows something about these things to clean her up and give her a new frame.

I want to take her out of the closet. I want to take Mary out of our spiritual, devotional and theological closets, too. Since the Reformation, when statues and images of Mary were smashed in churches all over Europe and when devotion and prayer to Mary was seen as idolatry, the Protestant churches really have not known what to do with her. As feminism arose, the situation got even more complicated. Is she a bad example for women (or men, for that matter)? Is she simply passive, silent, sad, blindly obedient, blissfully adoring, controlled by a male God and then a male child, eternally virginal and pure? Is she the stuff of folk tales about weeping statues or images in odd objects or talismans for good luck for old Russian grandmothers?

This is what I think. Mary is a young woman who looked an angel in the eye. She didn’t run away or protest loudly that she was not worthy or try to get the angel to go to someone else, all things, I might add, that the great Moses did when God had a job for him. She stayed in the room, but she didn’t immediately acquiesce to the angel’s request. She pondered. She thought about what God wanted of her. She asked good questions (I’m not yet married, so how is this going to work exactly?). She responded not with passivity, but with commitment, eyes wide open to how complicated this would be, based on her relationship with God.

Mary continued to walk her journey with her eyes wide open. She saw the shepherds and the magi and the angels at her child’s birth, and again, we are told, she “pondered these things.” She went through her life watching, sometimes seeing what she didn’t want to see. She didn’t want Jesus to be in trouble and she tried to stop him from speaking truth, and she learned that he had to speak. How could the son of a woman who had questioned an angel be expected to stay quiet? And even when he got in trouble big time, she did not turn away. If we are to believe John’s gospel, she was also there at the cross, watching, weeping. She did not flee then any more than she had when the angel appeared in her room. One of Mary’s gifts was to see the world clearly, both as it was and as God yearned for it to be. Her song, which we will sing and read on Dec. 24, is full of visions of God turning the world upside down for good. She knew about that, because God had already done so for her. She looked at the world as it was clearly. She pondered. She joined her eyes with those of God as her body became co-creator of the Messiah, and she saw so much more.

The author Rebecca Wells has written of Mary that she is one whose “eyes have seen all the suffering in the world and managed to stay open.” Perhaps there’s the title for this painting: “Mary of the Open Eyes.” Perhaps that’s what Mary can help us with in our own lives this Advent.

There is a great deal of this world I do not want to see. I do not want to see another picture of a burning humvee in Baghdad. I do not want to see another story in the paper about children raped and slaughtered in Sudan. I do not want to see police tape around another house in New Haven where a teenager has been shot. I do not want to see a picture of another newborn baby abandoned by his or her frightened young single mother. I do not want to see another in a long line of people at this time of year coming here hoping for money or food or other help for their families. I do not want to see my brother-in-law John or anyone else with a head bereft of hair from chemotherapy. I do not want to see houses in Louisiana or Mississippi still in pieces more than a year after Katrina.

But I am going to hold on to Mary, bring her out of the closet, and, like her, keep my eyes wide open. Like her I am going to believe that if I keep trying to focus through the eyes of Jesus, I will also see God at work in the world, and I will see ways that, like her, I can work with God to scatter the proud in the arrogance of their hearts, to lift up the lowly, to fill the hungry with good things, like her, to bear God to the world. Amen.