wfn.org | [ENS] Harvard's Memorial Church welcomes Presiding Bishop

["Matthew Davies" <mdavies@episcopalchurch.org>]

Sunday, December 18, 2005

Harvard's Memorial Church welcomes Presiding Bishop

ENS 121805-1

[ENS] Underscoring the role of Mary in a morning sermon for the Fourth
Sunday of Advent, Presiding Bishop Frank T. Griswold preached December 18
at the Memorial Church of Harvard University (full text follows). Griswold
is an alumnus of Harvard, having been graduated in 1959. He was welcomed
to the Memorial Church's pulpit by the Rev. Dr. Peter J. Gomes, who
serves the congregation and the university as Plummer Professor of
Christian Morals and Pusey Minister.

In the evening, the 96th Annual Christmas Carol Service presented by
the Harvard University Choir featured the world premiere of "Welcome
the Morning Star," written for the service by Bruce Saylor, composer of
operas, symphonies, oratorios and chamber music. The work is Saylor's
second setting of the Presiding Bishop's 2003 Christmas message.

The Memorial Church Harvard University December 18, 2005 The Most
Rev. Frank T. Griswold Presiding Bishop and Primate The Episcopal
Church, USA

Revised Common Lectionary Advent 4 Year B

I am grateful for the invitation to occupy the pulpit this morning
here in Memorial Church, and for the privilege of breaking the bread
of God's word in a place of worship noted for its preachers. For the
most part, my liturgical life is lived within the Episcopal Church and
other provinces of the Anglican Communion where certain commonalities
obtain: among them the use of a lectionary, that is: a fixed pattern
of Sunday and Holy Day readings from the Bible that oblige preachers to
fix their attention not upon what they might prefer, but upon what has
been appointed for a particular Sunday or Feast Day. I have lived with
this discipline for so many years that when I am, from time to time,
invited to choose passages of scripture for a service at which I have
been asked to preach, I invariably turn to the lectionary..

And therefore when I received a letter from the Associate Minister of
this church asking what readings I would prefer, I looked to the readings
appointed for the fourth Sunday of Advent.

The Advent season is a time during which we reflect upon events preceding
the Incarnation by way of making ourselves ready once again to celebrate
Jesus' birth. The gospel reading appointed for this morning draws our
attention to the figure of Mary, or more particularly the Annunciation
to Mary by the Angel Gabriel. This event has been the subject of many a
sermon and has also received the attention of iconographers and painters
across the centuries. In icons Mary is depicted in a state of hieratic
calm and quiet submission. In western painting she is frequently perched
gracefully upon a prie dieu in an attitude of prayer as she receives
her angelic visitor.  These renderings, as affecting as they may be,
stand in contrast to the report given in the Gospel of Luke that at the
moment of encounter Mary was "much perplexed."

The King James translation tells us that she was "troubled" while the
Greek text describes her as "greatly disturbed."

The depiction of the Annunciation I find most engaging is one that
hangs in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It was painted in the late
19th century by Henry Ossawa Tanner. In it Mary is seen sitting on her
bed in her night clothes. Sheets and blankets are cast aside as if to
suggest a sudden and startled arising. The expression on her face is
one of discomfort and anxiety as she looks toward a column of light
representing the presence of the angel Gabriel who had just made the
unsettling and unsought announcement.

Mary had every right to be disturbed. Annunciation, whether mediated
by angels or by all too human others, can be a fearsome and profoundly
disturbing experience. However, it does appear to be God's way with
us, which is why hearing and listening are, according to Scripture,
the fundamental stance of persons of faith.

"Hear O Israel.." Moses commands the people as they journey through the
wilderness. "Speak Lord, for your servant is listening," cries the boy
Samuel in response to the mysterious voice that wakes him in the night.
"I will listen like one who is taught," declares the servant of the
Lord in the Book of Isaiah. "You have given me ears to hear," declares
the Psalmist.

Mary was born of a people shaped by God's word; she had listening bred
in her bones. Sarah and Hannah and other faithful listeners were her
forebears, and throughout the land certain piles of stones, wells,
caves and mountain peaks marked the places where divine discourse had
overtaken some childless couple, or shepherd, or vine dresser, or scribe
or priest and made havoc of their lives. Mary had doubtlessly heard the
stories and been shown some of the sites where the word of the Lord had
laid hold upon this or that unsuspecting person.

According to Luke, Mary pondered what she heard in her heart: she did so
at the departure of the shepherds after her son's birth, and again when
Jesus, at the age of twelve, slipped away and was later found by his
anxious parents in the temple discoursing with the doctors of the law.
Mary took things deep within and let them rest there until they came
to full term and were ready to be born into the living form of God's
intention: until they were ready to take flesh and to happen. (And here
it is worth observing that dabar the Hebrew for "word" carries with it
notions of event, occurrence: a word is not simply spoken, it happens.)

According to the tradition of the Christian East - shaped by elements
drawn from the extra-canonical infancy gospel of James, which also left
its mark on the Qur'an - Mary was drawing water from the communal well
in Nazareth when the angel Gabriel first addressed her. She rushed home
in terror, took up a purple thread and began to spin - doubtless to calm
herself and recover her equilibrium.

As she spun her thread the angelic messenger appeared again, this time
it would seem with greater attention to Mary's state of unsettlement.
Perhaps his initial, "Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you" had
been a bit overwhelming. So this time around he adds, "Do not be afraid,
Mary, for you have found favor with God." Then, taking Mary's measure
Gabriel decides that it is safe to proceed: "And now, you will conceive
in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus." "How can this
be?" Mary replies in confusion, and likely drops her purple thread. How
can this be, indeed, as everything else in her world ordered to a nice
village wedding to a nice village man falls to the ground as well? And
yet something in her troubled spirit overleaps the strangeness and terror
of it all and she manages to stammer out her response: "Let it be to me
according to your word." And thus, Mary has declared her availability
to God's unfathomable and mysterious ways, which are often clothed in
contradiction, ambiguity or paradox.

But in the passage we have just heard, before Mary utters these words;
Gabriel adds to his announcement further information. "And now your
relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this
is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren. For nothing will
be impossible with God." Did Gabriel sense that Mary needed to know
that she was not alone in being drawn out of her tidy and circumscribed
world into the strange ways and workings of God? Did Gabriel know that
before she could say "yes" with every fiber of her being she needed, in
addition to an angelic voice, a human voice to address her and loving
and familiar arms to embrace her?  And so it is that as soon as the
Angel departs, Mary, goes "with haste," as we are told, to a town in
the hill country of Judea to Elizabeth whose greeting becomes a further
annunciation, "Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of
your womb." Elizabeth's words give Mary the courage to cry out with joy,
"My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior;
for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant."

Jesus' birth is by no means the end of it all. In fact it is only the
beginning. There is that terrible moment in the temple when Mary and
Joseph present their firstborn before the Lord and old Simeon says to
Mary, "This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many
in Israel."  What confirming words for her to hear. But then he adds,
"A sword will pierce your own soul too." This was another annunciation,
possibly more disturbing than the first. Simeon's words might very well
have come to Mary's mind when Jesus was twelve and she thought she had
lost him in the crowd.

Indeed, there must have been many moments of panic and worry along
the way, each one requiring from her a fresh response, another "Yes,
" - another declaration of "let it be to me according to your word."

When the adult Jesus declared in Mary's hearing that his mother and
brothers and sisters were those who heard the word of God and kept it,
she knew what he meant and the cost of it all. She might also have called
to mind what God had said through the prophet Hosea, "(I have) lashed
you with my words.."  (Hosea 6: 5). But Mary also knew that she could
do no other than to welcome the word, because it wasn't primarily about
task or function, but about her very life and who she was called in grace
and truth to be. It was through her progressive and ever unfolding "yes"
that Mary entered into the mystery of her own identity and became herself.

God's word, no matter what it may set before us in terms of a task or
something to accomplish is always personal and identifying, calling us
more fully into being.

Mary's "yes" takes her to the foot of the cross - where the sword pierced
most deeply - and through the cross into the resurrection and the wind
and fire of Pentecost. In every event and circumstance, in suffering
and in joy, she remained faithful, "Here am I, the servant of the Lord;
let it be with me according to your word."

Annunciations, often in strange and unexpected forms, can come upon
us when we least expect them. One of the reasons I am standing before
you today is because of a roommate in my ninth grade year collapsing
on his bed with laughter as he reported that the school chaplain had
remarked that I should be ordained. I laughed too at such a bizarre
idea. Nonetheless it did take hold. Thus, my 9th grade roommate remains
for me to this day a Gabriel and an Elizabeth rolled into one.

God's way with us, as it was with Mary, may be ambiguous and paradoxical
and confute our notions of order and rightness. What could be more
ambiguous in human terms than a young girl engaged to be married becoming
"great with child," as the older translations so delicately put it? What
could be more paradoxical than divinity and humanity - two opposites -
made one in Mary's womb?

"Consider the work of God," declares the author of Ecclesiastes, "who
can make straight what God has made crooked?" And yet that is precisely
what many of us seek to do: make God's ways straight according to our
own sense of propriety and rightness. But as God reminds us, speaking
through the prophet Isaiah, "My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor your
ways my ways."  The divine imagination overleaps all the boundaries we
set to contain it. To encounter it, or to be overtaken by it is like
finding ourselves on "insulas extranas," "strange islands" as St. John
of the Cross expresses the encounter with the divine.

When we find ourselves, as it were, on strange islands and the known,
the familiar, the safe, are left behind we become more permeable to God's
passionate and longing love - God's will - that is what God most deeply
desires for our well being and full flourishing. Mary experienced that
will, that longing, loving desire of God. Her spirit was large enough
to receive it without fleeing in terror or defending herself against
its contradiction of all that she had foreseen as the wife of a small
town builder and carpenter.

Mary stands as an encouragement to us all. Following her example we
need not be afraid when our tidy plans are overruled by sudden and often
unwelcome outbreaks of what appears to be divine unreasonableness. "How
can this be?"  and the confusion that followed were where Mary had to
begin to sort and sift her way haltingly toward "yes." Why should it be
any different for us?

At such moments we must remember that God's word is always a word of life,
though it may require a kind of dying to our hopes and plans in order to
receive it. As T. S. Eliot, following St. John of the Cross, observes:
"In order to possess what we do not possess we must go by the way of
dispossession." Relinquishing in order to possess, losing in order to
find, becoming foolish in order to become wise. These are all part of
the paradox of encountering and giving room to God's address to us in
its various forms.

As we look ahead to Christmas next week let us consider our own response
to the Word who seeks to dwell within us and to express his reconciling
love for the world through us. May we be encouraged by the example of
Mary, our sister. And, may we, in the communion of saints, be supported
by her prayer.. May her availability to God's desire, God's will, give
us the courage to make her words our own: "Here I am, the servant of
the Lord; let it be to me - and to each one of us here this morning -
according to your word."

Amen.

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