YES
A sermon by Dr. Sue Tschoche

January 10, 2010

The Lord Be With You.

I am by trade an historian, obviously a layperson. And I must begin by telling you how deeply honored I am that Caela asked me to be here today. A decade ago, Caela was my star student, the one I was just sure I could persuade to go to graduate school and become an historian. I still remember this moment in my office when she told me that she was going to seminary instead, that she believed it might be her calling. I hope that my face did not show how surprised I was, and after a while, I decided that her decision made sense, but it didn't stop me from thinking that she might still return to the historical fold. Caela, please take my presence today as my acknowledgement that I finally get it.

I am also grateful for this invitation because it constitutes one of those moments when a person of my age can begin a sentence with, “I never thought I'd live to see the day.” As Caela knows, I grew up in the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod; I went to parochial school and grew up in a tightly knit, ethnic, church community. Let me be very clear here: I wouldn't trade one moment of that upbringing for any other in the world, but I did have my heretical moments. When I was small, I sometimes played church by myself, in particular I always played at being a preacher. (Which is why I was by myself: turns out it's hard to get someone else to always be the congregation). But the other reason I did this in secret is because, from a very young age, I knew that this was a forbidden fantasy. I eventually left that church precisely for that reason and found a wonderful home in the UCC, but the child in me is, this very minute, pretty stunned by the fact that I'm standing here, speaking from a pulpit, at the ordination of a woman. And I thank you for that.

Several months ago, I asked Caela to send me her five favorite texts. She actually sent me fourteen, no doubt because it was so much fun to turn the tables and give me an assignment. What was wonderful was that it gave me a chance to try to parse out Caela's theology from those texts. And there did seem to be a constant – the texts all seemed to point to the powerful moments when human beings open themselves to God. Caela sent me prophetic voices like Isaiah's and Micah's, and stunning scenes of humankind's confrontation with God like Moses in front of the burning bush, and there was the mighty wind of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost as well. And, of course, there was the one text read just a moment ago, Mary's song of praise after she has been selected to be the mother of Jesus, the song we call the Magnificat. I picked it for the simple reason that reading it was a shock to me. I simply had never paid any attention to it before, never really heard it. This vision that Mary sings – of a world where the lowly are made high, where the hungry are fed, where the rich are sent away empty, where the powers and principalities are no match for the power of God – this is a vision of a world turned upside down, an utterly prophetic vision. As the martyred German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it, the Magnificat “is at once the most passionate, the wildest, one might even say the most revolutionary Advent hymn every sung.” This is not the voice of the soft, pastel-colored Mary we sometimes see in art. This is a woman who sings, as Bonhoeffer put it, “a hard, strong, inexorable song about collapsing thrones and humbled lords of this world, about the power of God and the powerlessness of humankind.” Mary meek and mild? No: this is Mary with the voice of an Old Testament prophet.

And so, I had to ask: Who is this woman? And why have I never paid any attention to her before?

Well, actually, we know the answer to that second question, don't we? The figure of Mary is perched right there at the fulcrum point of the great divide in Western Christendom. On the one side, our Catholic brothers and sisters have taken the real Mary and wrapped her up in two thousand years of legend and doctrine, to say nothing of exquisite art. And on our side, let's be honest, mostly we just have disappeared her. I tried to remember ever hearing a sermon on Mary – I just don't think there was one. The Lutherans, like most of the Protestant throng, though maybe more so, are positively allergic to Mary, as though talking about her would induce anaphylactic shock. I have to confess that I must have internalized that particular lesson. Maybe you have too. If you've ever spent an hour in an art museum that houses European art, perhaps you react like I do. I stare at the Byzantine icons, and then at all those luscious Renaissance masterpieces, and Mary is everywhere. And. And, well, nothing. They just don't move me. The best this old Protestant can usually muster, maybe, is to mumble, “well, that one is pretty” and then I immediately rush off to the museum wing that houses the Impressionists.

But, read the words of Luke 1. Attention must be paid to this extraordinary voice.

To do that, though, we have to find the Mary who actually lived and, as any historian will tell you, this is a tricky proposition. Tricky because she was part of that great mass of people who typically remain anonymous to history: just an illiterate peasant and a female one at that. In the ways that the world counts importance, she didn't matter.

There was also nothing memorable about Nazareth, maybe fifty families huddled in stone houses tucked into the hills. They were a close-knit and devout Jewish community but one in which everyone lived on the margins. Rome and its minions in ancient Palestine were taxing the peasants in places like Nazareth into slow starvation, confiscating as much as half of what the peasants produced.

The Mary who walked this earth was young, very young, probably no older than fourteen, when Jesus was born. Children in this world had to grow up very quickly. Like every other child, she had started to learn how to work as soon as she could walk. Maybe she tended the goats and helped grind the grain for flour. The older women probably taught her how to spot and prepare the herbs that made up the only medicine that existed. And surely, surely, she had learned at a very tender age that a Jewish peasant girl should make herself scarce if the soldiers passed through: they were used to taking what they wanted. And maybe that's the one certain lesson of her young life: she and everyone like her were utterly expendable. The year that Herod the Great died – the year that we believe that Jesus was born – there was one of those inevitable uprisings of the hungry in Galilee. The would-be revolutionaries took over Sepphoris, a much larger hilltop town just four miles from Nazareth. They armed the populace and plundered Herod's palace there. Predictably, the Roman governor sent his legions from Syria to put down the rebellion, a polite way of saying that the Romans leveled the town with their usual efficiency. Was she clutching her baby tightly in her arms while she stood on the hilltops of Nazareth and watched the glow of Sepphoris burning? Did she smell the smoke of the destroyed city as it billowed over the valley between the two towns? And tell me: does the sound of screaming carry four miles?

Mary lived the life lived by the downtrodden everywhere, in every time, including this one. And so, at fourteen, she was, I think, far older than we can imagine. She knew in her bones the ways of the harsh world; she knew what wagged that world and who wagged it – and it wasn't her, and it wasn't anybody she knew, and it didn't look like that would change anytime soon.

And yet. She sang her song of a new world coming. She sang because the Archangel Gabriel had come to her. If we ask what gave her the faith to sing the Magnificat, I do think we have to go back twenty verses in Luke 1 and look again at the extraordinary moment when Gabriel made a call on this peasant girl. Mary is understandably startled, but the angel soothes her and then tells her that God has decided to enter human history in the only way it can be entered: with pain and in the form of a helpless infant. Her pain. Her infant.

Though Gabriel tells Mary not to be afraid, her initial response seems to suggest that he need not have bothered. She certainly doesn't sound afraid: she sounds like a matter-of-fact peasant girl who asks the obvious question when this extraordinary proposition is put to her. “How? How is this supposed to happen? – I'm not even married.” How? No doubt that God can do this, but really, how? And to tell the truth, Gabriel's response is not too great on the specifics: the Holy Spirit will come upon you. The power of your God will overshadow you. “Overshadow": sort of a scary term until you think of the relentless Middle Eastern sun. Your God will give you shade.

How? Wasn't that always the central question, right then and ever after? She must have asked that question a thousand times in the subsequent years. When was it, do you think, that she came to terms with the fact that the “how” of this new upside down world was not business as usual? When did she comprehend that her son was not going to part the Sea of Galilee and drown the Romans in their chariots? That the powerful were not going to be afflicted with boils, and frogs were not going to rain down on them from the skies? That there was not going to be a mighty and invincible army to annihilate the Roman legions? When did she understand that the lowly would be lifted up because her son would show the world how? And that he would show us by living a life defined, in each and every human encounter, by mercy, by compassion, by justice. All those human beings that the powers and principalities ignored, ostracized, casually crushed underfoot – the ones that Jesus once tenderly called “the least of these” – they would be at the heart of it. This is what would turn the world upside down: extravagant unceasing love, a love not just professed, but lived, enacted, moment to moment, no matter the cost. And, at what point did Mary know with certainty what the staggering cost would actually be? Surely, we know the moment when her question went from “how?” to “how will I be able bear this?” But, somehow, bear it she did. When we last catch sight of her, in the first chapter of Acts, Mary is in that upper room before Pentecost with the eleven remaining disciples and a company of over a hundred other men and women. They had all been followers of Jesus, and they had lost him, and then had inexplicably found him – or rather, he had found them – and in that moment they were waiting just as Jesus had told them to do. He had promised that the Holy Spirit would come upon them.

It's not hard to imagine that some of those in the upper room were asking that question again: how? How exactly does the Holy Spirit come upon you? And maybe, just then, Mary remembered her long ago encounter with Gabriel. And if she thought about it, I think she could have explained to them how the utterly implausible becomes reality. You see, there is this moment in Luke's telling of that encounter that is so easy to miss. It is nothing more than an implied pause, a kind of cosmic comma in the story. Gabriel has given her the answer to her “how?” By the Holy Spirit, that's how. And right there is where the comma is. In the pause, Gabriel tilts his head ever so slightly and leans in a little closer so he can be sure he will hear her. In that pause, it seems as if heaven itself is holding its breath. And then the silence is broken. By Mary, who says simply, “Yes. Yes, I will do this. Yes, Lord, choose me for this task.” And heaven exhales.

Many years ago, a Jewish friend of mine showed me the book that her young children were working on when they went to Hebrew School. It was full of all those familiar Old Testament stories: Noah and Abraham, Moses parting the Red Sea. But the one that stuck with me was the telling of the Creation story. It went something like this: One day in heaven, while God and the angels were sitting around, God got up and said, “I'm going to make something.” And he left. When he came back that night, he was pleased with Himself and told the angels that on that day, he had separated the Light from the Darkness. And after they oooohed and aaaahed, the angels asked, “Are you done?” And God said “No.” And for the next four days, he left in the morning and came back in the evening and told the angels what he had done. On the second day he separated the waters from the dry land. On the third, he created every manner of plant. And so on and so forth. And every single night, God would pronounce his creations good, and then the angels would always ask: “Are you done now?” And God would say “No.” On the sixth day, he came back to heaven in a particularly fine mood, and said, “Today I have out-done myself. I have created creatures in my own image. I'm going to call them Man and Woman. They are going to be my partners. And the angels asked their question, “Are you done now?” But this time God sat back in his big easy chair and shrugged. “I don't know,” He said, “Ask my partners.”

Mary's reply to Gabriel was what I think God had in mind. We call Gabriel's visit to Mary the Annunciation, the announcement, and I think it is a misnomer, because it makes it sound as though Gabriel zoomed in through the window, zapped Mary with the memo about her fate, and immediately vanished. But notice: it wasn't just an announcement. It was a conversation with God's human partner. Our God did not force himself upon Mary, and He doesn't force himself on us either. Our God woos us, lovingly, tenderly, extravagantly. And then, always, waits for our reply. What will the answer be? Will it be, “Yes”?

Today, in this sacred space, Caela will say “yes” in a very public, very official way. In a moment, she will stand in front of God and witnesses, and she will say, “Yes, Lord, send me” and she will dedicate her exceptional mind and her huge, huge heart and her enormous strength of character – her life – to being a Minister of the Gospel. A gigantic moment. But. This is not about, cannot be about, only Caela. Six weeks ago, I went to see my minister about this sermon. I asked him what he believed to be the single most important thing I should keep in mind. In reply, he went to his bookshelf and pulled out the Book of Common Prayer and opened it to the Catechism. The question: Who are the ministers of the Church? The answer: The ministers of the Church are lay persons, bishops, priests, and deacons. In that order. Us. And Caela. No exceptions. No exemptions. No tag-backs ever. Each and every one of us.

In today's liturgy, we spoke that beautiful language from Martin Luther King. Jr.: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Lovely. Powerful. But, it begs the essential question: How? How is that supposed to happen? I believe that if we listen closely, we can still hear the Archangel's whisper: “The Holy Spirit will come upon you. And God will rest you in Her shade.” And then that comma, that pause. And heaven waits for us to say: “Yes, Lord, I will plant my feet. Yes, Lord, I will put my shoulder to the cold hard steel of that arc, and with your help, yes, I will push it with all my might, each day of my life, toward justice. Yes, Lord, I will do this. Yes.

God is still speaking. Comma.

Amen.