Sermon for Good Friday (Ecumentical Service)

Preached on March 30, 2018 at Emmanuel Lutheran Church, Freysville, PA
Preaching Text: Luke 1:46-55

Mary, the first to bear the Word of God

We now come to the conclusion of our series about the people in Jesus’ life. We end with the one who was there at the very beginning, his mother Mary. We subtitled tonight’s message as “Mary, the first to bear the Word of God.” Fitting, because she was. She literally bore the Word in her womb. She bore Jesus, the Christ, in her own body.

Jesus is the Word of God. That is, or at least should be, obvious to all Christians. But that’s not been my experience in the Church. No, we love to forget this. We love to find substitute “Words” that are more palatable, more to our liking than Jesus often is. Idols that we can put in his place and worship instead; Gods of our own making that better align with our desires.

Some of the idols are obvious. Many Christians don’t even bother with pretense and instead worship at the altars of greed or power or hate and do so openly. They flagrant disregard pretty much everything that makes Jesus who he is. But these are not the worst among us. Evil that is obvious is far less dangerous than evil that is concealed.

Because there are other idols that are much more insidious. Substitute “words of God” that we find much less obvious. Doctrines and dogmas of the church, theological stances that we cling to. Loyalty to church institutions. Our piety and faith practices. Our patriotism. Our politics. We regard these as good, and they often are. We see them as holy and right. But are they? We so seldom question these things because they seem good, and all too often in the church they have become the equal of or have even supplanted God.

Interestingly enough, Mary understood this. You see, it’s not a new problem. Holy people have always been seeking to reform God in our image and we have always been chasing after idols that we see as better than the real God. There were plenty of folks like that in her day. They ran the show, lording over others about how right and godly they were. And she hated it. Hated them. Resented them. All those Pharisees and priests that pranced around, reveling in a godliness of their own making.

We don’t think of Mary that way and that’s our problem. We like to think of her as demure and meek, but the Mary we find in Scripture is anything but. She’s fierce, fiery, passionate. I’ve called a “punk” before and I stand by that assessment. She’s a rebel, a radical, a revolutionary who’s done with the status quo of her world.

In fact, perhaps the strongest contemporary parallel to Mary that I can find is Emma Gonzalez. She’s the bald-headed girl from Parkland, FL who survived the horrific shooting there and is now one of the ringleaders of the new student movement for gun control in our country. I would guess many, given the political leanings of this area, don’t like her very much. But that’s a big part of why she’s such a good fit for a modern day Mary. You probably wouldn’t like Mary much either.

And the Magnificat, her most famous song, is proof of that. Much like Mary, we neuter this song. Turn it into fancy poetry and pay little attention to what precisely Mary is saying in it. But have you really listened to the lyrics?

He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts; he has brought down the mighty from their thrones and exalted those of humble estate; he has filled the hungry with good things,and the rich he has sent away empty.

If you are someone who benefits from the status quo, from society’s established rules and order, as most of us do, as I do, this is not a song that should make you feel good. Quite frankly, it should scare the hell out of us. Jesus comes to upend the world. He comes to upend OUR world.

And she’s right about him. Mothers are notorious for knowing us better than we know ourselves, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that she knew exactly what Jesus would do and encounter in life. He runs headlong, almost immediately, into that same religious establishment. He embarassess them. He makes mockery of their twisted doctrines and self-righteousness. He exposes their hypocrisy. And they hate and fear him for it.

We who follow him 2000 year later laugh along with the crowds at the folly of the Pharisees, chief priests, and scribes of Jesus’ day. We think we’re better than they, but the truth is uglier than we care to admit. We have become the Pharisees. We are all too often EXACTLY like those that Mary resented and Jesus battled. Because we do what they did.

We take our substitute “words of god” and use them to lord over others. We use them to arrogantly declare who is worthy of God’s love and mercy and who is not. We divide people into the holy and unholy. We hurt people who don’t measure up to our arbitrary standards. We stand between God and those he seeks to save.

You see, what makes all this so darned radical is not who the Gospel keeps out. It’s who it lets in. THAT is what scares us, just as it scared the Pharisees and good religious people of Jesus and Mary’s day. It lets in the prostitutes, the tax collectors, the lepers, the gays, the immigrants, the liberals, EVERYONE we all too often try to keep out. And that is why we are NO different than those who nailed Jesus to that cross. If Jesus showed up right now and started preaching, we’d nail him to the cross all over again to shut him up.

The cross is our indictment. It stands as proof that we are not so righteous as we’d like to think we are. WE kill Christ with our idolatry and arrogance. WE kill Christ with our divisiveness and rejection of those he loves. WE kill him, just as those good religious people did so long ago, right in front of his mother, as a final insult to all her aspirations of change and all her hopes of a new world.

But in that moment, cursed as it was, Mary was blessed. Because that was the moment that she predicted in the Magnificat came to be. That was the moment the world changed.

In that moment, at the cross, when all pretentions are stripped away, all delusions of our righteousness shattered, when we are ALL made equal in our unworthiness, that is the moment when we hear him say, “Father, forgive them.”

We are all guilty because of the cross. We are all unworthy because of the cross.

And yet, we are all made worthy because of the cross. We are all made innocent ecause of the cross.

We cannot claim arrogance in that moment. No doctrine or self-aggrandizement matters.

Only grace.

For only grace can bring paradise.

Only grace can change the world.

Only grace can make us worthy as it makes us all worthy.

Nothing else. No false words of God. Only the true one. Only the one Mary bore, now nailed to the cross for our sakes. The one we killed. The one who will rise again on the third day. Only Christ can save. Only Christ does save.

St. Paul in many of his writings speaks of how he boasts only in Christ. This is precisely what he means. Only Mary’s son can save us. Not our beliefs about him. Not all the theological constructions that we’ve created to puff ourselves up, no matter how right and good they may seem. No, only Christ and his grace.

She knew he would change the world. And on the cross, he changed it for all of us. Amen.