THE CHRONICLES OF MARY
a sermon by Dan Saperstein
preached at First Presbyterian Church, Bridgeport NE
December 18, 2005
Texts: Ps. 89:1-4, 19-26
Luke 1:26-38
With the bitter cold and snow we have had lately, many of us can take comfort in the fact that Christmas is just around the corner. It kind of makes the dark and cold bearable. But can you imagine a place where it is always winter but never Christmas? That is how the magical land of Narnia is described when it is first encountered in C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the first of his Chronicles of Narnia. As you no doubt have learned, the long-awaited film version of this classic Christian fable has just been released. In fact, it was the number one film in America this week.
For those of you who may not be familiar with the book, it recounts the experiences of four British schoolchildren named Pevensie in this magical land of mythical creatures, talking animals, an evil White Witch, and the glorious Aslan, the great lion-king of Narnia who has been absent for ages, but whose return and reign is prophesied to occur when four “Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve” sit on the thrones of Narnia.
Meanwhile, however, the White Witch has ruled Narnia with threats and violence, turning enemies to stone, and casting her wintry spell over the land, so that it is “always winter but never Christmas.”
The first of the children to venture into Narnia is Lucy, the baby of the family, a mere eight years old. She accidentally enters it through a wardrobe closet in a country manor where she and her three siblings are housed for protection from the London blitz during World War II. Although it is summer in England, it is winter in the lives of the children even before they discover Narnia. They are separated from their families, living in a strange home with strange rules in a stange region while their nation is under attack. Not surprisingly, when Lucy returns from her first foray into Narnia, and tells a fantastic story of a land of mythical fauns and white witches, she is dismissed by her brothers and sister as telling an imaginative tale. But Lucy believes. She knows Narnia is real. And when all the children stumble into Narnia together and learn of Aslan, Lucy believes in him too, and shares in the hope of the Narnian creatures of a redemption soon to come.
For this reason, Lucy is a fitting character to introduce the Biblical story of Mary, the mother of Jesus. Indeed, in that sense, the Chronicles of Narnia are very much the Chronicles of Mary. For on this fourth Sunday of Advent, the last Sunday before Christmas, we consider Mary, the very first person to hear the good news of the coming of Christ, and the first person to believe it.
For Israel in the time of Mary, the hopes and promises of God seemed forgotten, never to be fulfilled. For them it was like an endless winter with no Christmas ever to come. It had been 300 years or so since the last of the prophets. But the hope of a Messiah-King to overthrow the Roman occupiers and make Israel a great nation seemed impossible. It had been too long. The Romans were too powerful. No rational person could imagine it.
But faith sometimes defies reason. There was no rational reason for Lucy to believe her Narnia experience was real, and there was no rational reason for Mary to believe the Angel Gabriel when she was told she was to conceive and bear a savior for her people Israel. Madeleine L’Engle, another children’s author and Christian writer once described the season of Advent this way: This is the irrational season / When love blooms bright and wild. / Had Mary been filled with reason / There’d have been no room for the child.” [from The Irrational Season]
That’s the way Advent is. Advent begins with a new kind of thinking, if it be thinking at all. It begins with the announcement of the angel, "Nothing is impossible with God," and the response of Mary, “Let it be with me according to your word.”
Though we know little about Mary historically, as we read the story of Christ’s annunciation and birth, we begin to get a portrait of her as a person. Here is no Mary, meek and mild, but rather a woman of bold faith, who was willing to risk everything for God; a woman who carried not only a child, but the promise of a whole new order, the victory of God.
Some modern feminist theologians have criticized the church’s portrayal of Mary as passive and craven. But what do we see? When the angel Gabriel appeared to her, she does not run away in fear. Nor does she prostrate herself in mindless adoration. The scriptures say she "was much perplexed" at his greeting, and "pondered what sort of greeting this might be." When he tells her she is to bear the Messiah, she doesn’t laugh as Sarah did when told she would give birth to Isaac. She answers soberly, and rationally: How can this be, since I am a virgin?
But Gabriel reminded her that with God, it is always an irrational season. Nothing is impossible. But Mary has to agree. As one creative depiction of this scene puts it, Mary asks the angel, "Does God have to ask?" And Gabriel replies, "God always asks." Another adds, "He only hoped she wouldn’t notice that beneath the great golden wings he himself was trembling with fear to think that the whole future of creation hung now on the answer of a girl."
But Mary decides to go with the irrational grace of God. She knew what it meant. Her rational neighbors would say she was immoral. She risked being shunned by her fiance, or perhaps even stoned to death as an adulteress, or for bringing shame upon her family. Such executions continue to this day in parts of the Middle East. Who would have accepted her story? What she believed wasn’t rational. Why should God have chosen her? She was a peasant, not a queen, and barely a woman - probably not more than fourteen or so. But as much as reason told her this was just the result of some sour goat’s milk she’d drunk, still she believed that the word of the Lord would be fulfilled in her. "Had Mary been filled with reason, There’d have been no room for the child."
Sure it was impossible - the notion that the Lord of the Universe would be born a helpless child of a peasant woman. But Mary had decided to allow for the impossible, to move beyond what is purely reasonable. To say yes to the God of faith, to say yes to love, to say yes to a child.
Whenever we approach the manger - or for that matter the cross, or the empty tomb - we shudder with the impossibility of it all. We should be locked up for believing, had God not spoken the promise. But faith is trusting the promises of God to be true, even when doing so requires challenge, hardship, and risk.
The great reformer Martin Luther identified three miracles in Christ’s nativity: One was that God became human. A second was that a virgin conceived. And the third - the one that in Luther’s mind was the greatest of the three - was that Mary believed.
The time of Advent and Christmas is sometimes called the season of miracles. It is a time of hope, of laying hold of impossibilities in our lives and in our world and living as if they were possible. And when we do, sometimes miracles happen.
There is a scene in one of the later books in The Chronicles of Narnia in which a queen of an underworld kingdom has captured visitors from Narnia and is threatening to kill them. They tell her of Narnia and its lion-king Aslan, but she doubts their testimony about things she hasn’t seen. One of them, a marsh-giant named Puddleglum, answers, “Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things - trees and grass and sun and moon and stars. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in any case, the made - up things seem a good deal more important then the real ones... We’re all just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real-world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia” [The Silver Chair, p. 159]. Just as Mary was called to believe beyond what she could rationally conceive, so Advent and Christmas call us to a faith that goes beyond what we can see or hear, beyond our experience of the world and its limitations to a God who makes all things possible.
The marvel of Christianity, it has been said, is in its particularity. Christmas is as particular as you can get. Once upon a particular time, on a particular night, there was born a particular child to a particular woman. The divine Word became particular flesh and blood.
Congregational minister and author Martin Copenhaver has written,
"From Mary we learn about miracles and how to receive them. Mary understood that God is at work in unexpected places, in the life of a simple country girl through the promise of a child, and from her we can learn that God can be at work in perhaps the most unexpected place of all, in our own lives. After all, God’s miracles are nowhere more difficult to see than when they occur in front of our eyes.
"Before the crowded inn, before the chorus of angels, before the star, before the shepherds and the wise men, before even the child, there was the mother, who was not much more than a child herself, receiving word that she was to give birth to a child, bring forth a new life, and also receiving word that in some way through that child she was to give birth to the whole world and bring new life to all. She received the promise as a promise from God and thus in some way as a promise already fulfilled. And indeed, in time, the child was born, the Son of the Most High. It was a promise fulfilled first in the heart of one young woman, awaiting fulfillment in history. And for us the order has been reversed. The promise has already been fulfilled in history, and now it awaits fulfillment in our hearts."
One of the great themes of The Chronicles of Narnia is that the inside of something can be greater than the outside. That was the case with the wardrobe closet. But it is also what we find as we approach the stable in Bethlehem -- that the child in the manger is the One Paul calls the "Power of God for salvation for all who believe." [from Dave Wilkinson, You Will Name Him Jesus, 12/17/00]
Likewise, when we approach the Lord’s Table, we enter a magical wardrobe of sorts. The bread and the cup are more than what meets the eye. In themselves, they contain far more than baked dough and poured juice. They contain the very promise of God, waiting to be received. They also point beyond themselves to other times and places, even other realms.
This table calls us back to the table at which our Lord spoke of his impending death to his disciples. It reminds us of the great stone table of Narnia on which Aslan gave his life for the redemption of those who betrayed him. It looks forward to the table in heaven at which our Lord, who is both the Lion of Judah and the Lamb who was slain, will celebrate his final victory and welcome us into his eternal kingdom. It is a small miracle waiting to happen.
You see, it may be winter outside, but it is a winter with a Christmas that is already here. It is an irrational season, a season of miracles waiting to happen in our lives and in the world, if we dare to believe it. A young girl named Mary believed it. A fictional schoolchild named Lucy Pevensie believes it. And with God’s help, we will believe it too. Amen.
