Feast of St. Mary the Virgin
August 21, 2016
Richard Smith
We Christians have a name for this conspiracy. We call it grace. A relentless kindness built-in to the universe. Our spiritual teachers tell us it’s everywhere. Often it’s hidden, struggling to break loose. At times it’s working quietly behind the scenes. Other times, it’s in your face, you can’t miss it.
Martin Luther King was on to this when he said his familiar words about the moral arc of the universe being long, but always bending toward justice.
The universe is rigged toward love and justice and joy. Something is afoot, a divine conspiracy of grace.
The recognition of this divine conspiracy once welled up in Mary’s heart, and in today’s gospel it flows into a powerful song about a new world that is both future and, strangely, already here. Mary sings
- Of how God has already shown mercy from generation to generation
- Has already scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts, brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly
- Has already filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.
Strangely, wonderfully, Mary sings of a God who not only will do these things, but who has already done them. She sings as if God, in some strange sense of time, had somehow already accomplished the redemption and restoration of the world.
God’s strange sense of time. In it, this present moment and the past and the future form one eternal now. It can sound esoteric and New Age-y, but if you’ve ever been hopelessly locked in a lover’s embrace, or rocked by Bach’s Mass in B Minor, or overcome with goosebumps looking up at a clear night sky, then you know that time is more than a matter of seconds and minutes, days, weeks, and years. Sometimes, as we like to say, time stands still.
The eternal now that gathers past, present, and future is yet another and deeper experience of time. Some anthropologists call it “everytime”.
The theologians say it happens when we circle this table for Eucharist. Because here, we’re not just dutifully remembering some past event, the Last Supper, as we would remember, say, the hoisting of the flag on Iwo Jima or Washington crossing the Delaware.
Rather, in God’s strange time, that intimate moment Jesus shared with his disciples on the night before he died is happening right now as we gather here; it envelopes us, catches us up.
Those early disciples at the last supper have nothing on us. This is our moment as much as it was Peter’s, James’, John’s. Jesus is as present to us in this moment as he was to them. We and they are all caught up in God’s strange sense of time, this eternal now.
And it’s not just about past and present. It’s also about the future. Circling this table, entering that eternal now, means leaving behind for a moment the world as it is and embracing a new future that, strangely, is already here.
In today’s world, we’ve become painfully aware of the tremendous lack of equity. Ten percent of the population own 76% of the wealth. Among the growing number of poor people, 70% are women and children. People of color are incarcerated, sometimes brutalized and killed by police at alarmingly higher rates than whites. An increasing number of people in towns like ours are becoming displaced and homeless--a high percentage of them LGBT youth who have been kicked out of their families.
That is the world as it is. But here, as we circle this table, we step out of that world to enter God’s time, a sacred space, a future we could not otherwise imagine if we take our cues simply from what we experience out there.
In here the rules are different. In here it doesn’t matter if you’re black or white or brown; rich, poor, middle class; documented or not, Republican or Democrat; old or young, gay, straight, or trans. In here everyone is welcomed and honored.
If you let it, immersing yourself in this new world week after week will change how you are out there. It will cause you to notice people and things you might otherwise overlook, share more of what you have, work for justice. It will break your heart and bring you much joy.
In this sanctuary, here in God’s strange time, we step out of the world as it is to glimpse a new world that God is bringing about, one that is kinder, more welcoming, more just. In this Eucharist we find the nourishment to align ourselves with that great divine conspiracy already underway, though it is often hidden and struggling to break loose in the larger world.
A poem by Jan Richardson speaks of this dynamic of entering this sanctuary and into God’s strange time and then returning to the world out there. I’ll close with this.
A Blessing Called SanctuaryYou hardly knew
how hungry you were
to be gathered in,
to receive the welcome
that invited you to enter
entirely—
nothing of you
found foreign or strange,
nothing of your life
that you were asked
to leave behind
or to carry in silence
or in shame.
Tentative steps
became settling in,
leaning into the blessing
that enfolded you,
taking your place
in the circle
that stunned you
with its unimagined grace.
You began to breathe again,
to move without fear,
to speak with abandon
the words you carried
in your bones,
that echoed in your being.
You learned to sing.
But the deal with this blessing
is that it will not leave you alone,
will not let you linger
in safety,
in stasis.
The time will come
when this blessing
will ask you to leave,
not because it has tired of you
but because it desires for you
to become the sanctuary
that you have found—
to speak your word
into the world,
to tell what you have heard
with your own ears,
seen with your own eyes,
known in your own heart:
that you are beloved,
precious child of God,
beautiful to behold,
and you are welcome
and more than welcome
here.
—Jan Richardson
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