Mary's Song after Charlottesville

The Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 16

August 20, 2017

The Rev'd Richard Smith, Ph.D.

Let’s first look at the context in which Luke wrote the powerful story about Mary in today’s gospel.

The song Mary sings is part of a conversation she's having with her cousin Elizabeth. The two women lived in a country dominated by Rome under a brutal dictatorship. Just a few years before Jesus’ birth, about four miles from where he was raised, some twenty-thousand Roman troops stamped out a Jewish rebellion, burned the town of Sepphoris to the ground, and sent its inhabitants into slavery. When Jesus was growing up, Mary probably told him stories about this: “The day the Romans came”.

Years later, just before Luke wrote this gospel story of Mary, the Jewish population rebelled against the Romans. The Romans retaliated, attacking Jerusalem, burning much of it to the ground, slaughtering people left and right. Those who survived were brought under Roman rule by force, as virtual prisoners in their own city.

For Mary and for Elizabeth, the challenges they faced would have been similar to women in troubled regions today, particularly in Syria and Central America. Today there are pregnant women making dangerous crossings on rafts over the Mediterranean Sea, through the Sonoran desert along the US/Mexico border, across the Rio Grande, trying to escape tyranny and violence in their home countries and sometimes finding no room at the inn in the places where they arrive! These women, like Mary and Elizabeth, have every reason to be afraid, to fear the future.

So that’s some of the context in which Luke tells this story of Mary.

Now let’s take a look at Mary herself.

• She was a teenage Jewish girl from a fourth-world country under brutal occupation by a foreign power.
• Despite the efforts of Western artists to portray her as white, she in fact had dark skin, dark brown eyes, and dark hair.
• Some English translations say she was a handmaiden, which sounds nice, but the Greek word Luke uses is “doulos,” which means slave. Mary was a slave girl in a fourth-world occupied country.
• And her name, Mary, is Hebrew and has two meanings. The first meaning is bitterness. Mary lived in a bleak time of struggle. Like many of her fellow Jewish women from Miriam on down, Mary knew the bitterness that her own people experienced under the slavery and oppression of foreign nations, from Egypt to Babylon to Rome. Like them she struggled to keep hope alive in her people. The second meaning of her name is rebellion. Not the Mary meek and mild of Hallmark Christmas cards, she is the one who rebels against anything that crushes the human spirit.

And this dark-­skinned slave girl in an occupied land becomes the powerful prophet, singing the revolutionary words of the Magnificat. God, she says,

...has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.

These are dangerous words. In the days of the British Empire, William Temple, the Archbishop of Canterbury, actually told the missionaries to India never to read the words of the Magnificat to the many poor people of that country because it could incite them to riot in the streets.

But Mary not only speaks powerful words, she also puts her body on the line. Not only does she put one foot in front of the other, making her way to Elizabeth’s house, but she puts her entire body to the task of carrying and birthing a child, nursing and cuddling and bathing him, raising him to become a young man--a project many of you know something about.

It wasn’t just a matter of words. She put her body on the line as well. Because this is how love works.

Last weekend in Charlottesville, white supremacists, emboldened by the president’s rhetoric, unleashed a torrent of hatred resulting in the death of a young woman. Yesterday they showed up in Boston, and when tens of thousands of people marched against them, the president initially referred to those marching against the supremacists as “anti-police agitators”, words he later decided to walk back.

Next weekend could see similar hatred showing up in our own town. This past Friday, a synagogue in Alameda was vandalized. Yesterday morning, a friend went to breakfast with her family on Bernal Heights where she saw two men wearing “Make America Great Again” baseball caps and carrying tasers strapped to their belts. In ways big and small, the hatred and bigotry are becoming increasingly, painfully obvious.

But let’s be clear: The violence and hate of these white supremacist groups will not stop us as followers of Jesus:

• from praising and thanking God for the beautiful diversity of our people, 
• from looking out for the more vulnerable members of our communities
• from honoring the beautiful faith traditions of our Muslim and Jewish and indigenous sisters and brothers.
• from welcoming hardworking immigrants with their rich and beautiful cultures to this Sanctuary City of St. Francis and our state of California, and keeping them safe here

Faced with brutal oppression and violence in her own time, Mary both spoke out and put her body on the line. Today, given the brutal oppression of people of color, Jews, Muslims, and immigrants, we too must speak--to our friends, coworkers, and neighbors, to our senators and congress-people, to anyone who will listen--naming the hate, calling one another back to justice and basic human decency.

And like Mary, we, too, must put our bodies on the line--picking up the phone to call our representatives, showing up for a prayer vigil, marching in one of the many protests now being planned throughout the city, responding when deportation forces raid one of our terrified immigrant families. This is an all-hands-on-deck moment.

There are many ways we can respond. Good people can follow very different strategies, and there are many options. But for followers of Jesus in these perilous times, doing nothing is simply not one of them.