December 24, 2006 Fourth Sunday of Advent and Mary Sunday
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Luke 1:26-38, 46-55
Today is the Advent Sunday of joy and it is Christmas Eve. It is tempting
to say the same thing that I recommend every Easter: that you set aside your
struggles and suspend your worries and act joyful in the hope that your actions
may influence your attitude and you may actually experience joy. This is the
“fake it till you make it” school of spirituality, and 12 Step Groups like Alcoholics
Anonymous can attest to its effectiveness. Acting as if we have hope or peace or
love or joy, acting as if we have faith in a higher power that can restore us, can
actually bring those miracles to pass sometimes.
That approach might work for you in the hours and days ahead, but I need
to preach today on another approach to the spiritual life, because unlike Easter, the
Christmas season itself is a source of pain and darkness and confusion for many
people. For some, the expectation of celebration makes their own lack of
happiness all the more glaring—their own depression or grief or loneliness. For
others, the stress of creating the perfect Christmas for their family leaves them
exhausted and on some level enraged. For others, the awareness of global poverty
and war and the warm-winter-no-snow reminder of a planet in ecological travail
casts a shadow over Christmas light.
We need an approach to the spiritual life that can help us through these real
threats to joy. Mary, as Luke portrays her, offers models and metaphors that can
help us find the way through to the light we long for and need.
The title of this sermon is “A Magnifying Glass” with equal accent on both
magnifying and glass. In a way, Mary was like a magnifying glass, and if we can
learn from her to be a magnifying glass ourselves, perhaps we can have the joy
that she had. It is not a joy that comes when there is no more struggle or sorrow,
but a joy that comes through and in the midst of struggle and sorrow. Mary was
still a girl, she was unmarried and pregnant in a society where that could mean
serious trouble. She had plenty of struggle and sorrow. But within it she found
the ability to rejoice.
This is not a joy that depends on things going perfectly or on the healing of
all our mental or physical anguish, but a joy that depends on our ability to let go of
one way of being and be born into another.
Every Advent I return to an essay on Mary by the 20th Century Catholic
monk, Thomas Merton, from his book New Seeds of Contemplation (pp167-175).
In it he explains that the Catholic perception of Mary as Queen and as an exalted
object of reverence can be misleading. The reason she is most worthy, he says, is
because she show the most humility and peace “without which we cannot be filled
with God.”
Merton says that Mary’s greatest glory was “that having nothing of her
own, retaining nothing of a ‘self’ that could glory in anything for her own sake,
she placed no obstacle to the mercy of God and in no way resisted [God’s] love
and [God’s] will…Being ‘immaculate’ she was free from every taint of selfishness
that might obscure God’s light in her being.”
Merton says that Mary was “as pure as the glass of a very clean window
that has no other function than to admit the light of the sun.” And he says that
“this absolute emptiness…holds within it the secret of all joy because it is full of
God.”
This experience of selflessness, of emptiness filled by God, is not only our
joy but our calling in life, because by being like clear glass, we let God’s light
show through us to the world. The ultimate goal of the spiritual life is union with
God, when we become one with the light that shines through us—not the full sun
that Christ was, but we become like candles shining in the darkness and
transforming the world.
One of the regular attendees at the Prayer of the Heart on Thursday
evenings is also a student of the 12 Steps as a spiritual discipline—someone who
practices living by 12 Step wisdom every day. He talks humorously about his
attempt to hand his life and his will over to the care of God’s higher power (the
3rd Step). He says that he is always catching himself trying to wrench the controls
back out of God’s hand.
Some of you may remember the famous Presidential debate between
Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter. Carter was earnestly explaining his policies,
and Reagan cocked his head, put that charming smirk on his face and delivered
with an actor’s finesse the devastating line, “There he goes again.” That is what
this member of the Prayer of the Heart does when he finds himself trying to put his
ego back in charge of his life—he laughs at himself and says, “There he goes
again!” And then he turns his will back over to God’s care and direction.
That is what it is like to become glass. We need to practice handing our
will and our life over to God, surrendering everything we hold onto, letting go of
our attachments and addictions, giving up the self we have worked so hard to
furnish with an identity we can esteem and pleasures we can enjoy. If we are
honest with ourselves, we each know some of what obscures our glass and makes
us imperfect at letting God shine through. What is it that you need to let go of to
be as empty as Mary so that God may fill you with light?
If we set out to improve the clarity of our life we need to be prepared to
watch our ego rise up again and again and fog the glass with its hot breath of
desire or make it opaque with its shades of self-concern. It takes spiritual
discipline to become a clean pane of glass that can allow the light to show through.
It takes the same attitude that Mary had when she said that most beautiful line,
“Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”
There is another step besides being as selfless and ready to be filled with
God’s light as Mary was. We need not only to be glass, we need to be glass turned
toward God. Our culture suggests we turn the focus of our glass many other ways.
It suggests we make ourselves the object of our focus, or that we hand our will and
our life over to the advertising industry or the entertainment industry or to patriotic
or religious fanaticism—to any of a host of idol gods that are all happy to control
our will and our life. Glass focused on these things that are not God shines light
that is not God into the world. If we define God as the source or force of life, love
peace, justice, mercy and light, then if we are not turning our glass to God, we
cannot expect those things to shine through us. The light in us will be darkness, as
Jesus said. (Matthew 6:23)
The secret of joy is all in where we focus the glass that we have cleared of
self-will and self-concern. Two weeks ago I talked about Cognitive Behavioral
Therapy, the psychological theory that says that our feelings arise from our
thoughts. By refocusing and regrounding our thinking, by making our minds like
glass cleared of flawed, distorted thinking, we can adjust the negative emotions
that arise from that thinking and open to joy.
One of the cognitive distortions that the human mind tends toward is to
minimize the good things and magnify the bad. We blow up all the darkness till it
fills our vision and blots out all light.
Mary is a good model for us because she did the opposite. She chose to
allow the light to fill her vision. She focused her glass entirely on God, on the
hidden or small but real movements of God in our world. As a result of orienting
her glass wherever she felt God’s presence, God was magnified. She became a
magnifying glass.
In a time and place where others could see only reasons to despair, Mary
saw reason to rejoice. Others saw the success and privilege of the proud ruling
class and the power of king and empire, but Mary saw how God brought them
down by their own proud thinking. Others saw lowly people suffering from
oppression and poverty, but Mary saw the hungry filled with good things and the
lowly servant lifted and blessed. Israel was in dark times, but Mary saw the light
of God’s mercy shining in the darkness. By focusing on it, its light filled her so
that her soul magnified her God.
The people we tend to admire most are not those who never seem to
struggle or suffer, they are the ones who magnify the light even in the midst of
dark times. They are the ones who surrender and turn themselves to the light over
and over, every time they fall back into darkness, every time they try again to
wrench the controls away from God.
We cannot blame people whose glass seems full of darkness, because that
is only human. Jesus himself had his moments in the darkness. But we should
hail as blessed those who manage by miraculous grace and spiritual discipline to
turn their glass back out of darkness to refocus on and magnify God’s light. We
have many people in this congregation who are good examples of this—people
who inspire us with the beauty of the light they show, born in the night of their
struggle and sorrow.
We can thank God for them, and we can pray to be one of them, to be like
Mary in the days ahead, a magnifying glass full of God’s light, a candle shining in
the darkness, small, yet with the power to transform the world.
Let us pray in silence…..
Sermon 12/24/2006