Broadway Christian Church ·Columbia, Missouri
Morning Worship ·May 8, 2005
Seventh Sunday of Easter
Prayer of the Day
Dear One, we thank you for days bursting with life. We thank you for moments of worship to remember our lives in the midst of your love and hopes for us. We pray for this family of faith as we live into your future. Amen.
Scripture
Acts 1:12-14
Then they returned to Jerusalemfrom the mount called Olivet, which is near Jerusalem, a Sabbath day’s journey away. When they had entered, they went up to the upper room where they were staying. Peter, and John, and James and Andrew; Phillip and Thomas; Bartholomew and Matthew; James the son of Alphaeus and Simon the Zealot, and Judas the son of James; and all those with one accord devoted themselves to prayer, together with the women and with Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brothers.
Message
Waiting with Mary
Kim Ryan
A few weeks ago I spent a week in Leavenworth, Kansas. Yes, I was there by choice. I was at the retreat center that is on the campus of St. Mary University. I was there with the Bethany Fellows, that group of young ministers in their first five of ministry with whom I have the great privilege of working.
The Marillac Center is a lovely retreat center. It is there on St. Mary’s campus. As you might expect, at a Catholic retreat center on the campus of St. Mary, with retired Catholic sisters on site, there were lots and lots of pictures, and paintings, and sculptures, and statues of Mary. Beautiful pieces of art or reprints of famous artwork are there. One room, in fact, was filled with over 100 pieces depicting her alone. In that room there are one or two scenes of Mary and the Good News Angel declaring, “Be not afraid,” which is what angels always tend to say. There are pictures of Mary receiving the news of the baby in her womb and her famous, incredible response, “Let it be.” Now I know you thought the Beatles came up with that. They got it from Mary.
In the room are lots of pictures of mother-Mary, holding various shapes and sizes of baby Jesus, much like our own array of mothers this morning with that same beauty and that same glow that comes from sleep deprivation. They’ll get that same glow back when those babies turn 16, and they start driving.
My favorite painting in that entire collection of beautiful artwork was a painting by the Italian painter Mario. Baby Jesus, with all the sweet ways that a baby can be chubby and precious, is peaking out from under his mother’s lace headscarf looking right at you from the painting with the most mischievous sparkle in his eyes. I do love a baby boy with a mischievous sparkle.
This room was filled with blonde Madonnas, and black Madonnas, and Asian Madonnas, and Hispanic and Latin Madonnas. There was a sense of Mary’s presence from around the world and across time. It was exactly what one would expect to find in a Catholic university in a retreat center in a home for retired sisters.
But the question I am posing today is, of course, she was there in Leavenworth, but what is she doing here on the cover of Time magazine? Did you see this one? March 21st, you may recall, was Holy Week. Here is Mother Mary with the headlines of Tom DeLay and Michael Jackson. The caption reads, “Hail, Mary. Catholics have long revered her, but now Protestants are finding their own reasons to celebrate the mother of Jesus.”
There is a very interesting article in this magazine about the increasing focus and the popularity of Mary from the unlikeliest of places, the Protestant Church, from Protestant Bible students, and Protestant scholars, and teachers, and ministers, and lay people. Now you may or may not be aware that one of the lines in the sand distinguishing Catholic thought and practice and Protestant thought and practice for centuries has been what to do with Mary the mother of Jesus. On the Catholic side, there is that amazing adoration and sainthood. She is queen of heaven. She is mother of God. She is the one who prays for us all. On the Protestant side she is the Christmas card cover, and the best supporting actress in the drama of December, and she is out of the box that holds the nativity scene for a few weeks, and then she goes back into the box until next Christmas. So what is happening here that Mary would make the cover of Time magazine, because of a surging interest from Protestants?
I will also have to confess what is happening here that this Protestant girl spent an hour and a half in that room with all those wonderful pictures of Mary just soaking in the beauty, and the mystic, and the grace of her presence?
I am drawn to what Anne Lamott says about Mary in her newest book, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith. Anne is one of the funniest, one of the freshest, and absolutely one of the most frank authors I read. She is writing about trying to start a Sunday School program in her church for the children. Her friend who she has coerced into this endeavor says, “And what will we teach them?”
Anne says, “This was a problem.” She says:
I don’t know much about God, only that he or she is love and is not American, or male. I do love Jesus, and I’m nuts about his mother. You are not supposed to love Mary so much if you’re not Catholic, but I do. I wear a picture of her inside a gold oval frame on a thin gold chain. Her arms outstretched in blessing look as if she has pulled the orange lining out of her blue robe to show everyone there is nothing hidden inside, no tricks up her sleeve. I wear Mary for two reasons. Because she helps me remember the song, “Let It Be.” And because I use to pray to her as if she were my mother when I was coming down off cocaine. I’d lie in bed beside whatever cute, coked-out boyfriend I had at the time. He would be snoring and muttering while I ground my teeth in the dark.
“Hail, Mary, full of grace.” This is what the angel says before telling Mary she will be Jesus’ mother. And poet Denise Levertov writes,
Mary did not cry, “I cannot.
I am not worthy,” nor
“I have not the strength.”
She did not submit with gritted teeth,
Raging, coerced.
Bravest of all humans,
Consent illumined her.
And then Anne says:
This is so, so not me!
When I use to lie in the dark grinding my teeth, utterly whipped, surrender came. And then the miracle: motherly kindness toward my own screwed-up self.
One reason you’re not suppose to be a big Mary enthusiast if you are Protestant is that you might be overcome with a need to genuflect in public places. But Mary is, for me, the feminine face of divine love. And I’ve been hailing her ever since. Through my son’s birth and early childhood, right through to these teenage years, through my son’s reunion with his father, through health scares, through my mother’s terrible death from Alzheimer’s, through the early days of my relationship with the man I have been with for a while now. But some of the most desperate hailing I’ve done has been in the years of trying to help start a Sunday School at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church.
You know the phrase that captured my attention most in all of that is Anne’s praying to Mary while she “ground her teeth in the dark.” It occurs to me that beyond the religion wars about Mary is this sweet, sweet possibility. Mary is with us in the dark, opening within us motherly kindness toward ourselves. Taking her down from her pedestal or out of the nativity scene storage box down in the basement, we find a woman from the Scriptures who knows about waiting. Waiting in the dark. Waiting in that grinding of teeth kind of darkness.
Mary waits nine months for a promised child, and then years later she waits for an adolescent to make that hard journey into independence. You know, Mary lost Jesus in Jerusalem for three days. Talk about grinding your teeth! And then when she found him, he smarted off at her. It’s true. Jesus! It’s the most embarrassing part of Scripture I read. It was a dark time.
Mary, later waiting on the sidelines of his ministry, Mark will tell us that she was fearful her son might be embarrassing himself at the very least, fearful he might be putting his life at risk because of the course of action he was taking in his ministry. Mary is waiting at the cross in the deepest, darkest place a mother can be at the side of a suffering child. Mary is waiting at the tomb just before dawn not knowing but hoping for a flicker of light and truth to break into her waiting sorrow. And in our story today from Acts, Mary is waiting with the other followers of Jesus. It was after Jesus’ resurrection, after his departure, and they are waiting in a room, and do you remember hearing what they were doing while they were waiting in that room? Remember? Praying.
They were waiting and praying for what would happen next. What happens next is… well, that is next week. You have to come back next week for the sequel of that. But what happens next is nothing less than the energy and the passion of God birthing the Church.
Throughout the story of Jesus’ life, as recorded in Scripture, we have glimpses of Mary present, waiting, praying, waiting and praying into the next part of God’s future. That’s a really tough place to be. Isn’t it? That waiting place? Do you know that place? The place of the in between. The place of the what-is-not-yet there. Are you waiting for something today? Are you waiting for someone? Are you waiting and praying for God’s future into your life?
Another favorite author of mine, Joyce Rupp, in her book Your Sorrow Is My Sorrow, addresses words of prayer to Mary. This is what she speaks:
In the tears of your life I see a reflection of my own tears. In the struggles of your life, I see my own tribulation. In the desolate places of your life, I see my own attempts to regain hope. In my yearning for someone who knows what it is like to bear these burdens of mine, I look into your life and I see your shock, your fear, your emptiness, your confusion, your waiting. And, yes, I know that your sorrow is my sorrow. And I see, too, that you withstood all that brought you pain and heartache. I know that it is possible for me to also find a deep source of encouragement. I see that you found a wellspring of strength within you, and I, too, can find a place of peace and hope within myself. The Holy One, who sustained and sheltered you will also sustain and shelter me. I am not alone.
Wherever you are, for whatever you are waiting, the sweet, sweet promise is that you are not alone. I am not alone. That is exactly what we said to these families before us. “You are not alone.” Following Mary’s lead, we can wait and pray, and wait for God’s dawning of light and truth. We can wait prayerfully and hopefully for what will be next, because it will be nothing less than God’s energy and passion being born within us with motherly kindness.
On the cover of your worship bulletin… Did you see her? It is yet another Mary. It is probably one you haven’t seen before. Take a moment with me and look at her. This Mary lives in Loretto, Kentucky in yet another Catholic retreat center. She lives in a hallway in an old building that use to be a school for new Catholic sisters. The artist, Jeanne Dueber, is a retired nun whose studio is on site at that retreat center. Isn’t she beautiful? Take a moment to see her. Take a moment to see yourself in her.
Now each of us might interpret this work of art differently. I find she speaks to me in different ways at different times of my life. Right now, well, it’s the morning after prom for my senior. Talk about waiting in the dark and grinding your teeth! But in a few months that same son will be leaving for Brazil to spend a year there as an exchange student, and I keep looking at this image of Mary, and I keep trying to see myself release him into the grace of God and into his future. I’m doing that prayerfully, I can tell you, yielding him into God and yielding myself into God.
Whatever you are waiting for today, I invite you to see yourself in Mary. I invite you to yield whatever it is into the what-next of God and to trust that sweet, sweet promise, “You are not alone.”
“I am not alone.”
Amen.
Benediction
With all my heart I praise the Lord. I am glad because of God, who cares for me, a humble servant. I am truly blessed; the Lord is with me. Make me the yielding one, who expects you. Amen.
