Introducing Advent

My strange Advent-funk of yesterday is passed. Well, mostly.  No divine epiphany or perfect resolution.  Sadly no angel announcements or choirs.  Just a reminder -- via Mary -- that waiting is not static.

Re:Arranged

Advent 2012

This year for the 4 weeks of Advent we are going to enter into the life of Mary in order that she might enter more fully into our lives.  Using Luke 1:26-38 as a base text each week, we will look together at what it means to discover: The LORD is with You, Do Not Be Afraid, The Power of the Most High and, finally, to see the courage it takes to respond to each of these truths with bold obedience: "May It Be to Me as You Have Said."

In truth, there are many different Marys floating around in our collective Christian consciousness.  Catholic Mary with the halo, Orthodox Mary with the blue frock, Evangelical Mary who, when talked about at all is praised for the virtues of submission and passive acquiescence to the will of God - what a woman!  But who is Protestant Mary? Does a picture come to mind or was Mary left behind as a baby in the Reformation's bathwaters? And what of Biblical Mary?

As an exercise in creative writing, I've asked myself these two question: 

1) What was Mary doing exactly 30 seconds before Gabriel caught up with her?  What was her life like? Who were her friends? How did she spend her time? 

2) Thinking about how ordinary her life must have been until that angelic interlude, then, how was her life, her relationships, her thinking, her expectations, her heart Re:Arranged in the 9 months she was given to wrap herself around the idea of Messiah growing in her womb.

That kind of waiting isn't static.  It is active and intense. It's about shifting from what has been to what God will do. It is letting go of all that does not harmonize with this intrusion of God into everyday life.  It is pondering, wrestling, accepting the strangeness of God who becomes flesh.

A resource for me this Advent Season is an older book now called: Blessed One: Protestant Perspectives on Mary.  It is a compilation of essays very beautifully and thought-provokingly rendered.  So, I will leave you today with a thought from the introduction: 

To elevate Mary to a status beyond ordinary personhood is to abdicate the very hope of the incarnation -- that God has met us in the mundane and beautiful context of creaturely existence. Respecting the ordinariness of Mary (as surprising as it is), ... is to accept our own vocation as the ordinary and imperfect, called and loved, people of God.