Readings: 2
Samuel 7:1-11, 16; Luke 1:26-38; Magnificat
There’s a secret door in the
belly of Mary,
hidden to most but open to
all.
There is no handle.
You enter by seeking and
weeping and prayer:
or by sheer serendipity.
Once inside, the space is vast
and endlessly expanding.
Like the Tardis or those
Russian dolls that fit inside each other,
the spaces go inwards,
infinitely unfolding.
And there is not only one
room, but many…
The beginning of a poem by feminist
theologian and poet Nicola Slee, titled ‘The mansion of Mary’. It goes on to
describe the ‘many rooms’ and the colourful bustle of life going on in each of
them: the smells of cooking, the sounds of music, of creative activity, of
chanted incantations, of silence… The poem ends describing ‘a small chamber,
without windows, / its walls painted azure and studded with stars / like the
ones on Mary’s vestments.’ It is a place of safety, of sanctuary. A bedroom for
sleep and re-energising, for the explorations ahead.
Over the centuries, Mary has been
turned into a sanitised, de-sexualised, impossible ideal of womanhood: mother,
yet virgin; meekly obedient; set apart from the great cloud of prophets,
disciples and saints. And yet over the centuries Mary has also had many faces,
many stories, that have burst out of the narrow patriarchal straitjacket. She
is ‘a lady of paradoxes, … a seething mass of contradictions’, a mansion of
many rooms to explore…[1]
In fact, the image of the house is a
thread that runs through today’s readings – a thread that is worth following,
to see where it takes us.
In the second book of Samuel, King
David is settled in his house made of cedar-wood, but he’s troubled. There he
is in his house, while God is nearby, camping out in a tent. The ‘tent of
meeting’, or ‘tabernacle’, housed the ark of the covenant (the gold-covered,
wooden chest containing the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments) which had
journeyed with the Israelites in their 40 years in the desert. Here, in the
‘holy of holies’, was the place where God dwelt, from which God spoke. And yet,
compared to David’s big, grand, solid house, God’s dwelling-place is flimsy,
temporary, fragile.
So David wants to build God a house.
A proper, impressive, robust house, like his. But God is not having any of it.
Through the prophet Nathan, God says to David, ‘all this time and I’ve never
needed a house. I’ve been moving about in a tent. I’ve been with you wherever
you’ve travelled. And I’ve been perfectly happy with that.’ God has been a
journeying God, with a journeying people.
And then God turns it around on
David. ‘You want to build me a house? No, I will build you
a house.’ Not a physical house of cedar-wood, but a metaphorical and yet very
real house: in status, in politics, in history… ‘I will make you a great name…
a place… a house… a kingdom… a throne… established forever’.
A thousand years later, and King
David’s vision of a house for God has been realised in wood and stone. First
under David’s son, King Solomon, and then a second version, 500 years later,
under King Cyrus, which was then renovated and expanded by King Herod, just
twenty years or so before Jesus was born. The holy of holies was still at its
heart, but now it was surrounded, like the skins of an onion (or the Russian
dolls of Nicola Slee’s poem) by layers of chambers and courts, each separated
by solid stone walls. The holy of holies sat within the Temple sanctuary, which
sat within the Temple Court, within the Court of the Priests, within the Court
of the Israelites (which meant the men, of course), within the Court of the
Women, within the outermost Temple precinct and Court of the Gentiles. Walls of
restriction, by ethnicity, by gender, by position in the religious hierarchy.
The House of God has not only become a rigid structure: that structure ordered
people, separated people, excluded people through its hierarchy of holiness.
And then one day, some 90 miles away
from Jerusalem and the Temple, up north in the Galilean hill country, in a
small village called Nazareth with less than 500 inhabitants and no reputation
to speak of, the angel of the Lord comes to a teenaged girl, reiterating the
promises God made to King David: ‘a name… a throne… a house… a kingdom…
forever…’. And these promises, announces the angel, will take flesh in you…
And Mary, who seems to be a pragmatic
young woman, doesn’t ask ‘why me?’; doesn’t protest that this is too
overwhelming a task for someone like her; she simply asks the practical
question, ‘how, exactly?’. And after pondering Gabriel’s response for a
moment or two, offers herself with a clear, consensual Yes: ‘Here I am.’ The
servant of the Lord. The God-bearer. The one who will do what King David could
not do: make a house in which God will dwell – in her own body.
And this is the Mary whose song we
will soon sing again, as we have throughout Advent:
Though I am small, my God, my all,
you work
great things in me,
and your
mercy will last
from the depths of the past
to the end
of the age to be.
Your very
name puts the proud to shame,
and to
those who would for you yearn,
you will
show your might, put the strong to flight,
for the
world is about to turn.
From the halls of pow’r to the
fortress tow’r,
not a stone
will be left on stone.
Let the
king beware for your justice tears
ev’ry
tyrant from his throne.
The hungry
poor shall weep no more,
for the
food they can never earn;
there are
tables spread, ev’ry mouth be fed,
for the
world is about to turn.
(verses from 'Canticle of the Turning', Rory Cooney)
In Mary… in Mary… in Mary…
God’s promises are coming to birth: ‘a name… a throne… a house… a kingdom…’.
But not a grand, cedar-wood house like King David’s. Not the imposing, stone
Temple of King Herod, built so that everyone knew their place and didn’t step
beyond it. But a house of the flesh and blood of a teenage mother, a manger-throne
for a homeless baby, a kingdom where everything is turned upside-down and
inside-out.
And surely, for a world like the one
we’re living in today, this is the only kind of news that can possibly be
called ‘good’. A world in which one of our own callous government ministers
tries to make it a criminal offence for a homeless person to sleep in a tent,
branding rough sleeping a ‘lifestyle choice’. A world where refugees fleeing
from war-zones and regions devastated by climate change are dehumanised and killed,
where camps in Calais are set on fire by French police, and camps in Gaza are
bombed daily by Israeli missiles. Into this world, God comes to pitch his tent
with the travellers, to take flesh in the midst of suffering people.
A world in which so many live lonely
lives behind locked doors, struggle to find enough money to buy food to eat and
heat our living space, flee homes that are violent or abusive, or live every
day with physical pain or mental anxiety. Into this world, God comes seeking
company at our Pantry and Places of Welcome, seeking hospitality in our
Community Houses, seeking friendship and belonging in our gatherings as church
and community, seeking encounter and tender care on our streets and in our
gardens, Commons and woods. God comes as root system, weaving connections
between us down in the dark underground. God comes as tree of life, sheltering
us from the storms and cleansing the air we breathe. God comes as Mother Earth,
forever making a home for us, and inviting us – in our shared fragility and
interdependence as creature-kin – to rediscover and re-make the world as the
dwelling-place for God-with-us.
I want to finish with a story
with Yoruba roots, from the Nigerian-born thinker, writer and teacher, Bayo
Akomolafe:
There is a
father in the village, who’s about to die, and he calls his son home from the
city, for the two of them to build a house together. Along the way, the old man
becomes too weak to continue, and he retires to his bed while the son
faithfully finishes the job. He puts on the thatched roof, sweeps the compound,
and then rushes with gusto to his father’s bedside, and says, “Father, I have
completed the work, I just wanted you to know that.” “Are you sure it’s
complete?” the father asks. “Yes,” the boy says, “it is complete.” And with
surprising strength, the father jumps up from the bed, picks up a mallet, walks
to the new house, inspects the walls, looks around… and then all of a sudden,
with a mighty swing of the mallet, he smashes a hole into one of the walls.
“What are you doing?” the son exclaims, “Why did you do that?” And the old man
answers, “You see what just happened? Now our neighbours will pass by, and they
will point to the hole and say, ‘What happened there?’, and they will come
around and they will greet you and they will ask for your name and you will
tell them, and you will ask for their name and they will tell you theirs, and
you will invite them for tea or for pounded yam and then you will become
neighbours.” “Where is this going?”, asks the son. And the father replies, “You
are not complete until you are wounded in some way”…[2]
We began with ‘a secret door in the
belly of Mary’. We end with a house with a hole in its wall. It’s tempting,
like King David, to imagine that we are in the business of house-building: for
ourselves, for our neighbours, for God even. It’s tempting, as Christians, to
imagine that God’s house belongs to us, and that our main job is to welcome
others in to the place where we’ve already made our home. But God has other
ideas. Where we build a house, God smashes a hole in
the wall. Where we hold the keys to all the locks, God kicks open the door from
the outside. Where we imagine we are always the hosts, God arrives as
unrecognised stranger and cracks open the bread and wine. Where we think we’ve
got everything in order, God gives a job to an unknown girl which turns the
whole house upside-down.
This Christmas Eve, where might God be calling for our attention, our welcome – in the
places and people we might least expect her to come? What kind of home might
God be asking us to make ready, to open up, to his coming? What kind of house
might God be making for us, to dare to enter into and find a welcome,
and company, and a calling, and life?
