Fourth Sunday of Advent (C), December 20, 2015; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

O God of “she who believed,” grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

I have always loved Mary, the mother of Jesus – the Godbearer, more than a good Protestant girl should. It is Mary who draws me to the catholicity of the Episcopal Church, but I’ve never understood Mary to be meek or mild or mindless, and I don’t know how anyone who reads Biblical accounts of her could understand her that way either. I don’t know how anyone who hears the words of the Magnificat, which are taken from the Song of Hannah in the Hebrew Bible book of Samuel, could hear anything but a religious and political manifesto. Earlier this month, the Rev. Nancy Rockwell, wrote an essay entitled, “No More Lying about Mary,” that captured in writing what I have always believed about Mary – that she was brave and strong.

Rockwell writes, “God chose a spunky woman” to be the mother of Jesus. She points out that there is nothing in the text to indicate Mary’s young age or sexual status – just that she is not married and has not previously delivered a child. Listen to Rockwell’s description of Mary: “Mary is unmarried when the angel comes. The angel’s invitation and her independent decision tell us Mary does not need permission of clergy – or her parents – to become pregnant. God knows Mary owns her own body. … Mary, wanted by God, according to the angel, for her bold, independent, adventuresome spirit, decides to bear a holy child – for a bold agenda: to bring the mighty down from their thrones; to scatter the proud in the imagination of their hearts, to fill the hungry with good things and send the rich empty away. This is Mary: well-spoken, wise, gritty. Traveling alone, like every prophet before her, she sets out on her first journey, to her [kinswoman] Elizabeth’s house, to declare her agenda. There will be more journeys: to Bethlehem; to Egypt and back [according to Matthew,] to Jerusalem [every year at Passover until Jesus was ]…crucified.” [1] After Jesus’ death, according to Christian history, Mary traveled northwest to Ephesus, where she lived out the rest of her days, in a city known for the professional leadership of women.

It seems to me that Mary’s courage doesn’t mean the absence of fear, and I imagine that she left Nazareth and headed for the hills driven first by a desire to get out of town, and to check in with Elizabeth, whom the angel Gabriel had said was also unexpectedly pregnant. Perhaps this was before Mary was convinced that any of the news she had was good. Perhaps she wasn’t sure any of her news was good until she was greeted with joy and declared blessed by Elizabeth. “Blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.” Notice the circularity of the manifesto – the poor will become rich, and the rich will become poor. “Where is the good news in that?” the rich might wonder. Well, as soon as one becomes poor, the blessings start to flow again. The description is not of a particular cataclysmic event or end, but of the circle of life. I don’t know about you, but I’ve experienced this first hand.

In the last two weeks, I have been in two Bible study conversations about this Gospel reading – the first, with a group of clergy colleagues, and the second with our Vestry. Both times, as I reflected on this famous story of the only two pregnant prophets to have a scene with dialogue in the whole Bible, I felt stirred to tell a story that I haven’t told to very many people, and they, in turn, have encouraged me to tell you.

The story goes that back in the early 1990’s, I was beginning the difficult and frightening process of “coming out of the closet” as a church lady – as a church lady who felt called to the priesthood. Coming out as a Lesbian, even in the hostile territory south of the Mason Dixon line, was much easier than coming out as a Lesbian imagining ordination in the Episcopal Church. Most of my straight church friends and most of my queer unchurched friends thought I was insane. Looking back on that struggle, all of it seems easier than coming out of the closet as someone who has had mystical experiences – sleeping and waking. I have never wanted people to think of me as the religious nut that I probably am. Perhaps some of you have suspected it all along, but I have been reluctant to offer evidence from the pulpit.

The process of going from Vice President of Human Resources for a large company based in Virginia, to seminarian in Massachusetts, included some real danger and sizable emotional and financial cost. I risked everything, although I’m glad to say that I didn’t lose everything, I did lose a lot. I’m still paying for it – and I’m still benefiting from it. The love and support of other people made it possible, but what really propelled me forward during those early years, was a series of vivid dreams. They were so compelling that I wrote them down, I studied them, I analyzed them in therapy, I prayed with them. That’s not really the religious nut part. It’s that the things I had dreamed started appearing in my waking life. Scenes and activities in my dreams that I had understood as symbolic, metaphorical, but not real, started actually happening in the months and few years that followed – and I kept that mostly to myself. As I settled into life in Massachusetts, the mystical experiences abated, but the memories of the dreams stayed with me.

In one of the dreams, I had returned to St. John the Baptist Roman Catholic parish school run by Franciscans that my brother and I attended for four years of elementary education. Back then, it wasn’t just my status as a Protestant that kept me from having a turn serving at the altar. Girls were not allowed. But in my dream, a guide encouraged me to journey into the sacristy and then to the altar. The invitation was thrilling and I accepted with great joy. Then I was told that the whole improbable journey was powered by the surprise discovery of a spring of living water, a source of energy deep within, underneath the building and I was invited to walk downstairs to see that wellspring. I awoke with a renewed sense of wonder and courage and thanksgiving.

More than ten years later, in 2007 when I had been a priest for just a few years, I traveled to Palestine and Israel for the first time with a group from Parish of the Epiphany in Winchester. Part of the pilgrimage included a stop at The Church of the Visitation at Ein Karem, in the Judean hill country. There in the courtyard is a stunning statue of Elizabeth greeting Mary, arms outstretched, pregnant bellies nearly touching. Behind the statue is a wall covered with ceramic plaques painted with the words of the Magnificat – “my soul magnifies the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my Savior” in more than thirty languages from around the world, making it abundantly clear that this song applies to everyone.

The Church of the Visitation is built at the site traditionally identified as the location of the home of Elizabeth and Zechariah. There are Byzantine ruins of a chapel there and subsequent buildings that have been built and have crumbled through the centuries. The current church was built in 1937 by the Franciscans, on top of the ruins in order to preserve the remains of previous chapels that were found there. When I walked into the chapel, a guide invited me to walk down several flights of stairs to see an ancient wellspring. It was the very wellspring I had seen in my dream so many years earlier. I really don’t have words to describe my shock at seeing the spring. I was overwhelmed by the holiness of the mystery of the fulfillment of what had been shone to me in a dream.

In this encounter of the two pregnant prophets, I have always heard a story of allowing God’s blessing in – of claiming God’s blessing in difficult situations that seem impossibly out-of-bounds, of “the privilege of doing hard things,” as one vestry member said the other night. I have experienced this story as giving us an example of how we might be inspired – filled with the Holy Spirit – and how our souls might enlarge or magnify the view of God in the blessed and stressed situations of our own lives. In this story, each of us is given words to say, “blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.” And, in our own languages, “my soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,” – words to say whenever we receive an untimely blessing. Now I also hear this as a story of coming out, as acknowledging having received inspiration, blessing, and not only bearing it, but sharing it – telling it out loud. It occurs to me even more deeply that gestating and giving birth to inspiration, we are called to more than a private experience, but also to a form of coming out.

One of the things I’ve learned, as I reflect back on the LGBT rights and recognition movement over the last decades, is that what has made all of the difference, is individuals telling their stories – coming out. I think the Episcopal Church, indeed Emmanuel Church – each one of you (whether you are here for the first time or the umpteenth time) could grow stronger and strengthen others by coming out as who and Whose you are, more and more. The song of Mary applies to everyone. Perhaps you remember the beautiful words of the 13^th century prophet, mystic, and declared heretic, Meister Eckhart, who wrote:

What good is it to me
if this eternal birth of the divine Son
takes place unceasingly
but does not take place
within myself?

And,
what good is it to me
if Mary is full of grace
and if I am not also full of grace?
What good is it to me
for the Creator to give birth to [a] Son
if I do not also give birth to him
in my time
and my culture?

This, then,
is the fullness of time:
When the Son of God
is begotten
in us. [2]

I want to add, this, then, is the fullness of time: when our souls tell out the greatness of the Lord.

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