Advent 4c 2024; 22 Dec.
Luke 1:39-45; Jack Hardaway
UNBOUNDED
Experience is often a bad teacher.
We learn the wrong things.
Usually we hear the opposite. Experience is a good teacher. But experience is only a good teacher when we learn the right thing.
Often we learn the wrong thing.
Experience teaches us to build walls, establish boundaries, construct barriers and implement barricades to keep things safe, our possessions, our power, our hearts.
The Holy Spirit teaches us something else.
Mary.
Mary the mother of Jesus.
The mother of God.
Mother Mary.
Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
The Holy Spirit moves.
God shows up and people just start singing.
It’s like a musical, two pregnant cousins walk up to have a visit and they both start singing, and their in-utero relations start dancing, or leaping or capering in joy depending on the translation.
The boundaries fall away.
And Mary sings of the world being born again with all the barriers of power and wealth falling away, and those who are left out, cast out, scorned and forgotten are suddenly being lifted up and welcomed in.
Those who live behind walls are pushed out.
Those who had nothing to protect are lifted up.
Closed off to the Spirit.
Open to the Spirit.
Mary shows us what is beginning to happen.
She shows us the God who is unbounded.
And she shows us that we will all be unarmed.
The walls are going to fall. We are being exposed.
Jericho is falling.
Have I walled myself away?
Have I walled out others? The poor? Those in pain?
Is that what I have been taught?
The Spirit is teaching us to sing, to dance, to celebrate the humanity of Jesus, and the humanity of Mary his mother: whose humanity is the source of the divine union that is born in Jesus. In Mary is conceived unbounded humanity, the closed doors and closed hearts are opened wide.
“Radically unprotected,” is a term sometimes used for some of the saints, such as Saint Francis, but also especially Mary.
They show us how to be open and available to the Holy Spirit, to the visitation and habitation of God. They show us how to be vulnerable to the contingencies of human flesh and human behavior. To live without walls.
They show us God, as the one who is un-boundary-ied, radically unprotected, who is vulnerable to humanity and death even death on a cross. God dances and capers and sings with joy for the holy visitation with each one of us.
In God’s humanity we find our lost humanity, long walled away.
Are we available for joy?
Can joy get past the barricades that we have erected, that we have learned to build so well?
Have you known someone who has a contagious joy?
Who is wide open and disarming?
Not manic or deluded, or silly but an openness that is a choice and a joy that is grace, sheer gift, the sacrament of the holy.
Open to the Spirit.
This is the Sunday of the year when we look closely at Mary and what she teaches us.
The Holy Spirit is a good teacher.
Mother Mary is a good teacher.
Mother Mary shows us an open heart and an open life, vulnerable to the Spirit, where Joy is a holy possibility.
Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.