Is it the manger seen or the manger scene? Which is correct? It’s a matter of perspective more than grammar.

Like the artist Bruegel’s painting of Bethlehem, set in a Flemish Village, “The Golden Glow of the Winter’s Sun,” there is the jagged outline of a steeply gabled house, children skating, throwing snow. Two great-wheeled carts drawn up to an inn where a registration of sorts is taking place. A pig is being butchered for a feast, with merriment, hustle, and bustle everywhere. Almost unnoticed, just to the right of center, a man bent over, carrying a saw, and leading a donkey that carries a hooded woman. The manger seen or is it just a scene?

Sweet Mary, Joseph, and shepherds– we see it, but do we? When this season that comes in spite of us and not because of us, when it is past, will we have been voyeurs or players upon the stage? It is the reason we take time to look at those gathered long ago and ask, what did they see that we might see?

“Mary, Mary, sweet and mild, mother of the little child,” or was it “Mary, Mary, quite contrary?” She was that!

One colleague tells of a busy day interrupted by a Baptist preacher from down the street. He was driving past the church and saw on the sermon board, “Mary kept all these things in her heart.” “Twenty-eight years and I’ve never preached on Mary,” said the Baptist. Which got my friend to thinking, “Why is it that Protestants avoid her so?” The recent issue of Presbyterians Today addresses that very subject, “Mary the first disciple,” but not all so willingly.

A magnifying glass: something to help me read maps that my eyes can no longer easily follow. Why magnify, scrutinize a teenage girl, unwed mother? A person the more purified churches of our times would have trouble with, unless she confessed and stopped her silly chatter about it being all God’s fault.

What was it Mary kept in her heart? Not only from that birthing night, but even from her encounters nine months earlier? Imagine her waking after the visit from Gabriel, God’s Western Union person, asking, “Was it all a nightmare?” “Handmaiden of the Lord?” If that is so, why then all the cruel gossip? If God has a hand in this, then you’d think God would at least set the neighbors straight.

“Hail, favored one,” said the angel. “Favored my foot!” Mary was upset. “What kind of greeting is this?” And there was the trip, a pilgrimage of sorts, on a cold night, down crowded streets, doors locked against them. What kind of greeting for the mother of God’s Son? If this is what “favored” means, who needs it? And the pain, more than birthing contractions, to bring a child into a world like this. Every mother knows what it’s like to enter into the shadows of darkness in order to bring life into the world. But what kind of world is this life being brought into? This “favored one of God” thing, “most blessed among women,” her cousin Elizabeth had called her. Is this what it means to be blessed?

Frederick Buechner writes, “She struck the Angel Gabriel as hardly old enough to have a child, let alone this child. But those were his instructions. Tell her not to be afraid. As he said it, he only hoped she wouldn’t notice that beneath his golden wings he himself was trembling with fear. To think the whole future of creation hung now on the answer of a mere teenage girl.” (1)

“Mary, Mary quite contrary.” It is only a qualified “yes” she gives at first. “Wait a minute.” “How can this be?” Mary was no shrinking violet hanging on to every word of the angel, or God, or any man. She stood her ground. “How can this be?” especially in a world like ours?

Mary, according to Martin Luther, the model of faithfulness. Faith and humility, fear and confidence all wrapped up in one pubescent little girl. That’s Luke’s story. First the greeting, then the hesitancy, and then cousin Elizabeth. “My soul magnifies the Lord,” a song, a symphony to the hearts of the downtrodden from the time it was first sung. “The mighty one has done great things. Scattered the proud, put down those in high places, exalted those called ‘low down,’ and sent the rich folks away empty handed.” Imagine being the mother of one of those people represented by one of those little dolls we have on the Darfur panel and hearing those words.

Mary, model of humility and hesitancy but so filled with a faith of fierce defiance and confidence, gutsy kid! Such a woman that Bach magnified her in music that stirs the world even today. Her faith having a certain grit to it unafraid to question, “Why me?” “Why this child?” “Why now?”

Like the film, I once saw of a youngster dying. His dream was to be on the TV game show “Jeopardy” because they give you the answers. All you need to do is figure out the right question. Life is about questions not answers and that’s the trouble. Here was Mary, just like that youngster and maybe like some of us, asking, “Why?”

And there was Gabriel standing with his hands folded behind his back trying his best to instruct a teenager. Many of us have been there. “Whatever,” that was her learned reply.

There’s that old cliché, “The present shapes the future.” But not so with Advent. It’s the other way around. Here the future shapes the present. Or at least that is what is supposed to happen. Like any hope-filled moment, a new career, graduation, “whatever,” the future beckons. We live the present shaping and reshaping ourselves in order to reach our goals, but with Advent, a “different life” is the goal. How do we make that happen?

First, you have to say “yes.” “Yes” to whatever is ahead. All human life starts with a “yes.” Two persons say “yes” to one another for a lifetime of love and support. So too with God. That’s what the gospel accounts are telling us. God probes human hearts searching, on wings of love, in ceaseless prodding, God seeks the place to give birth to a new world, and we are the potential vessels. The future shapes the present in Advent.

Every bit of scripture is written for a community of believers. People like us wait to hear a message and all we need to do “is receive God still.” Digest God’s word with our bi-focals, first seeing that which is described and then seeing our own lives.

The Angel Gabriel speaks and Mary is troubled just as we should be troubled. To a young innocent girl with more questions than answers came the word of conception and pregnancy and ever since the human soul has been challenged with responsibility not our own, carrying the potential for the life God desires to be born in us.

This season is not about memories, nice as they are. It’s not about cherubs hovering on the pew behind you whispering Elizabethan English, acceptable because we have seen them a million times reflected in our stained glass windows.

The new life that waits for us happens with the ring of the phone. “That family down the street is in trouble.” It comes with a headline, “Disaster Strikes.” It appears in those eyes you can’t seem to avoid. We say “yes” and it is then our souls begin to magnify God and then the message reverberates! That’s the Good News story; Luke and Mary are telling us that we’re the ones being visited! We’re the ones who should be troubled. We’re the ones who then have to say “yes.” Because God has regarded even us. “How can this be?”

Advent, a summons to say “yes” and then the struggle. Yet, “those who have walked in darkness have received a great light.”

My childhood minister, a surrogate father of sorts, recounted on his 60th anniversary of ministry an event in my home church that changed his understanding of faith and also, I would add, has forever influenced me.

There was a young nurse in our congregation. She came to see him. She was pregnant and in those days, it was of significant shame. It shouldn’t happen to decent girls. She wanted him to go with her to her family. He declined saying he thought it was best if she told them but then to tell them she had talked to their minister and that he would help her. Like Mary going to Elizabeth, she went to Washington D.C. where she stayed in a home for unwed mothers and worked as a nurse.

The one thing my minister asked her to agree to was that she was not to see the baby after its birth. To give it up immediately for adoption. He was afraid if she saw it, she would want to keep it. When she returned after her nine-month ordeal she met with him and after conversation he had to ask, “Did you see your baby?”

She said she had and in fact, she had held him for four whole days. And then she said, “I am so glad I did because it nearly broke my heart when I gave him up and finally I understand what God must have felt with Jesus.” “It was then,” said my minister, “that I finally began to really understand God’s accepting love for every one of us.” And when we don’t say “yes” to that challenge of acceptance it breaks God’s heart in the same way, of that I am sure.

That, dear friends, is when and how the manger truly gets “seen!”

 

1) Frederick Buechner, The Magnificent Defeat, The Annunciation

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