Mary brought an unbelievable miracle to an unbelieving world.

With titles like Queen of the Universe and Mother of God, you’d think the she would play a bigger role in our Baptist consciousness.

[Prepared for North Baptist Church, December 15, 2013.]

But we’re not big fans of Mary most of the time, although she is an important character in our Christmas pageants. 



In our little Protestant church in Morrisville, we’d find a blonde girl who looked cute with a white towel draped over her head and give her the role of a lifetime: gazing adoringly at a 40-watt light bulb that portrayed the baby Jesus in the manger.

But the rest of the year, Mary was rarely mentioned in church. 
It wasn’t until I was in the Air Force that I got a sense of Mary’s predominance in other Christian families.

I was a chaplain’s assistant on an American base in England, and one of the Catholic priests I worked for was Leo Lyons (his real name). Father Lyons was a tall, prematurely white-haired captain with a crinkly Robert Young smile and serene father-knows-best demeanor. He was relatively egalitarian when it came to relating to teenage airmen so I tried to be open minded about his theological views. Whatever he believed was fine with me.

One spring Father Lyons announced he was taking a leave to visit Portugal to visit Our Lady of Fátima. 



“Who?” I asked, envisioning an exotic dancer. 



Chaplain Lyons raised his eyebrows the way he did when I thought a monstrance was a phantasm in a Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly novel. 



“Our Lady the mother of Jesus,” he said, spelling it out in words I could understand.



“She was from Portugal?”



“Noooo,” he said with the patience of a veteran pastor who knows some students require special attention.  “She appeared miraculously to three shepherd kids in 1917.”



I was speechless. The Baptist tradition doesn’t offer anything quite so interesting. I was becoming increasingly impressed by Catholicism and its panoply of miracles.

Mary’s manifestation in Fátima astounded me. Her sheer power to appear and talk to people was a startling contrast to the chipped plaster Marys of manger scenes who stared blankly at their plaster offspring.

The more I learned about the Mary of Fátima, the more astonishing she became. The shepherd children testified she was beautiful. She emanated light so bright it hurt to look at her. She addressed the children in fluent Portuguese and gave them spiritual insights, images of hellfire, and - famously -revealed unto them three eschatological secrets.

What Mary told the kids was so incredible that the Roman Catholic Church kept her final prediction a secret until 2000. By then, most people assumed the secret warned of worldwide nuclear conflagration, but the actual interpretation was more prosaic. During a visit to Portugal in 2010, Pope Benedict XVI exegeted it as a forecast of sorrows that would be heaped upon the church, in part wrought by the scandals of sexual misconduct of priests.



Be that as it may, it is awesome – to use the word when it actually seems appropriate – that a woman absent from the stage for some 2000 years still had the power to influence world events and distract political and church leaders. In October 1930, following a canonical inquiry, the Bishop of Leiria-Fátima declared the visions “worthy of belief,” and every pope since Pius XI has declared the Fátima miracles really happened.

Whatever happened at Fátima, the story usually causes Baptists and other non-liturgical types to roll their eyes. Skepticism about faux miracles is one of many issues that led to the Reformation, and we Baptists are the Doubting Thomases of the ecclesial landscape.

Not that we’re incapable of believing improbable things, but when it comes to miraculous manifestations or bleeding statues, we won’t believe it until we see it.

When I traveled to Rome toward the end of my European tour of duty, I was eager to view the Incorruptibles, the saints who lived such virtuous lives that their remains – as Father Lyons and other priests assured me – had never decayed, but were laid out untouched by corruption. I guess I was expecting rosy cheeks and moist lips, because the centuries-old Incorruptibles looked like leathery mummies to me. My Catholic companions expressed pious awe at the miracle of their preservation, but I couldn’t see it. They may have been acting, or they may have had greater faith than I.



Even so, none of these wonderments have had the same impact on the on the world as Mary. One has to wonder why Baptists and low-church Protestants have been so unaffected by her charisma. She was, after all, the mother of Jesus. It’s not that we dismiss that, but neither do we assign the high status or deep respect accorded to her by our Roman Catholic and Orthodox sisters and brothers.



Given what we know about Mary, we have vastly underestimated her. She was, among other things, a peasant girl. She was born into a patriarchal culture where girls counted for naught, and her family had to contend each day with an occupying army that the Jews as superstitious bumpkins.

Mary and other girls were inconsequential members of their families, valued only for their cooking and cleaning skills. Mary was not expected to read, have opinions, make decisions, or fall in love. She did not go out and choose her husband because she liked his limpid brown eyes and sinewy pecs.

Joseph, like everything else in her life, was consigned to her by her father. Joseph, one might even say, was forced upon her. Based on what we know about the culture, Mary would have been between 12 and 14 when she was betrothed, and her betrothal probably happened shortly after her first menstrual cycle.

What happened next must have been terrifying. Look at it from her point of view. She’s 14. She’s engaged to a stranger. She’s innocent of the ways of the world. She may not even understand what sexual intercourse is, but she’s old enough to know that if she does it before she is married, her parents and her neighbors will drag her out of the house and stone her. 



Then one day Mary is told she is pregnant. That could not have been good news to her, even if it was delivered by an angel. Her first thought must have been that the angel was delivering a death sentence.

And even when the angel sought to reassure her that everything was all right, it’s hard to imagine she was in any sense relieved. With child, you say? With child – by God? You wouldn’t believe it today if someone said you or your daughter was pregnant by God.

And chances are, Mary didn’t believe it either, at first. She was an unbelievable choice to have an unbelievable conception to bring an unbelievable baby boy into an unbelieving world. The salvation of humanity requires of us the same intellectual discipline claimed by Alice, Lewis Carroll’s own precocious teenager: to believe three impossible things before breakfast.



This moment at which Mary was informed of her pregnancy – the Annunciation – has been portrayed in literature, song, Frescoes, statuary and art for two thousand years.

One of my favorite Annunciation paintings was done in 1850 by the poet-painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In this depiction, Mary cringes on her bed, drawing away from the messenger of scary news, her face tense with fear and disbelief. The Freudian coup-de-grace is that the model who posed in the role of Mary is Rossetti’s own sister, Christina, who also made a name for herself as an English poet. Some would say this whole artistic scenario is messed up, and they would have a point. But, given the reality of what is supposed to be happening in the scene, how could it be otherwise?



Certainly a miracle has happened here, and throughout its history the church has seen it this way: a virgin has conceived by the Holy Spirit, God knoweth how.



But, according to Luke, a new miracle of equal power begins to unfold. Once the shock wears off and Mary catches her breath, this 14-year-old peasant girl, this cipher who can’t read and has been told never to think, commences to utter one of the most revolutionary statements in human history.



God has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty. He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants for ever.’ (Luke 1:51-55, NRSV)



Overthrow the powerful?

Raise up the peasants?

Feed the hungry?

Reject the rich?

The angel must have been as shocked as Mary was when she was informed she was pregnant.



From the very beginning, demure little Mary far exceeded the expectations of her family and culture.

In the same way, she obviously exceeds the expectations of Baptists and others who set her aside years ago along with the high liturgical trappings and arbitrary hierarchies of the oppressive churches we abandoned. Ironically, as we can detect from her opening speech (“The Magnificat” as it is known in those high churches), she is the one thing we should have held on to.



We Baptists shed a lot of high church trappings that reminded us of the Church of England and other oppressors. 

Given the importance Mary’s son assigned to his last supper, for instance, it seems almost heretical that we limit our communion ordinance to once as month. We’ve abandoned the beautiful litanies and liturgies of the Book of Common Prayer because we think it’s holier to pray from our hearts. And despite our eagerness to be transparent witnesses of our faith, we toss aside the most visible demonstration of what we believe: making the sign of the cross when we pray.

I guess we can live with that. We also exchanged priests, bishops and hierarchs for soul liberty and the priesthood of all believers, and who can say we are not better off?

But when you consider the importance of Mary to the church and to Jesus, I wish we had not been so quick to set her aside.

Mary’s first utterance, as recorded by Luke, sets the scene for all that is to come. She quickly grasps what is happening: the God everyone expected to come in shock and awe is actually coming as a mewling, puking boy. But that counter-intuitive revelation preceded the turning of the universe on its head. And with Jesus still zygotic in her womb, Mary knew it all.


But more than that, it was Mary who nursed him, guided his first steps, toilet trained him, and whispered in his ear the Godly secrets that would change the world. Jesus was God, and Mary was his mother.



In a sense better understood by our higher church sisters and brothers, Mary is also our own mother in that she symbolizes a side of God we rarely acknowledge: God’s feminine side.

Years ago I attended the funeral of a good friend on the American Baptist staff. He was young and energetic and his sudden death from a cerebral hemorrhage was a devastating shock.

As we sat sadly in our pews, my late friend’s wife was surrounded by her young children. The children, confused and frightened, began to cry. And their mother reached out her arms to them and hugged them tightly, whispering comfort in their ears.



The minister who officiated at the funeral pointed to the widow.

“Here we see how God comes to us as a mother,” he said. “God shares our grief, our sense of loss, but the Mother God’s first instinct is to embrace and console her children.”



Sometimes we need a divine mother, a goddess, who knew something Jesus didn’t: the experience of motherhood.

One thing the angel did not reveal to Mary at the Annunciation is that giving birth to God’s son would not be all gold and frankincense.  That message fell to a dying old man when the baby Jesus was presented in the temple.



Then Simeon blessed them and said to his mother Mary, “This child is destined for the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed – and a sword will pierce your own soul, too. – Luke 2:34-35, NRSV)


Throughout history, when a woman is overwhelmed by the joys of motherhood, or when the sorrows of motherhood break her heart, the mother of Jesus understands with an intimacy that transcends the experience of fathers and sons. “I’m a mother so I pray to Mary,” many women say. “She was a mother, too.”



Sometimes I wish I was as comfortable as many of my Catholic and Orthodox friends in relying on Mary as an eternal reminder that God whom we call Father has another dimension we rarely call on: the Goddess. God the mother. 



That aspect is clearly revealed to us in the person of Mary, and we Baptists need to work harder to see it.

Annunciation Sunday is a perfect time to remind ourselves of the crucial role this peasant woman played in the life of Jesus and in the foundation of the church, and give her the honor she is due.

Mother Mary, come to us, speaking words of wisdom. Let it be.