Texts: 2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16; Romans 16:25-27; Luke 1:26-38
On Friday Trish and I attended the service of celebration in St Johns, Waikouaiti to mark the 150th anniversary of the dedication of the church. Not surprisingly, the first lesson read at the service was a short passage from the eighth chapter of the First Book of Kings, in which we find King Solomon's prayer of dedication of the first great Temple. Solomon was, of course, famous for his wisdom; and I wonder if an example of that is shown in his prayer of dedication.
Our first lesson this morning finds Solomon's father, David, reflecting on the need to build a Temple. In a way, our passage seems to reflect well on David. He is now firmly ensconced as the all-powerful King of Israel; he is living in great luxury as befits such a king in a palace. But where is God, the great God of Israel? For the Jews at the time God's presence with them was symbolised by the Ark of the Covenant, which they had carried with them on their travels. And during those nomadic years it had been housed in a tent, known as the Tent of Meeting. We remember how Moses used to go to the Tent of Meeting to confer with God. But the people were nomadic no longer; they had their own land. Their King was in his own palace in their capital city. Surely, if he could be housed in such splendour, it was only right that God should be "housed" in corresponding splendour? To our human ears, such thoughts by David have the sound of humility.
But they seem to have a different sound in God's ears. God tells David through the prophet Nathan that he doesn't want David to build a house for him; rather, he will build a house – a royal line – from David. Besides, God has made do with a tent up until then, so what does he need a house for? It is David's son, Solomon, who builds the temple; and here we see Solomon's greater wisdom. He produces a magnificent building, but in his prayer he acknowledges the absurdity of thinking that God will live in it, will be confined to it. He says this: But will God really dwell on earth? The heavens, even the highest heaven, cannot contain you. How much less this temple I have built! And so his plea is not that God will come and inhabit the Temple, but that God will pay attention to the prayers offered in the temple. And there is the root of the idea that the temple is to be a house of prayer for all the nations.
In his sermon on Friday, Bishop George referred to his experience of visiting the ancient churches of Canterbury when he attended the Lambeth Conference in Kent. He talked of three in particular; a chapel that dated back to the wife of King Ethelbert of Kent, towards the end of the sixth century. The queen was a Christian, and the king allowed her to have a place of prayer built, so long as it was not within his citadel. Then in 630 Augustine arrived from Rome as a missionary to convert the Kentish people. He was allowed to build a small monastery, but again, not within the walls of the citadel. Only when the King was finally convinced that these Christians were good for his kingdom and not a threat to it, did he allow a church within the protective walls, and what is now Canterbury Cathedral was built. Three houses of prayer, dating from 1400 years ago, but part of our history through the common bond of our faith, and the special bond that all Anglicans have with Canterbury's archbishop.
Then Bishop George turned our attention to the church in which we were sitting. A much shorter history, of course, but a similar one. For 150 years people had been coming into this building and praying to the God addressed by Solomon all those centuries ago; May your eyes be open towards this temple night and day, this place of which you said, 'My Name shall be there,' so that you will hear the prayer your servant prays towards this place. And as I looked up at some of the magnificent timbers in St Johns I remembered a line from a John Betjeman poem, "The beams burnished with the prayers of a thousand years".
And I think all this captures the tension we sometimes feel between proclaiming that God is everywhere, and yet we want our special places, our churches, where we often feel closer to God than we might elsewhere. Solomon could see the absurdity of thinking that God was confined in the Temple, but he could not see the even more astonishing truth of God's presence among us that we are now preparing to celebrate. Solomon assumed that God's true dwelling-place was not a temple, however magnificent, but heaven itself. What would he have made of it if he had known that God would choose a very different dwelling-place when the time came to live among his people on earth? And I'm not referring to a stable; I'm referring to a young woman called Mary, and through her to the whole human race.
This Fourth Sunday in Advent is the one on which we are invited to think about Mary. So what do we think about her? Do we think about her? Perhaps we've been a bit put off her by what may seem to us excessive adoration in the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches, where she seems sometimes almost to share top billing with Jesus. And certainly she has not been helped by some of the legends that have been attached to her name, and to her death. There is no biblical warrant for describing her as sinless, or denying that she had other children after Jesus, or for the doctrine that she did not die but was taken up to heaven.
And as much as I value icons as aids to prayer and worship, most of the iconography around Mary does not do her much credit either. There is one wonderful exception; an icon of Mother and Child done in Papua New Guinea shows Mother and Child laughing happily together. But most icons show Mary as stern, if not downright depressed. On the other hand, she is sometimes pictured as a stunning beauty, a poster girl for L'Oreal or Max Factor! I don't think that's helpful either.
Feminist theologians have never known what to do with Mary, either. We might have expected that they would embrace her as bringing something feminine into the rather masculine images of divinity that Judaism and Christianity are often accused of. But they assign that role to the Holy Spirit (again without biblical warrant!): they seem to dislike the fact that Mary's chief role is that of mother, and she is first introduced to us as some guy's fiancée.
For me it is exactly Mary's ordinariness that makes her so important. She isn't chosen because she is lovely – she might not have been – or even because she was especially well-behaved, much less sinless. She was chosen because she was chosen; in the same way that God chose Israel because he chose them. It was (as her great song of praise makes clear) yet another example of God choosing the least, the poorest, the most humble. The God who told David that he preferred a tent to a temple, and who came to Bethlehem in a stable instead of a palace, chose an unknown peasant girl rather than a queen to be the mother of his Son.
In doing so, God sanctified women and men. God sanctified not only the birth process, but the sexual side of our nature as well. There is no escaping the fact that St Luke's account of how Mary became pregnant is couched in sexual terms. According to St Luke, when Mary asks the angel how she can give birth as she is a virgin, the angel says this: The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God. I am told that in one of the modern translations of Scripture the phrase used is "the Holy Spirit will mount you". That's too much for my sensitivities, but it's not inaccurate.
In Mary, sexuality is sanctified. In Mary, the human womb becomes a fit dwelling-place for God. In Mary the divine and the human become united just as surely as the male and the female become united in ordinary conception. And it happens only with Mary's consent. She had no real idea what Gabriel was saying, but in faith she said 'Yes".
And that's all that any of us are ever asked to say to God. Christmas is a time for saying "Yes" to God; "Yes" to a God who wishes to dwell among us, with us, and within us. Yes to a God who makes strange choices, because we ourselves are among the strange choices God has made!
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