{"id":124,"date":"2019-07-25T11:03:41","date_gmt":"2019-07-25T15:03:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.henreckson.com\/?p=124"},"modified":"2021-04-12T12:58:09","modified_gmt":"2021-04-12T16:58:09","slug":"vespers-reflection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.henreckson.com\/?p=124","title":{"rendered":"Vespers Reflection"},"content":{"rendered":"Jointly held by the Fellowship for Protestant Ethics and New Wine New Wineskins\n\n\n\nIn the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin&#8217;s name was Mary. And he came to her and said, &#8220;Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.&#8221; But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. The angel said to her, &#8220;Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end&#8221; (Luke 1:26-33).\n\n\n\nI spent two years at Notre Dame\u2014two years that I designated as time to take a break from my evangelical heritage. I did not convert in the end, but many friends did. In those two years, I often felt like a pilgrim passing through Notre Dame\u2019s Marian-haunted spaces. But its sacred spaces shaped me in ways I only recognized in retrospect. It was here that I truly cut my theological teeth on Augustine and Aquinas. It was here that I witnessed my first mass, here that I first made the sign of the cross, here that I converted to the religion of Notre Dame football, and here that I came to embrace the Protestant catholicity of my apostolic faith.\nWhen you are on Notre Dame\u2019s campus, you almost always stand in the shadow of Mary. If you walk south from the Golden Dome, you\u2019ll even find a statue of Jesus looking up at her nineteen-foot figure with his arms outstretched in a posture that leads flippant undergraduates to comment that he\u2019s calling out to her: \u201cJump, Mom, jump!\u201d\nHere, there is a golden resplendence to Mary that shimmers through even South Bend\u2019s infamously grey winters. But the Mary that we encounter in this text, and in her Magnificat, is not Our Lady glorified\u2014at least not in the expected fashion.\nMary\u2019s glory, here at the beginning of her story, is shrouded by her consternation and surprise. This is not how things were supposed to go. This is not the sort of place that an angelic messenger is supposed to show up. In Luke\u2019s text, Mary is confronted with a brilliant moment of grace, but one without pretense or worldly stature. God claims Mary as his favored daughter, his beloved. Like the unclean woman of Mark\u2019s gospel who touched the hem of Jesus\u2019 garment, Mary believes in God\u2019s power, and yet seems afraid and disconcerted.\nYou can understand why. Mary was in a position of profound vulnerability: pregnant unwed young women could not simply go around proclaiming that they were God\u2019s chosen vessel. What would everyone think?\nDespite all this, God claims her as a favored child. Like the unclean woman in Mark, she becomes the treasury of God\u2019s grace for the world. Similar to Abraham\u2019s call, she becomes mother of the faith given to many nations. She is the first member of Jesus\u2019 new family: precious, spotless, a testimony to God\u2019s preferential love for those who need Jesus the most, who audaciously cling to the hem of his garment to receive his glory.\nThose of us who look to Mary as our mother\u2014Protestant and Catholic alike\u2014have many differences, several of which have kept us out of formal communion for centuries. I don\u2019t want to minimize these differences. But there is something remarkable about this occasion, this joint vespers: Mary\u2019s squabbling children are gathered here under the same moral vocation: to cast down the mighty from their seat, exalt the humble, fill the hungry with good things, and send the rich empty away. We are here to cling boldly to God\u2019s glory contained in the meekest of vessels, and remind God what God promised to our mothers and fathers.\nMary\u2019s calling and special status is not one of obvious magnificence. Her glory does not always cascade down in golden resplendence for all the mighty to see. It is more commonly found in acts of humble obedience and service to the downtrodden. It is found in the most unexpected places, where those on the periphery store God\u2019s promises in the treasury of their hearts.\n*&nbsp;&nbsp; *&nbsp;&nbsp; *\nThe great French Dominican theologian Yves Congar wrote in his classic work True and False Reform in the Church that Christians are beset by twin temptations: contentiousness and oppressive conformity. He describes the former as the characteristic sin of the reformer; the latter temptation he assigns to those with privilege. In his own day\u2014which is not so very different from our own\u2014he was especially worried about the sins of institutional privilege, the sort that \u201cstifle prophetic impulses\u201d like those present in Mary\u2019s Magnificat. Those who stand on the periphery, like Mary, have every right\u2014every obligation\u2014to seek ecclesial and social recognition from those at the center of power. And those who by chance or accomplishment find themselves at the center must \u201cattend to the periphery.\u201d\n\u201cWhen the sap is bubbling in a tree,\u201d Congar continues, it is a welcome sign of \u201cgrowing pains.\u201d So the church must be on the lookout for unexpected angelic ministers, unmarried pregnant prophets, and all who wait\u2014like Mary\u2014for the ultimate unveiling of divine glory in the person of Jesus.\nIn Jesus \u2018 final moments, after all, it is Mary who stands in his shadow, at his feet beside the disciple John. As the earth shakes and the temple veil is torn\u2014giving us the fleeting glimpse of God\u2019s unfiltered radiance\u2014Jesus gives to Mary a new son, and to his beloved friend a new mother.\nWith his dying breath Jesus gives us a testament of unity, the promise of a new family formed in the glory of his death on empire\u2019s cross.\nIt is my hope that we have a briefest foretaste of that unity here, all of us daughters and sons standing this weekend in our mother\u2019s shadow.\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Jointly held by the Fellowship for Protestant Ethics and New Wine New Wineskins In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin&#8217;s name was Mary. And he came&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><a class=\"moretag\" href=\"http:\/\/www.henreckson.com\/?p=124\">Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":134,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.henreckson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.henreckson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.henreckson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.henreckson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.henreckson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=124"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"http:\/\/www.henreckson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":280,"href":"http:\/\/www.henreckson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124\/revisions\/280"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.henreckson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/134"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.henreckson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.henreckson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.henreckson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}