The Book 1000+ Little Things Happy and Successful People Do Differently lists these “10 Words to Live By” – Positivity, Patience, Courage, Love, Truth, Confession, Appreciation, Responsibility, Growth, and Persistence.”
Beliefnet lists these “10 Simple Words to Live By” – Thank you; I love you; I believe; Before You Speak, Think; I Know I Can; You’re Welcome; I Appreciate You; I Won’t Give Up; I Am Happy; I Will Forgive. They’re more phrases than individual words…but you get the point.
Planet Success lists 75 Quotes as Words to Live By, offered by the likes of Bruce Lee, Washington Iriving, Mark Twain, and these by Dr. Seuss: “Be who you are and say what you feel because those mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.”
All of these are great in a Your Best Life Now kind of way. But when I think of words that embody discipleship, words that followers of Christ are meant to live by, these words are almost always at the top of my list: “Here am I the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”
Luke tells us that in the sixth month, of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, the angel Gabriel was sent by God to Nazareth, to Mary. Mary, in Luke’s words, is a virgin betrothed to Joseph. Excavations of Nazareth have found silos, olive and wine presses, and storage receptacles indicative of an agrarian culture and other evidence points to Nazareth having at most a population of about 500. And while tradition has a fair amount to say about Mary, and less to say about Joseph, our text doesn’t say much about Mary’s background or her family or her economic status.
It does say that she is a Parthénos – a young, unmarried woman; but in this case Mary is betrothed, promised to be wed to a man name Joseph. In a word, she is ordinary. There is no mention of über holiness, or extra purity, or heightened devotion. She is a young woman from a small town, betrothed to a man from the same small town.
And to this ordinary girl comes Gabriel the angel with the message that she is not ordinary; in fact, she is favored by God. It may be because Mary’s life is SO ordinary that she is perplexed by Gabriel’s message of being favored.
I’m sure we all know something about Rosa Parks, Malala Yousafzai, or Indira Ghandi. All women who are know for their courageous acts in pivotal moments in history, and yet, all women who just wanted to live ordinary lives, lives like anyone one may have had in their moments of living. Then there is Florence Owens Thompson, born Florence Leona Christie.
Born in 1903, the daughter of Cherokees displaced from their native tribal lands, Florence married her first husband at 17, and started a family working in mills and at farms in northern California. She gave birth to her 6th child in 1931, six months after her husband died from tuberculosis. She had four other children with two other husbands, and in her words, “I worked in hospitals. I tended bar. I cooked. I done a little bit of everything to make a living for my kids.” In the spring of 1936 their car broke down on Highway 101 and she pulled into a camp of nearly 3,500 other pea-pickers. While her husband and sons went into town to get parts for the car, she waited in a lean-to, and was approached by a woman with a camera. The woman was Dorothea Lange who was finishing up an assignment of documenting migrant workers. Florence is the woman, the ordinary woman, in the famous photo that accompanied an article in the San Francisco News, “What Does the ‘New Deal’ Mean to This Mother and Her Children?” The article in the newspaper prompted food donations to flood into the migrant camp, but by that time, Florence and her family and moved on. In September 1983 Florence died surrounded by her family. Her tombstone reads, “Migrant Mother — A Legend of the Strength of American Motherhood.”*
Mary is as ordinary as Florence Thompson, as perhaps we view ourselves many times. Ordinary.
And into Mary’s ordinary life comes the message, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.”
Gabriel offers to Mary that something unusual is afoot (at the Nazareth Circle K) and that Mary has found favor with God; she will conceive and bear a son and name him Jesus, and what a child he will be!
Mary is even more perplexed by this development, because she is only promised in marriage and not really, truly married to Joseph yet and still a virgin. To which Gabriel says the Holy Spirit has it all under control.
Now…I don’t know about you…but…it’s when I’m told that the Holy Spirit has it all under control that I start to get nervous. I can’t even publish a Christmas Eve bulletin without knowing who is reading what lesson, so when I hear that whisper that says,” Trust God to accomplish this” I get pretty queasy.
But Mary hears something in this message from Gabriel that helps her trust in the mystery that she is called to participate in. She trusts the message that, “Nothing will be impossible for God.”
I honestly don’t know what she heard, or why she chose to trust, ordinary as she was. The task seems enormous; the means of accomplishing this thing sound too strange. And yet, she agrees to participate. Mary says, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”
Courageous words; words to live by for anyone who would identify themselves as a disciple, or a follower in the Way of Jesus.
When we think of cultural heroes, or heroes of the faith, we remember their heroic deed(s), not that they are—or were—as ordinary as us. We don’t remember that they were ordinary people with ordinary lives. Our heroes are stained glass monuments, bronze-cased warriors, carefully curated and written icons that embody their status as heroes and, out of the grasp of our day to day living. I always go back to this bronze statue of Saint Peter in the Vatican. Visitors and pilgrims to the Vatican have reverently touched the foot of this Bronze Peter so much over the years that the toes have been worn down smooth. But it’s not the victories of Peter that makes him so easy for me to identify with; it’s his many failures.
At some point, we are given moments of decision, all of us. At some point we are invited to take part in the mysterious workings of God in our own small towns, our own ordinary corners of the world. Mary acts as a creative partner and agent with God in the coming of the Christ child. I have to believe that the same invitation, the same declaration, stands today for us, as it did for Mary.
May you, in the most ordinary moments of your days, hear the greeting of God’s messenger that you are Favored and God is with you. And by the power of God’s spirit you can make Christ a reality for those around you.
*“The Hidden Life Story of the Iconic ‘Migrant Mother’” by Alex Q. Arbuckle. http://mashable.com/2016/06/12/migrant-mother/#m4EJ9FhfGaq7
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