10th Sunday after Pentecost

When Elisabeth was 2 years old she knew what a bride was supposed to look like and could pick out the bride at a wedding. I found that out when I came home one day from a wedding rehearsal and she had been playing dress up with the babysitter. She had a scarf over her head and told me that she was the bride today. So I asked her who the bride was at a wedding and she picked out the bride right away.

Now, all of this is not to show you how bright my little prodigy is, but rather to remind us how simple it is to do and know some things. It doesn't take a genius at most weddings to know who the bride is. That's what the scripture in Isaiah is counting on, that we know what a bride looks like because of how she looks, what she is wearing.

In our culture, which we call multi-cultural today, you can still pick out the bride most of the time. In Isaiah's time and place, which was a bit more homogenous, you could always pick out the bride. The bride always wore special clothes, as did the groom.

The special clothes are not what make the bride a bride or the groom a groom, in Isaiah's time of ours. She is a bride because she gives her life to her husband, just as he is a groom because he gives his life to his wife. But the clothes did do something then and they continue to do something today. They set this act apart from the everyday giving and receiving that we do with each other and make it different, signifying its special place in our lives and its life changing meaning.

When Isaiah rejoices because he has been clothed as a bride and a bridegroom he is declaring that everyone can see that he has been made special by God and that now his very life has changed because God has made him righteous or "just" in God's sight. When we are made righteous in God's sight we are made to look different to all the world as well.

Think about it for a minute. You know the difference between someone who is smiling and someone who is gritting his teeth in anger. Everything about him looks different and we approach him differently. If we approach the one who looks angry at all we tend to do so only after preparing ourselves for his response, expecting to get into conflict. When we approach someone who is smiling we are relaxed and don't expect to get into conflict, but expect that the person will be easy to deal with.

Now I'm not trying to suggest that we will always and everywhere look like a bride. There are times when we may be gritting our teeth rather than smiling. And there are times when we don't feel much like someone who has been made righteous by God. We are still human and that doesn't change in this life. That is why we need God to make us righteous in His sight; we don't do it ourselves. And we don't do it 100% of the time.

If that's what we expect of ourselves, to be smiling 100% of the time, to be thinking of other's needs 100% of the time, to be looking like the bride 100% of the time, then we are setting ourselves up for great disappointment and dissatisfaction with our lives.

But that is what we appear to expect from ourselves - if we are living up to our potential - because we assume that our saints, those people who were Holy and different from us, were also wholly, that is completely, different from us.

Mary is a great example. The Bible doesn't care about Mary having more children than just Jesus. In fact we have stories of her coming with her other children to see Jesus and we have a great deal of evidence that talks of James the brother of Jesus as being the leader of the church in Jerusalem. It's pretty clear that Mary was a mother of several children. Yet many years after the Bible had been completed the Church decided that we should make up stories about Mary being a virgin for her entire life. You see, the Church had decided that human sexuality was tied to Original Sin and therefore Mary could not have had sex because she was the mother of Our Lord and was pure so that Jesus could be pure. And of course she had to remain pure every moment of her life. Note that I said pure, not righteous.

It's odd that we believe that one bad action can make a person bad through and through, yet we don't hold that one good action can make a person good through and through. It gets back, I think, to our using purity rather than righteousness as a measure for our saints and ourselves.

It's very much like our confusion with racial identity. In some states in this country we tried, some years ago, to define which people were of what race. Some states held that one had to have a percentage of this or that "blood", or a particular percentage of ancestors, to be called Black or White. Other states held that if one had a drop of blood or a single ancestor that didn't fit into the category of "White", then you were Black or Native American or at least "non-white". I still have never heard of anyone having one white ancestor and being called automatically "white" or non-whatever. However, I must admit that the reason I've not heard that may have more to do with my being associated with the "white" community than whether or not it happens.

All of this discussion about ancestors and drops of blood had to do with purity. And purity was always defined as being concerned with purity of white ancestors and never anything else. In this case purity was used to separate out who could vote and own land and be a part of the community. Purity is always about separating, not about reconciling. When we let purity guide us instead of righteousness we get into trouble by defining ourselves against each other because it is always about us, not about God.

None of us is pure good. Only God is pure good and pure love. But we would like to make our saints pure so we make up stories about them and thus we separate ourselves from the very people we try to emulate. It's a shame that we've done that with Mary, tried to make her pure instead of righteous in the sight of God. Because that always makes it about Mary and not about God. And I don't think that is what Mary would have tried to do.

And I'm not sure that it helps me to think of Mary as completely pure. I want to wonder what was going through her mind when she looked around and couldn't find Jesus on that trip to Jerusalem when he was not yet a teenager. I want to think that she could get just as exasperated as I do when one of her offspring - could it be that Jesus would have done this? - when one of her offspring asked her for the three thousandth time in five minutes, "Mommy, why are you_____________? And here you can fill in the blank with your favorite why question. Why are you cutting olives? Why are you drinking water? Remember, she finally got tired of that question and told him to do something about it at somebody's wedding.

I don't think that Mary would have wanted her purity to be the issue at all. I think that she would have done what Fr. Casey explained so well last week. All of the evidence we have about Mary is that she would have turned our focus to God and to God's righteousness and justice. Listen to the Magnificat again from the translation in the Book of Common Prayer.

This is hardly evidence of someone who would turn all lights on herself. Like Jesus, she points to God and to God's goodness. She goes on to say that she will be blessed because of what God has done, not what she has done.

These are the first couple of sentences and they do indeed talk about Mary, that she proclaims God's greatness and that she will be called blessed because of what God has done for her.

The rest of the Magnificat talks about God. I'll paraphrase.

God has mercy on those who fear him (those who know that God is God and they are not.)

God has shown strength and has scattered the proud. (Those who would point to themselves and not God!)

God has cast down the mighty (those who rely on their own power and control) and lifted the lowly (those who have no power or control.)

God has filled the hungry (those who know they are in need, those who recognize their emptiness) and sent away the rich with nothing (those who believe that they have it all and lack nothing - God can give them nothing.)

God helps his servant Israel because he remembers to keep his promise to Abraham and his seed (those who have been faithful to God will receive God's mercy.)

Mary points us to God's righteousness and to God making us righteous by his action of mercy, not our own.

It is God who clothes us with righteousness, but it is we who are clothed and are made resplendent by God's clothing.

When we are clothed as a bride to be recognized as one of God's children - God's heirs Paul calls us - we are clothed in ways that help us to be resplendent to the world, to shine a light that is the light of God and not our own light.

And so God clothes us with the fruit of his Holy Spirit. We are clothed with love, that we may desire and do what is best for all those around us.

We are clothed with joy that we may share the unfettered joys of being in relationship with God and at one with his presence in our lives.

We are clothed with peace that we may know God's presence when we see his hand at work in the world.

We are clothed with patience that we may continue to work for God's justice and not be pulled down by our failures.

We are clothed with kindness that we may help others who have stumbled or are in need.

We are clothed with generosity that we may give freely of all that God has given us.

We are clothed with faithfulness that we may trust when we are afraid.

We are clothed with gentleness that we may lead others through love and not force them through fear.

We are clothed with self-control that we may choose God and choose life with him.

When God clothes us, it doesn't take a genius to see who the bride is.