Through Stained Glass: Advent Word a Day 2 - Strength

“Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.”
― Lao Tzu

 Strength

What does it mean to have strength? 

Strength can mean strong – physically. 

Think of The Rock, Dwayne Johnson. 

Strength can mean the capacity to withstand pressure – mentally / emotionally / spiritually.

Think of Mother Teresa. 

Yesterday I saw Tom Brady play in Indianapolis. Before the game, I admired the structure of the dome – a building big enough to play a football game in; beams strong enough to hold all the material needed to create a space big enough to play football games. The strength of those beams is impressive! 

Tom Brady is the greatest quarterback of all time. Physically, he is not the strongest on the field. His strength is found in the way he cares for his body off the field, the countless hours spent going over the playbook, and the experiences he has gained over his 22-year career. His greatest weakness is that he can’t scramble [run around when he is about to be tackled by the most muscular man on the field] and is too slow. He has seven Super Bowls. 

Strength. 

Advent upends our definition of strength. Or at least it can. 

Advent upends our definition of strength. Or at least it can. For Christians, it is the season before Christmas – the holy days celebrating the birth of Jesus. We call this event the Incarnation – the day in history [it wasn’t 12/25] when the Holy One took on flesh and lived among us. 

The Holy One came not with a parade. There was no royal announcement about Their birth. There were no fighter jets or military marches. Instead, the birth of the child who would become Christ was ordinary -- like ours. As the stories go in two of the gospels, it happened unexpectedly – at an unexpected time – to an unexpectant mother. 

The strength of Advent – the strength of our faith – I believe – is found with Mary. 

The Holy One was born into the world like us, lived in skin like us, and had a mother who cared for Them. Mary carried the Love of the Universes in her womb. The historian Margaret Miles explains how “a human body’s best show of power, and the evidence of Christ’s fully human incarnation, was the Virgin’s presentation of Christ from her own body.” The Holy One – who exists as a community of Three – reveals themselves not in a royal, lofty theology, nor in a parade full of pomp and circumstance, but in the ordinariness, the messiness of life. 

Imagine the strength of Mary’s witness. Strong enough to bring down the mighty – and start a revolution that begins at the margins and places where we least expect it. 

Mary gives me strength by way of her humanity. She isn’t God, but she is – us! She is lowly, or so she claims – and is the one who hands the Christ to the rest of us. In an age when women were seen as less than, she said ‘yes’ to the Holy One – and things were never the same. I love what Richard Rohr says about Mary when he writes:

“In some ways, many humans can identify with Mary more than they can with Jesus precisely because she was not God! The Gospels attribute no miraculous works or heroic acts to her, simply trust and pure being more than doing. From her first yes to the angel Gabriel (Luke 1:38), to Jesus’ birth itself (Luke 2:7), to her yes at the foot of the cross (John 19:25), and her presence at fiery, windy Pentecost (see Acts 1:14, where she is the only woman named at the first outpouring of the Spirit), Mary appears on cue at key moments of the Gospel narratives. She is Everywoman and Everyman, and that is why I call her the feminine symbol for the universal incarnation.”

We are all meant to be Mary. Mary’s story bears witness to ours – and our strength to point towards the Christ in our lives with our work, being, and personhood.