When the Angel Gabriel offered Mary the opportunity to become pregnant and carry God’s Child, it is often unnoticed how God gives Mary, a 12 or 13 year old girl, a choice. Pregnancy in the ancient Middle East (and even today) is seldom a woman’s choice.

I suspect that her sharing of her consent to God and resulting conception and pregnancy did not go well with her parents. Remember Nazareth is a small village of 300-400 villagers, and everyone knows everyone other’s business. And scandal such as pregnancy of a betrothed village girl would be known in a very short time.

Then there is the fact that she is pregnant and betrothed, and Joseph is not the father. I have often read the Luke account with the Matthew account of Joseph’s dilemma in discovering Mary’s pregnancy and that he is not the father. He considers his options: marry her, quietly put her aside, or bring this to public and religious court in the synagogue: condemnation and stoning to death.

But I want to note a small phrase used in today’s gospel, “with haste.” The phrase indicates a state of urgency or perhaps even panic on the part of Mary. What is the cause of her panic? She needed distance from the whole family scandal and find someone who might understand her.

Here are some of the moments of grace that come from Mary’s consent to carry God’s child.

A moment of grace and deepening faith: African American biblical scholar Renita Weems in her book, Just a Sister Away, notes how pregnant women have a physical and emotional need to be in company of other pregnant women. It is to share their experience together, confronting fears, sharing joy and hopes for children. It was a moment of shared blessings.

Two pregnant women come together with only a partial understanding of what happened with their pregnancies. Shared individual experiences of grace now becomes a communal experience of grace. The dynamics of God’s grace becomes compounded when we share our grace with each other. Their two stories interweave with the common chord of God’s miraculous grace. Elizabeth, who was barren, now in the final trimester of her pregnancy, and Mary, who conceives Jesus through the power of the Holy Spirit, they come together.

A hidden story is revealed as the two women, the elder woman cursed with barrenness for years and women and men’s scorn and the young teenager, pregnant out of wedlock, a situation filled with personal danger. They face each other guarded gratitude to the one who lifts the lowly from despair.
Elizabeth goes first in responding to Mary, for Elizabeth’s fetus leaps for joy. She then pronounces the sign for Mary: Blessed are you among women, and blessed s the fruit of your womb!” As she gives hospitality to Mary, Elizabeth is drawn into the hospitality of God. Mary is just becoming aware of the full dimensions of her assent to God and the fetus she is carrying in her womb has a special future ordained by God. In their meeting, we witness faith of both women increased in hospitality, shared grace, and faith strengthened. This is the beginnings of the faith community oriented towards God’s mission in Jesus.

Inspired by the Spirit, Mary sings a prophetic canticle or song of liberating truth. A pregnant, unwed girl, speaks liberating and even radical truth:

My soul magnifies your greatness, O God, And my spirit rejoices in you, my Savior.

God is bigger than we can imagine, and our God is not bound by male structures, heterosexist power, structures of economic greed, and the fossil fuel lords. God has the ability to surprise Mary and Elizabeth and now us by coloring outside the lines of heterosexuality and stepping outside of religious boundaries. Mary welcomes a vocation to stigma and otherness, and she takes seriously that God will work through her otherness to transform herself and her world through her child.

Mary’s soul has humbly accepted the invitation of unprecedented grace to carry God’s child, and her acceptance magnifies the greatness of God. Her bodily response over time actually makes God more than God was before. There is something new happening in the life of God: God will embody God’s self in her womb and take on human flesh. And the incarnate one will be born in a cave with nonhuman animals and placed into a manger, a feeding trough. And her spirit rejoices because ultimately it is this transformation within God that will save her and others whose voices have been silenced.

For you have looked with favor upon your lowly servant, and from this day forward, all generations will call me blessed.

She is from a poor peasant family, a nobody in Palestine and in the powerful Roman Empire. She becomes controversial in her own family and is at risk of rejection and perhaps even stoning to death because she accepted God’s offer and became pregnant while betrothed. I am sure in the midst of her explanations to parents, family, and to Joseph her betrothed that consequences of her acceptance to bear the child of God were not seen as a blessing. Mary carries the stigma of otherness, a pregnant unwed mother from a poor family, and we understand the stigma of otherness among Christian Pharisees.

Mary queers the patriarchal economy that understands women’s bodies as not belonging to themselves. She is free to answer as an equal to God’s invitation to bear Jesus; she has ownership of her body and remains an active agent in making a decision for herself and a decision to accept God’s offer. But she models for us authentic queer discipleship, for she accepts her otherness not as a burden but as a grace.

God and Mary break the patriarchal and exclusive economy of grace, for Jesus is conceived without male agency and outside of marriage by the Holy Spirit overshadowing her. These two points are backgrounded by many churches in the idealization of the Virgin Mary and Christmas. Both Judaism and early Christianity perceived the Holy Spirit as the feminine principle in God. Some early Christians genderized the Holy Spirit male rather than female because of the implications of same-sex conceptualization of Jesus. Yet if God’s Christ was conceived in a non-heterosexual manner and born out of wedlock, what does this say about narrow regimes of Christian marriage and sexual morality? What does it say to the many who are excluded from heterocentric economies of grace?

You have filled the hungry with good things, while you have sent the rich away empty. You have come to the aid of Israel your servant, mindful of your mercy—the promise you made to our ancestors—to Sarah and Abraham and their descendants forever.

Mary’s song is a radical proclamation of good news for women, indigenous peoples, undocumented, those outside of heteronormativity, and for the Earth and the community of life, for she now praises God for turning the world upside down. She praises God who has promised compassionate solidarity with those who suffer from personal, political, racial, and environmental injustice.

Mary’s vocation is a thoroughly queer vocation; she stands with the underside, the marginal, and the outsiders—those yet unimagined as outside
A twelve or thirteen year girl lifts our eyesight to the profound realization that God breaks boundaries of male power and agency. God breaks the boundaries religious people build. Mary conceives Jesus outside of marriage and religious values. She realizes the grace of otherness and how God uses her otherness to transform her and the world.

But moments of grace generate other moments. Author Nick Page writes, “The story of Jesus’ birth is not one of exclusion, but inclusion…Joseph’s relatives made a place for Jesus in their heart of their household. They did not shun Mary, even though her status would have been suspect and even shameful (carrying an illegitimate child) they brought her inside. They made room for Jesus in the heart of a peasant’s home.”

Mary is not the passive but a pregnant virgin, chosen to bear God’s child, not as constructed by many Christians as the bearer of Christian sexual morality. The real teenage Mary bursts into song–singing about the end of human oppression and religious tyranny in the name of God. She anticipates the powerful will be brought down, the hungry fed, and the rich sent away empty. God will turn the heterosexist world upside down by the baby growing inside her womb.
Mary anticipates that God’s promise of Jesus’ birth will continue to turn the world upside down and that those who are excluded will have their rightful places in God’s reign. As Jesus preached and challenged religious bigotry and oppression, a woman in the crowd raised her voice and said to him, ‘Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts that nursed you!’ But Jesus said, ‘Blessed rather are those who hear the Word of God and obey it!’” (Luke 11: 27-28)

Blessed are we who take the model of Mary’s courage and otherness to thank God for our diversities as transformational grace, for she truly became a breath of heaven when in all her humanity boldly said “yes” to God’s grace of Jesus the Christ. . But blessed are we who hear God’s Word and live it with the boldness and courage of Mary. May heaven continue to breathe through us that queer grace that Mary carried to birth and transform countless lives.