Not Despite, But Within

A sermon on Luke 1:39-55 by Nathan Nettleton for the funeral of the Rev Margie Dahl
A video recording of the whole funeral liturgy, including this sermon, is available here.

When Margie asked me to preach for her funeral, I was immediately reluctant –  I think because I just didn’t want her to be having a funeral. This is an honour, but I wish it hadn’t come. When she then told me she had asked Annette to tell the story of the Visitation before I preached on it, I started to wonder whether I was being stitched up, because preaching after Annette’s storytelling always feels quite unnecessary. 

Margie loved this story. She was always drawn to it. When I asked what aspect of it she wanted me to focus on today, she said hospitality. I’m going to honour that, but my pondering of it has taken me in some directions that Margie probably didn’t anticipate. I’ve started to think that what was drawing her to this story was not just the resonances with the life of hospitality she had already embraced, but the whispers of a hospitality that spoke to some of her deepest yearnings, places where the hospitality she longed for is perhaps only now coming into view for her.

But let me start on more obvious ground. There is something different about this as a hospitality story right from the start. Jesus chided the well-resourced who only extend hospitality to their own class. “How about inviting those who will never be able to pay you back?” he said. But we can extend hospitality to the have-nots in ways which reinforce both our social standing and theirs.

In this story, though, neither woman has the social standing to offer conventional hospitality as it was understood and practiced in their day. One is old and has been barren for most of her life. One is young and pregnant outside marriage. The joyous hospitality they extend to one another is not the strong welcoming the weak. It is two precarious people making room for each other in a world that wouldn’t make much room for either of them. 

Much of Margie’s pastoral ministry looked like that, didn’t it? When she wore her own brokenness on her sleeve, she had a real gift for meeting other vulnerable people in a place of unguarded recognition and communion. Like Elizabeth with Mary, she was able to bless others, not because she could give with nothing to lose, but precisely because she had everything to lose, and meeting another in that as an equal is already a blessing.

Of course, brokenness encountering brokenness always has some prickly and awkward edges, so the blessing won’t always be reached smoothly and nicely and without any snags. Hindsight often shows that the snags were essential to the blessing.

To be honest though, Margie often struggled to see that herself, and tended to judge her own ministry far more harshly than any of us watching it did. Little prickly rough patches, ordinary humanity, could blow up into massive failures in her mind’s eye, and plunge her into self-condemnation.

And I wonder whether that is one of the deeper reasons why this story was always reaching out to her. It’s a bit of a clergy funeral cliché to say that the deceased pastor was better at preaching grace than at receiving it, so let’s just take that as a given and look a bit deeper at what might have been beckoning to Margie from Mary’s response to Elizabeth. And what might be beckoning to us.

As Mary breaks into song, one of the first things she names is her own smallness and lowliness. “God has looked on the lowliness of his servant.” At that point, Margie and Mary would probably both be telling each other, “No, no, no. Don’t put yourself down. You’re wonderful.”

But in what might be seen as a healthy hospitality to herself, Mary seems able to accept her own wonderfulness in a way that Margie continued to find elusive, no matter how much she yearned for it. Because Mary doesn’t just assert that she is small and lowly, full stop. She says, “God my saviour has looked with favour on the lowliness of his servant.”

Most of us have heard Margie say that she would probably go to hell for this, that, or the other thing, and though it was said at least partly in jest and she certainly never thought God was sending anyone else to hell, in her moments of greatest self-doubt, she seemed unable to shake the fear that she might be the one exception to God’s grace. She wasn’t alone in that.

Her very accomplished theological mind readily grasped the concept of God looking with favour on our lowliness, and joyously bringing beauty out of our brokenness, strength out of our weakness, and wisdom out of our foolishness. But her lowliness?

Somehow Mary, as young and precarious as she was, knew deep in her bones that God was looking on her with favour and that she was greatly blessed. She doesn’t say that God has looked with favour on her despite her lowliness; she says “God has looked with favour on the lowliness of his servant.”

And I don’t know about you, but in my mind’s eye, I’m seeing Margie wide-eyed with childish delight as the irresistible and undeniable hospitality of that favouring look now floods her soul – something she has long craved and which has been beckoning to her from this story all these years. Beckoning to us all.

There is another aspect of this story which was perhaps gently calling Margie to something new. Although Mary’s song begins with God’s acceptance of her in her lowliness, it quickly moves on to what God is doing on the world stage, righting injustices and lifting up the abused and downtrodden. Margie undoubtedly shared the passion for justice that echoes down the centuries in Mary’s song.

Most of us know stories of times when Margie was treated badly, abusively, unjustly. It is not hard to see why Mary’s picture of things being put right appealed to her. But that’s not really what I have in mind here.

It’s more Mary’s clear-eyed realism about the omnipresence of injustice, of people’s inhumanity to one another. Despite being very young and pious, Mary stands her ground and looks a cruel world right in the face.

Margie had a huge capacity to embrace the brokenness of individuals, but when it came to church congregations and organisations, she seemed somehow unable to comprehend their failure to behave like Jesus. 

The willingness to look for and expect the best in people is a beautiful thing, but it can tip into naiveté that leaves you defenceless and prone to being blindsided when human communities are all too human. The Church may be the body of Christ, but it remains a broken body that does all-too-human much more than it does fully divine.

Perhaps Margie sensed Mary singing to her soul and calling her to a new level of hospitality, to a capacity to welcome the broken and dysfunctional communities of a broken and dysfunctional world, offering them her shared vulnerability as fully as she could do with broken individuals, while not being caught off-guard when they didn’t live up to what she hoped for and worked for for them.

Yesterday morning Jeff told me he was coming over here to set up a display that we will see shortly of pictures and items that represented various eras and aspects of Margie’s life. He said it would include some things that were “quirky and amusing”, and I couldn’t help but say that it could hardly represent Margie’s life without containing plenty that was quirky and amusing.

We loved Margie. We loved her with all her amusing and bemusing quirks. At times we longed for her to be free of the pain and pitfalls that came with some of those quirks, but to badly paraphrase Mary’s song, we were mostly able to look with bemused favour on her quirkiness and call her blessed.

And I’m trusting that even now, as we entrust her to God, she is discovering herself infinitely welcomed, favoured and blessed – a promise that she could never quite imagine, but which has been quietly drawing her to this story all these years.