Text: Luke 1:26-38, Isaiah 11:1-10
This morning, we find ourselves in the second Sunday of Advent… this season of waiting for the coming of Christ.
This Christmas story is so familiar and comfortable, we could curl up in it like a blanket.
We are ready for the heavenly choirs of angels mingling with the smelly shepherds in the field, for the time when wise men led by celestial signs witness the fragility of an infant of a manger.
It is a season of holy anticipation – not for experiences beyond this world – but ones that are embodied in things that we can touch and feel, live and breathe.
We are ready for God to come and be with us!
This morning, we hear again the story of the annunciation – the announcement! – from Luke’s gospel.
The angel Gabriel appears to Mary.
The angel proclaims that Mary is favored in God’s eyes – blessed among all women – for she will bear a child who will be called the Son of God.
Mary asks but one question: How will this happen?
After a brief and yet wholly inadequate explanation, she responds:
“Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”
I first heard this story as a child and so the image seared in my mind of Mary is of a wise and beautiful woman, full of the grace of God, who was ready for whatever came her way.
She always seemed so much older than me, but truth be told, she was probably only sixteen or seventeen years old at the beginning of this story.
This young woman was living in a world of prearranged marriages and had likely been promised to her husband-to-be, Joseph, for many years.
It was a world where a woman’s only education would have been in the home.
It was a world of Jewish faithful living under a Roman occupation, a time of darkness and poverty, disappointment and despair.
And yet, she found the courage to say yes.
Because of the nature of the season, often we hear the annunciation on Sunday, and just a few days or weeks later we have a beautiful, bouncing, baby boy in a manger.
There are so many details we skip over… in part because we don’t know what happened.
The scriptures leave us to fill in the blanks.
Or as AJ Levine reminds us in her book, Light of the World, “Matthew and Luke are not writing for children… nor are they writing newspaper reports striving for historical accuracy. [They] are designed less to ‘record what happened’ than to set the scene: to explain to readers removed from that time and place what the birth of Jesus signifies.” (p. 11-12)
There are truths in this story that are more important than the details.
Truths we have handed down from generation to generation.
Last week, we heard the record of ancestry of Jesus Christ from Matthew’s perspective.
Matthew traces a Jewish history of Jesus from Abraham, to David, through Exile and to the father of Mary.
He shows the arc of the promises of the Jewish story and how Jesus is fulfilling them.
Luke is telling a different sort of story.
In the first verse of our reading for this morning, he notes that an angel appears to a virgin, engaged to Joseph, who was a descendent of David’s house. Her name was Mary.
Her name means Bitter Tears, but it also calls us to remember the “Mary’s” who would have been in her spiritual ancestry… like Miriam, the sister of Moses.
Miriam who rescued her brother from certain death, helped to lead the people out of Egypt, and was later known as a poet and a prophet.
The focus here is not just on the lineage from the house of David.
It is on the woman.
One woman.
And the decision that is before her.
But there is more to this one verse.
We often read it out of context, but this angel, Gabriel, is the same who showed up to announce the birth of John to Zechariah and Elizabeth… we heard a piece of that story earlier in November.
He offers a warm and joyful greeting, but you have to remember, this is not just a friendly neighbor stopping over.
This is an angel of the Lord.
When a messenger of God shows up in scripture, there is always a catch, as Levine describes it.
You are expected to give a response.
Our minds are taken to Abraham leaving behind everything he knows and moving to Canaan, or Moses leaving his quiet shepherd life to confront Pharoah.
When an angel of the Lord shows up, your life changes.
Mary’s response to these words is understandable.
She is filled with confusion and terror.
Everything that she has known in her quiet life in the small, quiet village of Nazareth is about to change.
Who will she become?
Where will she be asked to go?
What will she be asked to leave behind?
We all carry with us fears of the unknown, fears of standing out, fear of loss, fear of failure…
And… she doesn’t even know about the baby yet!
Gabriel sees the fear flicker in her eyes and reassures her even while sharing the news.
“Do not be afraid.”
These words come to us in the scriptures 365 times.
One for every day of the year.
“Do not be afraid.”
Dr. Christine J. Hong writes about how these words don’t actually make us less afraid.
“Every day, people are faced with untold grief and pain, and the gospel, or the good news, is not enough to take that pain and fear away. Hope sounds hollow to those who are enduring the wretched parts of life… courage rises despite our fear, not in its absence.” (A Sanctified Art Sermon Planning Guide)
And I think courage rises out of our fear when we know that we are not alone.
When we can trust that we will be given what we need to move forward.
As the angel Gabriel speaks, “Do not be afraid,” Mary is also given a glimpse of the future that awaits her.
She will have a child.
Not just any child, but the Son of God, who will inherit David’s throne, and reign over an eternal kingdom.
In other words… everything that they have been waiting for will come to pass.
And that can be scary.
And it will take acts of courage in order to bring it into being.
So Mary has a very important question to ask.
“How?”
She isn’t focused on the whole eternal reign of David’s kingdom piece… but wants to know what is going to happen to her own body.
As Wil Gafney notes, “Before Mary said, ‘yes,’ she said, ‘wait a minute, explain this to me.’”
“In a world which did not necessarily recognize her sole ownership of her body… this very young woman had the dignity, courage, and temerity to question a messenger of the Living God about what would happen to her body before giving her consent.”
Gabriel’s answer is less about biology or the mechanics, and more about a spiritual reality.
It is about the presence of God with us.
It is about the action of the Holy Spirit – a core theme in the gospel of Luke.
It is about impossibilities becoming real – evidenced by the pregnancy of her very old cousin, Elizabeth.
It is about a kingdom of oppression being taken over by a kingdom of love.
When we find the word “fear” in our modern translations of scripture, it can come from two very different root words.
Here, in Luke, we find the Greek word, phobos, from which we get the idea of phobias today.
Fear stops us in our tracks, holds us back, and can be destructive.
But we are also told to fear God in other places in scripture.
In Isaiah 11, we are reminded of this shoot growing from the stump of Jesse… a symbol of the heir of David’s Kingdom.
The Spirit of God will rest on him… a spirit of knowledge and fear of the Lord and he will delight in fearing the Lord.
The Hebrew word here is, yirah, and it implies a sense of reverence or awe.
I think part of what happens in this moment, and in the angel’s answer to her question is that Mary moves from terror to awe.
She moves from a fear of the unknown to a sense of awe about the impossible becoming possible.
In her memoir, This Here Flesh, Cole Arthur Riley writes, “I believe fear has the holy potential to draw out awe in us. To lead us into deeper patterns of protection and trust. To mold us into people engaged in the unknown, capable of making mystery of it instead of terror.” (p. 86)
As Isaiah tells it, and the hymn “O Come O Come Emmanuel” reminds us, God will come to be with us.
Christine Hong writes – “God’s spirit will intervene, leading to a world of righteousness and peace. Prey will no longer fear their predators. The vulnerable will be protected. All of creation will be filled with the wisdom of God.”
You see, God enters our fears.
God enters our struggle.
God enters our grief and pain.
It doesn’t always go away… but God is with us in the midst of it.
And in that presence, our fear is transformed.
We find the courage to say, “yes.”
We find the ability to say, “Here I am.”
We are given what we need in order to move past our apprehension and accept God’s invitation.
Two thousand some years ago, a young woman, a girl really, said “yes” to God’s invitation – and just look at how the world has changed.
It is how God has always worked.
From the very beginning, ordinary nobodies who hesitantly said “yes” to God were transformed by the spirit of God.
From the nomad Abram, to the murderer Moses, and shepherd boy David.
Each of them, in their own way, said “let it be with me according to your word.”
They opened themselves up to God’s will in their lives, despite their fears.
They answered the call and tried to live obediently.
And God accomplished amazing things through them.
Does that mean it was easy?
Did they suddenly face straight paths with no obstacles?
Of course not.
Mary could not know the course her life would take.
She would have to struggle to protect her child by fleeing to Egypt.
She would live to see her son crucified by the Romans.
Still fearing the unknown, she said, “let it be with me according to your word.”
The Word came and lived among us.
God took on flesh – God worked through human lives, and God’s will was embodied in the small “yeses” of many insignificant people.
And the world was changed.
Each of us have fears in our own hearts.
But God shows up in the midst of those fears and invites us to be transformed.
We find the ability to say yes, because we know the stories of these faithful ancestors who said yes.
But we also find the ability to say yes, because we hold onto beautiful impossibilities and the promises of what God’s love means in our lives.
In the midst of our grief and struggle and of all that is unknown, we know who holds the end of our story.
We stand in awe and reverence of what we know we are working towards:
A world where righteousness and equity reign.
A world where the wolf and the lamb sleep in peace.
A world in which we are led by a little child.
The fears of my heart cannot be quieted by anything I have at my disposal in this world.
But even in those fears, I need the Holy Spirit to do something new in our lives.
To do something new in our community and our world.
It is terrifying to think about what that might mean.
Because God doesn’t want to change the world without us.
And that means letting the Spirit of God dwell in my heart.
Not just on Sunday mornings, but every day, every moment.
Because if I… if you… if we really said yes, then everything would change.
That’s the point, isn’t it?
We don’t say yes because we are afraid of the risks.
We are afraid the path will be hard.
We are afraid to leave behind what we know.
And it will be.
And that is all hard.
But we don’t do it alone.
The angel Gabriel whispered to Mary, “Do not be afraid.”
If we say yes, God will be with us.
If we say yes, God will give us everything we need.
If we say yes, and face our fears, we might just see them transformed into the impossible.
May it be so.
I saw how many of you were drawn out of your homes just a couple of weeks ago to catch a glimpse of that great conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter in the sky. While it was possible to see with your naked eye or through binoculars, this particular photo was made available by Greg Hogan. It was taken as a long exposure shot from central Georgia.