21 December 2008, Advent 4

The painting to the right has been a favorite of mine for many years. I took the picture that you see at the Philadelphia Museum of Art on a visit there a few years ago, when I just happened upon the painting, after having really loved it for years previously. It's The Annunciation and was painted by Henry Ossawa Tanner in 1898. I hope you enjoy it as much as I have. A better image of the painting is here: Tanner Annunciation.
Now on with this week's sermon. May the remainder of your Advent be one of discovery and joy.
Gerry

Luke 1:47-55, Luke 1:26-38 (Click the link to read the scriptures.)

There is something about the two passages from Luke that are set as today’s lectionary readings that really get to me. I am attracted to them in ways that I cannot fully explain, catapulting all of it into the realm of the spiritual, as far as I’m concerned. And I’m not really alone, I know; many artists and musicians throughout the ages have tried to express the mystery of this event between an angel and a young woman.

But why are we all drawn to this event that non-believers around us would scoff at and call yet more evidence of superstitious foolery? Why does a story which occurred thousands of years ago, the actual factual truth of which is really of no importance to me, still make some of us catch our breaths and stop for a moment to reflect about how the divine and creation interact? Why this fascination in art and music and imagination with a story that’s no more than a few lines of an interchange and the subsequent song that young girl sang in response?

I think that part of it is because it is such an unusual tale; it’s a narrative we’re not used to, not even in the bible. If you consider the other miraculous births that we have from scripture, they all involve old women…elderly women…barren women…women well past their childbearing years: Sarah laughing her head off at the thought of her and Abraham adding a nursery after all these years; Hannah, barren and childless, dedicating her baby Samuel to service to God in grateful response to the birth. Even Elizabeth, whose tale of bearing a son in her later years is told just prior to and intertwined with the words we heard this morning in Luke, precedes Mary in becoming pregnant by only six months.

But in those six months, that tiny space of time when you think of the entire scope of human history, God does a new thing, a different thing, a radical thing. God chooses a young woman to bear the Messiah, God’s anointed one. God selects a woman who is at the beginning of her childbearing years to be the mother of this most important gift.

Of course, women had little if any status or position in society throughout the many histories of humankind. What status they did have came most often because of the man to whom they were married or perhaps due to their age or sometimes due to what we would call their family of origin. So maybe these other women, the Sarahs and Hannahs and Elizabeths, did have some degree of standing, just a bit of stature in the community.

But Mary? She had none of that it seems. She wasn’t yet married. And the man she was going to marry in fact was just a carpenter—likely he wasn’t a landholder and he wasn’t a priest or any of the other vocations that carry a certain amount of standing.

And Mary was young. We all probably remember hearing for the first time someone saying that Mary was probably a teenager. I haven’t done the research myself so I have to rely on the scholarship of others as likely you do too. But it does make sense, doesn’t it, that Mary would be just a teenager? Thinking about it in market terms, if you have a commodity, such as a daughter, you’re going to make use of her by arranging a marriage to her while she’s young, while she can still provide the future husband, the buyer, with offspring, wouldn’t you? Plus you may want to get her out of your household as early as you can so you don’t have to provide for her anymore. So it seems to be logical that Mary was indeed young.

So we have a young woman, a lowly servant, as she describes herself; one without stature or standing or connections. That’s quite different from those who had been granted miraculous pregnancies up to this point. And that’s the point: this radical choice proclaims to the world that God is choosing a new route; this birth will be completely different from all the others. God is entering humanity from the very bottom of society, where God is needed the most.

And Luke, our gospel writer this morning, gets that. Luke’s gospel, Luke’s good news, is all about God’s preference for the poor; Luke’s emphasis is on Jesus’ ministry to the lowest of the low. And this emphasis doesn’t start with the angels announcing to those smelly societal outcasts, shepherds, though that certainly is another big hint from Luke about what we’re going to hear from his recounting of a miraculous birth and life and ministry. Luke gets to his emphasis on the poor earlier than those shepherds abiding in their field. He hits us with it in the care that he shows in presenting Mary’s story, especially in contrast to Elizabeth’s. Elizabeth’s tale, as wonderful as it is, is the way things used to be done. And her son, John the Baptist? Well, we know where he fits in here. For two week’s in a row this Advent, if you’ve been paying attention, we heard two different gospel writers recount him saying that he’s just not worthy to even lace up the sandals of the one who would grow up under Mary’s care. The former things are past and gone and over; the new things, God’s new-fangled ways, are what are important here.

This is indeed radical stuff. Don’t believe any of the prosperity gospel preachers who are so popular who preach that if God loves you, you will be rewarded with material goods and wealth. Luke would hear none of that and Luke tells us that Jesus wouldn’t either. Luke reminds us that Jesus not only came for the least among us, but indeed came from that very place of poverty himself in the fact that it was Mary who bore him.

Listen to Mary. Hear her story and let it fascinate and move you too. Give into any urgings that you might have to just sit with those few words of interchange between Mary and Gabriel, who was probably wondering, as he spoke aloud those words of comfort and surprise, just what God was up to this time. Let Mary’s story live in our culture. And watch for new ways in which God continues to act as you end your Advent preparations and at last celebrate that miraculous gift.