How Will This Be? (Luke 1:26 - 38)

Last week, we spoke of Mary and Elizabeth, and the ways in which their encounters with the divine changed them, how their lives had been upended, and how their encounter with one another may have helped them cope with their encounters with the divine.  This week, we back up a little and talk about one encounter and what it foretold.

The Angel Gabriel, making one of only three appearances, comes to Mary in the sixth month of the year, in June,  when things were already blisteringly hot in Palestine, when women like her had already started waiting until evening to water the sheep.  Nazareth was a little sheep town, barely a wide spot in the Jerusalem road, and Mary was engaged to an upstanding young man named Joseph, who was of the illustrious line of David.  And Gabriel says “Greetings, O favored one, the Lord is with you!” And she’s troubled, because she’d never thought of herself as favored in any way, shape or form, and immediately she’s on her guard.   Because being favored by God wasn’t necessarily all hearts and roses . . . Just look at Isaiah, for Pete’s sake.  He was favored by God and got branded on the mouth by a bunch of flying snakes. Or Ezekiel, who had to eat a whole scroll, without even the benefit of salt.

But the angel tells her to not be afraid—she’s not afraid, she thinks, just troubled,  but never mind—“Do not be afraid,” the angel says, “because you have found favor with God. And behold!  You will conceive and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus.”  And that was pretty specific, she’s even told what to name him . . . and what a name it is: Jesus, yeshua in Hebrew, savior.  But wait, there’s more!  “He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High.  the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.”

And her head is reeling, and she blurts out the first thing that enters it, the million-dollar question: “How will this be, since I am a virgin?”  And the first thing I think of is that she’s asking out of curiosity, she’s asking because she really wants to know.  After all, she is a virgin, she hasn’t known a man or a god . . . How is this going to come about?  Is God himself going to, uh . . . you know? Because she may be a young girl, but she knows what’s what, she knows how babies are made . . . she hasn’t spent the last five years watching livestock for nothing.  Just how is this going to happen, exactly?

I also think she isn’t at all certain which way things are going to go—as Luke says, she’s trying to determine just what sort of greeting this is going to be. I think she’s asking how it will be for her, how will her life be after all this, after being touched by the divine, in whatever form it’s going to take.  Maybe it’s just me, but I hear a fair amount of wariness on her part, a fair amount of suspicion in this brief exchange.  After all, she’s heard the stories of how the call of God can—and usually does—transforms the lives of those who are being called, and most of the time, it’s not in a way they would desire.

But there’s a third sense in which she asks the question, and it’s born out of a deep-seated sense of inadequacy, of insignificance before the power if God.  As we saw last time, she is just a slip of a girl, barely into adolescence, and certainly not mother-of-savior-from-the-house-of-David material.  And  besides, she’s grown up in the toxic stew of the patriarchy, which insists that women were simply appendages to men.  She couldn’t even go into the temple, for goodness sake, to worship her God.  How will this be, she is asking, that something so glorious could come through the offices of something as insignificant as me?

At a church in Starkville Mississippi to which we belonged, there was a Baptist named Lee.  Well, like me, he used to be a Baptist, but now he was a Presbyterian.  And I may have mentioned him before, but he’d joined our church because he was in the Deep South, and he wasn’t from around there, and the Baptist churches in Starkpatch, as we used to call it, were a little too … hard core for him.  Again like me.  But unlike me, Lee was in in the military, and he’d seen a lot of things, a lot of different people and cultures, and he’d outgrown the parochial judgementalism of a lot of Southern Baptist congregations--not all of them, save your cards and letters—but a lot of them, there in the buckle of the Bible Belt.

Anyway, after he’d been there a year, he was elected elder, just like that, and because we’d gotten to know one another in that brief time—probably because of our common ancestry as refugee Baptists—he came to me all upset about his election.  I tried to reassure him that this church did that all time, elected relative newcomers, and that we trusted the Lord to get these things right.  That didn’t reassure him much, and it certainly didn’t help when I related our pastor’s opinion that that congregation elected anybody who wears a suit (I’ve since gotten better at pastoral care).  He kept saying stuff like “I’ve only been a Presbyterian for a year, and here I am an elder already.  How can this be?”

Have you ever asked that question?  I know I have, especially during the early stages of my call into pastoral ministry, at the beginning of my transition from earthy biologist to, well, somewhat less earthy pastor.  And I suspect many of you have asked it as well, and not just at the call of God, either.  Perhaps when you you’ve gotten an unlooked-for promotion, or come into some unlooked for money, or something equally unexpected.  It’s the same question as “why me,” isn’t it?  The same question we ask when bad things happen as well . . . “I’ve had two colds, three fevers, and now this.  Why me, Lord, why me?”

Well.  Gabriel seems to think she’s asking in the first, purely biological sense, the mechanical sense, because he answers that one. Maybe he thinks that’s the only issue, or maybe he knows that it wouldn’t do any good to tell her any more, about the wonder of the shepherds or the star, about the heartache of seeing her child spiked to a tree . . . Maybe he had no answers to give her, maybe he didn’t know how she was worthy, or why God picked her for this terrible, wonderful, journey.

Whatever the case, here’s what he tells her: “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you . . .” and there’s not a lot of detail here, is there?  There’s not a lot of “here’s how it’s going to happen” stuff that we moderns tend to ask for.  He just tells her that the power of God is going to do it, through the Holy Spirit.  And because of that the child will be called holy, which as you know means he has been set aside and consecrated for the work he will do, and all Mary knows about that work is what she’s been told: he’s going to inherit the throne of David, and of his kingdom there will be no end.

The angel comes down, makes a pronouncement, and boom!  The life she expected for herself—a quiet life as the wife of a carpenter, safe and protected, perhaps even loved—is gone in an instant.  No wonder she questioned, no wonder she wondered how all of this was going to come about, in what  sense she was favored.  We all question when faced with a life-altering circumstance.  I remember for a while I flopped around like a fish on a hook when I felt the call, when I heard something that I knew would change my life forever.  And of course, my call didn’t just change my life, but the lives of my family as well.  Pam likes to say that she didn’t hear God, but her life was changed anyhow.  And in many ways, we were like Mary: virgins at following the will of God.  We didn’t know exactly what we were doing, but it turned out ok in the end.

Of course, it doesn’t happen with individuals and families: the lives of whole groups, whole communities can change in an instant at the intervention of God.  It’s kind if what we’ve been talking about for the past year: are we doing what the Lord would have us do?  We have been in a process of discernment, of trying to listen to God and figure out what God would have us do.  And when we find it, when we know that what the will of God is, we might well ask “How will this be?  We don’t have the financial resources, or the people, or the energy to do this, Lord.  How can this be?”

And when that happens, as it surely will, as it surely is happening even as we speak, we would do well to heed ol’ Gabriel’s promise.  To hear it, to understand it, and to accept it, deep down where we live:  “Nothing will be impossible with God.”  Amen.

Three Women (1 Samuel 2:1 - 11; Luke 1:39 - 55)

     Hannah was inconsolable—she could not bear a son.  Her husband Elkanah and she had tried and tried and tried, but to no avail: she couldn’t get pregnant.  Meanwhile, her husband had a second wife, Penninah by name, who could:  she’d given him sons all right, and daughters too, and she never let her forget it.  Not that she ever could, with the Penninah’s children running around like little wild Philistines, running and jumping fooling around, doing typical child stuff, which Hannah saw, and it broke her heart to see them, she yearned so deeply and acutely.  And at the same time, the children knew that her childlessness made her a second-class woman, and it was reflected in how they treated her as well, and with the typical cruelty of children, it could get pretty bad.

Not that it wasn’t that way with Penninah; after all, the children took their cues from her . . . her taunting could be devastating, leaving Hannah in tears.  Of course, dear, sweet, clueless Elkanah never saw it, because Penninah was careful to be miss goody two-sandals around him, then when his back was turned, she’d throw Hannah a dirty look or a rude gesture.

Things would get really bad when they’d all head up to Shiloh once a year, so her husband could make sacrifice to the Lord, as was required of every head of household.  For some reason, Penninah would use these opportunities to really lay it on thick, to really provoke Hannah, who would stand there, outside the gate of the temple (in those days, it was not fixed in Jerusalem), weeping hot, bitter tears. When her husband would see her, he would ask what was the problem, she’d explain that she was heartbroken because she could not give him sons.  Elkanah would always say the same thing: “Am I not more important to you than ten sons?” and he would give her a double portion.  Such is the arrogance of men.

One day, the priest Eli is sitting on the seat next to the temple doorpost, and he observes her crying, and she is moving her mouth, but no sound is coming out.  He concludes that she’s drunk—she is a woman; she couldn’t be praying—and he says “How much longer will you be drunk?  Put away your wine.”  But in fact, she is praying, and she tells him:  “Please don’t consider me a worthless woman; I have made a vow to the Lord, that if the Lord will give me a son, I will dedicate him to God all of his days.”  And moved by her plight and her evident humility—or perhaps just trying to get rid of her—Eli says “Go in peace, and the God of Israel grant your petition that you have made.”

And lo!  God grants her request, and she bears a son whom she names Samuel.  And true to her vow, she dedicates her son to the Lord, and Samuel becomes the last and greatest of the judges.  More important, as he grows in wisdom and stature, he guides Israel in the choosing of Kings: first the ill-advised Saul,  it then King David, whose return and eternal reign all of Israel awaits.

And Hannah, now joyous beyond belief, and though she knows none of the future of her illustrious son, nevertheless gives God all the thanks and glory, singing “My heart exults in the Lord; my horn is exalted in the Lord. My mouth derides my enemies, because I rejoice in your salvation.”

 

 

Mary was frightened . . . She’d told the angel, messenger of God “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word,” because what else was she going to do?  She knew a done deal when she saw it.  This was an angel of the Lord who was talking, not some penny-ante, two-bit sprite.  An angel of the same Lord who created the earth and the heavens, who brought her people out of the land of the Pharaoh, and who restored the faithful remnant after the captivity in Babylon.  And Mary, just a slip of a girl, barely of marriageable age, had about as much chance of resisting the will of that Lord as a camel had of fitting through the eye of a needle.

And now she was scared, and it was not hard to understand why: the local authorities, the Lord bless them, had a way of dragging adulterous women into a plaza and pummeling them with rocks until they were dead.  And Mary did not like the finality of that one little bit.  Besides, she was betrothed to a wonderful, gentle man, the son of a carpenter, who made her feel safe and warm, and she just knew what he would do when he found out, and she couldn’t blame him . . . after all, Joseph hadn’t seen the Angel, hadn’t felt its power, hadn’t seen its golden . . . she guessed they’d been wings, swirling diaphanously about them both.

What Mary doesn’t know is that Joseph—a kind man who’d been prepared to put her away quietly—would have his own visitation.  But because she doesn’t know, as soon as she can tell she really is with child—she just feels different, somehow—she flees to the countryside, and her distant cousin Elizabeth’s house, who is going through her own identity crisis.  While Mary had gone overnight from young bride to marginalized outcast, her cousin had gone from scorned childless woman, to an aged woman with child, with all the dangers that entails.

When Mary arrives, Elizabeth is preparing supper for her husband Zechariah, a somewhat minor priest.  And immediately when Mary comes in the door, she feels a lurch in her belly as her child leaps in her womb.  A smile of wonder slowly spreads on her face, and a stream of laughter comes burbling out, not one filled with derision, but overflowing with joy.  And in that instant, their eyes meet, and each one knows what has come to pass with the other, and an instant bond comes about between them.  Mary’s uncertainty and fear vanish, while not exactly gone, are diminished, and she feels safe and valued for the first time in a long time.

Now, Luke is focused on the Savior’s coming, and we can’t blame him for that, so he doesn’t give any but the barest details of that visit.  But we have the time to stop and consider the dynamics of that remarkable encounter.  Do the women speak—as women are wont to do—about their respective men?  Do they speak in that loving, yet exasperated, way about straight-as-an-arrow Joseph and crotchety old Zechariah?  I imagine they did . . . But I also think they spoke of other things, deeper things . . . How they both felt about their lives and roles—Elizabeth’s now, and Mary’s soon to be.  I imagine the older cousin gives advice to the younger, and holds her hand as she pours out her hopes and fears, and that Elizabeth worries aloud about the dangers of a late-in-life pregnancy, and Mary is bears witness to that as well.

In fact, I imagine that what the visit is for both of them is pastoral care, what we call a ministry of presence.  But it’s not some hierarchical, one-sided relationship where one person listens to the plight of the other, as important as that can be.  The women are instead present for one another.  It’s a presence based on mutuality, based on trust, based on compassion.

A thousand years earlier, Hannah—reviled and considered of value only as a brood mare—had two potentially pastoral encounters.  The first, with her husband Elkanah, ended up being all about him: “Surely I am worth more to you then ten sons,” he told her.  In the other, with the priest Eli, she is reviled as a drunk, before he remembers himself, and offers his assurance that her wish will be fulfilled.  But still and all, she sings a song of joy to the Lord.

Luke tells us that the Holy Spirit came upon Elizabeth and Mary, and though he may not have meant it this way, I like to think that the Spirit was there in the relationship between the two.  After all, the Spirit is relationship, is in relationship, an eternal dance with God the Creator and God the one who saves.

And Mary, like Hannah before her, sang her joy and wonder to the Lord: ““My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, who has looked on the humble estate of his servant.”  Amen.

Restoration Dreams (Mark 1:1 - 8, Isaiah 40:1 - 11)

The Dream of the 6^th Century Scribe

We have been under attack for a decade; our king, Jeconiah, has been playing fast and loose with his allies, first paying tribute, then not paying tribute . . . First with the Egyptians, then with the Babylonians . . . It was confusing, to say the least . . . We were in constant turmoil, we always have been, situated on a prime invasion route between the north and the south as we were . . . Then the Babylonians bested the Assyrians, and the deportations began, the first wave ten years ago,  and now it was our turn . . .

An when they come, I am sitting in the gate of the Temple’s outer court, ruling on disputed matters, using the law of the Lord God Adonai as my guide.  Since the time of the judge, this has been left to us scribes.  We are, after all, scholars, experts in the Law.  So it is when I am plying my appointed profession, practicing my holy calling, that I hear the ringing of livery and the tramping of feet, slowly approaching the gate.  And a dozen Babylonian soldiers file into the plaza before the gate and spread out, spears interlocked in close order.  An officer strides forward and stands before me and says “Are you Josiah, scribe of the Jews?” (I am named Josiah, after the great King) And I say “I am . . . Have you come to worship the Lord God Almighty?”

Ignoring the question, the soldier says “I have orders to take you to the caravan.” And he leads me away, out of the city of The Lord God—the only city I have ever known—and to a waiting line of wagons.  It is a long line, and crammed into the wagons I can see many of my friends and acquaintances.  There is the Chief Priest, my counterpart on the priestly side, and his entire corps of sub-priests.  In the wagon they led me towards, I see my assistant, and most of my subordinate scribes.  As a matter of fact, in the closest wagons, I see the entire hierarchy of the Jerusalem Temple, learned men all; indeed, in other wagons he could see all the elites of the city, the cognoscenti—the scholarly and rich, the major land-owners, the landlords of free laborers and merchants . . ..

And with a creaking of harness and a groaning of wheels, the caravan begins to move, and as it does, we see fires bloom like evil sunflowers behind us, all around the city.  A,bove it all, we can see the Temple, burning fiercely—the heart of our religion, the very dwelling-place of God, crumbling before our eyes.  And despair, unending, unutterable despair, descended upon us all, because without a house, without an abode, how could the Lord be among us?  How could our God be on earth?  And we begin to hear the screams, and smell the odor of burnt flesh, and after the sounds and smells fade, we can see the glow of the burning city as we get further and further away.

The trip to Babylon is like an evil dream, a dream filled with deprivation and hunger.  The wilderness between Judah and Babylon is rocky and wasted, and wells are few and far between, and many die of thirst and the elements.  But at last, we came to Babylon, shining city of hanging gardens and the height of Middle Eastern civilization, but all is lost on us, we are bereft, without hope, cut off from our homeland and, more important, our God.  As the psalmist wrote:  “By the rivers of Babylon—there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion.”

And over the intervening years, the yearning for our Jerusalem home never went entirely away, but it did dim, a bit.  We in the first generation had it the worst, of course.  The deportees, like myself, had beem important, the cream of Jerusalem society—and we are no longer on that level in Babylon.  For my part, I  went from chief scribe of Judah to day-laborer on the garden walls.  But as time has passed,, the pain had become a dull ache, always there, but more of a dark, background rumble.  In spite of ourselves, we are becoming assimilated.

The Babylonians have never restricted our religion . . . They know, perhaps, that the free practice of religion goes a long ways towards suppressing revolt.  And so tonight, as I walk to the ceremonies at a neighbors house, I look forward to hearing the evening’s portion of Torah, but when I get there, there is a young poet, a descendant of the great prophet Isaiah, who lived nearly two centuries before.  And the verse the poet recites stuns me and all who are present, and stirs something within us that we had long ago forgotten: hope.

“Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her, that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has served her term . . .” And as the news of this new word from God spreads throughout the exile community, we are comforted . . . Comforted and reminded of the love and mercy of our God.

 

The Dream of the 1^st Century Scribe

People flit like a ghosts through the rubble . . . Children cry because they have little to eat . . . The market is barren, only a little bug-ridden flour and moldy bread to be had, and that at grossly overinflated prices . . . Neighbors gouging neighbors, it’s what the market can bear, even if we cannot. I am one of those fluttering spirits, moving from place to place, visiting old haunts, looking for friends, acquaintances, anyone to give comfort.

The Romans moved out in the night, leaving a skeleton crew of burly centurions, more to be visible, more to remind us of their power and presence than keep the peace.  As if the smoking ruins don’t speak enough of their power, and they certainly look unconcerned with the peace . . . Jerusalem is a wreck, its denizens no more able to mount a resistance than cats and dogs who clog the gutters after a rain.

The Romans crushed the Jewish revolution handily, after letting it fester and congeal for five years before, although it had been building for decades before that.  But almost overnight, their fabled army came through, burning and looting and raping the fight right out of us, leaving us hungry and tired and hopeless, our future bleak and uncertain.

Not that there is anything certain about life outside the city . . . The countryside is divided, with neighbors fearing neighbors, squabbling over what to do.  The price of oil—olive oil, that is—is unreasonably high, once again the result of supply and demand. Furthermore, Emperor Nero died last year, and there is unrest in Rome. Four men have been acclaimed emperor, only to be assassinated, one by one. Now Vespasian, the very general who took Jerusalem, has been crowned. Talk about uncertainty.

And, as I stumble down a dark, rubble-strewn alley, I begin to hear chanting somewhere ahead.  A synagogue, I tell myself, and continue in that direction. The sound grows first stronger, then weaker, and I have to backtrack some, but eventually I arrive outside a house that’s relatively intact, and I hear the chanting from within.  I peer into its candle-lit interior, and as my eyes adjust to the light, I begin to make out the shapes of people, sitting on rows of crude benches, perhaps twenty-five or thirty of people in all.  One of them glances behind as the door shuts and scoots over with a smile, making room for me on the end.

Glancing around, the first thing I see is that the congregation, if that’s what you can call it, is made up of both men and women; I drop my jaw in amazement.  Further, I can see that it is mostly slaves and free laborers—kitchen workers, maids, stable boys—with nary a purple robe in sight. As I take this all in, a woman comes to the fore, and begins to speak, and now I know that I’m definitely not in a synagogue.  In fact, I am suddenly very uncomfortable: what are these people doing, men and women sitting shoulder to shoulder?  And letting a woman say anything, much less come to the fore, in a position of leadership, makes me downright angry.

I am just about to stomp out of there, perhaps to go and report them to whatever Jewish authority that’s left, when I hear what she is reading from the scroll in her hands: “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”  And I’m thinking “Jesus Christ?  Jesus Christ?  What news could possibly be good news regarding him?  I myself saw him crucified, forty years ago, a toddler sitting on my father’s shoulder, and he was dead, dead, dead.”  And now I know what this place is, who these people are . . . They are people of the Way, follower of an executed Jew, and I sit there in that ruined house, scowling and waiting to hear what could possibly be this good news.  It will just give me more fodder when I turn them in to the San Hedrin.  If I can find out where they’re holed up, that is.

“As it is written in the prophets, ‘See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way; the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’”  And as a scribe, I know she is quoting first from Malachi—the part about the messenger who’ll prepare the way—and then Isaiah, the part about the voice crying in the wilderness.  And I can see that the author is associating these times with those of the deportation, and we all know that after the comfort was predicted, it came about, that the Lord God rescued the faithful remnants from Babylon and restored them to the rubble of a conquered Jerusalem.  Now she has me interested . . .

And I can tell others in the congregation are as well . . . They begin to stir, to utter “hallelujahs” and “amens” and suddenly, as if blinders are removed, I can see what this reading is all about, what this “good news” is all about: it is about the same thing that second Isaiah’s was:  hope.  Somehow, the life and teachings of this wandering rabbi, executed for sedition four decades before, gives them comfort, gives them hope . . .

And as I sit there, bruised and battered from my season of despair, I begin to feel it too, as if it is a contagion.  I tooI begin to feel the presence of the Lord God in that place, and I hear the tale of long-dead John the Baptizer, compared to that long-ago voice in the wilderness, who proclaimed the coming of that good news, who swore that he was not fit even to tie the sandals of the crucified one . . . I listen to the testimony, hear the words of hope, and I begin to believe.  Against all evidence, against all sense, really, I begin to experience hope.  Comfort, comfort, O my people.

 

The Dream of the 20^th Century Scribe

As I work long into the night on an interpretation, laboring to get it right, I try to avoid the nabbed of competing voices, but the filter into my consciousness nevertheless.  Ebola stalking the land, turning West Africa into a charnel house, and sending a world into panic.  ISIS stalking the Middle East, maiming and beheading everyone who gets in the way.  Oil prices—crude oil, that is—while down at the moment, will certainly rise to choking levels by summer’s light.  And violence blooms like evil flowers across the land . . . And I think—not for the first time, nor I suspect, for the last—where is the good news in all this mess?

But it is the time of dreaming, it is the time of hope, and on this second Sunday of Advent, I remember the prophets beat, the multi-lensed, multi-generational, multi-epochal song: comfort comfort, O my people, and I plead: come, Lord Jesus, come.  Amen.