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.
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