When I announced on Facebook last week that my book is coming out in June, I experienced that Facebook phenomenon - where people from different parts of my life, people I haven’t seen in decades, people I knew in different parts of the country or different countries, responded to me with well wishes. It was so nice to hear from them, but I grew increasingly uncomfortable when I realized how many of these people sending me kind messages, are actually in the book. So many of them.
People who said, “So excited for you, Kara! I’ve just pre-ordered my copy!” are going to open the book unsuspectingly in June and get partway through and suddenly recognize themselves on the page. Some are there by name, many others not, but when they get to their part they will know it’s them.
But somewhere in the middle of the week I shifted from mild horror to gratitude. God has met me through so many different people, in small ways, and big ways, and ways most of them were probably not even aware of at the time. So my story is their story too.
We are part of each other’s story. We forget this, but it’s true. We are all connected. Every person’s story is part of other people’s stories, and they are all one big story – the story of God, the story of love.
“In the sixth month,” our text begins, which isn’t a beginning at all. We act as though the incarnation of God coming into this world in the flesh begins here, with this moment of great invitation in the conversation between Mary and Gabriel, but it doesn’t begin here, really. This part of the story starts six months into someone else’s story – Elizabeth and Zechariah, who were old and childless and are now expecting a baby boy who will be the messenger of the Messiah, and Elizabeth is 2/3 of the way through her pregnancy by the time Gabriel is sent to recruit Mary.
But that story is inside another story too, and that inside of others; this thing goes back farther and reaches out wider than any one person or family, any one people or nation, any one year or century or millennia, even. Abraham and Sarah, Ishmael and Hagar are part of this story, Isaac, Rebekah and Jacob and Leah and Rachel and generations and centuries of a people longing for a Messiah, people enduring oppression and finding freedom, losing and finding their way, trusting and longing for God. It’s the story shaped by the rise and fall of empires, by flood and promise, and it goes all the way back to a voice speaking life into being, light into darkness.
No story is ever on its own, no person’s story is ever just their own. Which is to say, no moment or act of love is ever isolated – it’s all connected; we are all connected.
So when Mary receives this invitation to be part of God’s coming in, God’s love coming right inside of all of this to be with us as one of us, she hears also, at the same time, that she is not in this alone. That even now her relative Elizabeth in her old age has conceived a son and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren. Gabriel says, Your part starts here, Mary, but Elizabeth and Zechariah – this is their story too that you are stepping into. And they are already part of yours. You are not in it alone.
This is the 4th week of Advent when we light a candle for Love. Love is what we are here for - we are made to love and be loved. Love is our life instinct, the energy that drives us back to our source and purpose. Love is our deepest belonging – to God and to each other.
Loving each other is to vulnerably give ourselves to another and receive them, and when we love another person we feel that depth of belonging, and tap into the belonging that holds us all together in God. God breathes love into us and that makes us alive, connected, human. And love never ends. Not ever.
No life is ever just our own – we lie to ourselves when we act like this is so. We always belong to all others and they to us. But from this moment onward, Mary will feel it. She will know herself and all others to be held in God’s love – she will see her participation. Mary was being invited to have her life commandeered by love. She is being asked to bear God, as God comes in to love the world.
“Favored one” Gabriel calls her. That’s a misleading translation that makes it sound like it’s something Mary has done that has endeared her especially to God and earned her this place. Really, that word “favored” means, recipient of God’s grace, one on whom God is pouring grace. So when Gabriel says, “Don’t be afraid, you have found favor with God,” he is really saying, Don’t be afraid, God is pouring grace on you.
God will come into Mary’s impossibility with grace and claim her for the embodiment of love, and from this point onward, she must see the world as loved by God. She can’t not see all other people as those to whom, for whom, God comes in, because it is through her own body that God is coming to them, it is by her hands and words and actions and tears and laughter that love will touch the world.
Mary’s invitation is unique – to bear God within her, let God love the world through her. But Mary’s invitation is also the invitation God extends to us all every moment. To vulnerably open our hearts and let God claim our lives. When we do we too will bear God within us and let God love the world through us.
How can this be? Mary asks. It’s impossible. And Gabriel preaches to Mary what our own tired, fearful, confused and frustrated hearts need to hear, though we can barely allow ourselves to hear it. Our vigilant safeguarding heads block us from hearing it, but I invite you to hear it now, as Mary’s heart opened up in spite of her own protective head to hear this from God’s messenger: Nothing is impossible with God. Nothing.
Lots of things are impossible with us. So many things are impossible. We know impossibility in the core of us, and we fight against it all the time. We can’t extend our lives, our health, our minds. We can’t guarantee those we love stay always safe and well. We have broken dreams we can’t reclaim, and broken relationships we can’t figure out how to mend, and brokenness woven right into all the complex layers of our relating to each other as a nation. Day after day, we live right up close to impossibility. I mean look at us, this virus that we can’t see is ravaging the human population of the whole entire world. If there were ever an Advent to feel our human impossibility, this is it. This is the time for sitting in the darkness and longing for the light.
So when God sends messengers to tell us that you and I will bear the love that we are incapable of bearing, that we will be people through whom connection and belonging reach into the world, into the places of need and struggle, to those from whom we feel impossibly disconnected, we too say, How can this be?
How can this be since I am afraid? How can this be since I feel nothing but contempt or confusion toward those people? How can this be since we have nothing in common, we don’t believe the same things even? How can this be since I am so far away? How can this be since I have nothing to give? No experience, no resources, no voice? How can this be?
And the word comes back to us just as that word has come to all bearers of God’s love since the beginning of time: Nothing is impossible with God.
So it’s ok if things are impossible with us. Nothing is impossible with God.
Your story is the story of God who comes in. And it’s part of the stories of all those around you. It doesn’t start with you, your involvement begins in the sixth month—or the sixth year, the sixtieth year, the six hundredth year—of someone else’s story, just as someone else’s story starts in the middle of yours, and one day you may find that you are mentioned as having been a bearer of God to them. We are all connected, and we are all held in love.
I love that Mary’s first move after the angel leaves is to hightail it to Elizabeth and Zechariah’s house. Perhaps like those three in those days, we might look on one another as recipients of grace and remind each other that we are not in this alone. Perhaps like they did, we might help each other trust the God who comes in as God seeks to come into the world through us, and together navigate the deep toll it takes to live in such stark awareness of being so very beloved, among and alongside all these other deeply loved humans on this planet for whom God comes in. And together, like Zechariah, Elizabeth and Mary, right up against our own impossibility and the world’s, we will live from the nothing being impossible for God.
May it be so.
Come, Lord Jesus.
Amen.
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