In Real Time

 Matthew 1:18-26

My dog can tell time.  She’s just not very good at it. She’s off by like 25 minutes, usually. 25 minutes or so before it’s time to wake up she shimmies up next to me in bed and puts her paw on me, or nudges me with her nose. 32 minutes or so before it’s time to eat she sits next to her  food and stares at us like, what’s wrong with you, don’t you know what time it is? And she’s generally pretty close on when it’s time to take a walk, but if I leave the house to get something out of the car, she thinks I’ve been gone for hours.

 

We can tell time too, but we’re not too good at it either.  We think time has to do with what we have to get done or how far ahead or behind we are. We make time about efficiency and productivity, about competition and scarcity. For most of us, if you ask what we wish we had more of, we’d say “time,” and if you ask us how we’re doing, we’d probably say “busy.” 

We might be conscious of minutes, or even seconds, but we’ve often got no sense of real time, time as God created it, time as God invaded it, time as God is redeeming it, time that gets shared in the meantime with past, present and future, with all those who exist for something other than using up time.

 

On Wednesday, Christmas Eve, we will gather together to share again the story of the beginning of Jesus.  A moment that changes time, that fills time with eternity and resets the trajectory.

The story of Jesus begins somewhere.

 

Each of the four gospels begin the story of Jesus differently. John begins in the beginning was the word and the word was with God, all cosmic and poetic, and the word became flesh and dwelt among us. And then jumps to grown-up John in the wilderness explaining he is there to prepare the way for the Messiah who is promised.  This story, John is saying, is transcendent and ungraspable, and even when it’s right in front of us, we miss it, and the first words Jesus says in John are “Come and see.”

Mark starts with John the Baptist too, “the Beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ” and gives us a prophecy from Isaiah, about the messenger crying out in the wilderness to all of us, “prepare the way of the Lord,” because he’s coming now, and John appears all camel hair and locusts and wild honey, and by verse 9 he is already baptizing Jesus in the river Jordan, and by verse 12 Jesus is already in a wilderness of his own, facing hunger and temptation and being prepared himself to inhabit time with us.

 We’ve spent most of Advent in Luke, who begins the story of Jesus with Zechariah and Elizabeth and the surprise announcement about John, and moves to focus on Mary, who melds past and future in a prophecy of her own. And in a resonant pocket of time God brings these people together into a timeless community pregnant with the truth that God is about to invade the world in human form, and that, for no reason they can conceive of, they’ve been chosen to bear this great mystery.  By angel pronouncement they’re brought on board, and then through silence, song, blessing and mutual support, their lives shift into a new reality.  

But they’re not taken out of real life or real time. Not only are the stakes enormous, and the confusion undoubtedly palpable, but the regular daily chores don’t stop for this strange and profound reality they must now get their lives around. Maybe after the greeting and the Magnificat, when the days and weeks go by, Elizabeth and Mary might even forget this is all going on, till they ask Zechariah a question and oh yeah, he can’t answer, or the baby within one of them kicks and it all comes rushing back. And in time marked by grape-sized, avocado-sized, grapefruit-sized, the growing promise that what is coming can’t be stopped. Right in the middle of normal life something is unfolding that defies explanation, and they can’t do anything about it except to keep living in it and see what happens next.

Today we move to Matthew’s beginning, literally, it begins “the genesis of Jesus.”  And after 17 verses of laying out the genealogy of Jesus going back to Abraham through the line of David, placing the Christ in context of all the people, prophecies and promises in God’s ongoing story, he ends with  ^“Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, who is called the Messiah.”
Then he begins again, ‘the genesis of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way…’
And he tells us how Joseph is brought into God’s great scheme of salvation.  

We are all living inescapably in the time when all will die.  We see it all around us, the nations tremble and kingdoms totter, cruelty, selfishness and power, hunger and pain, the capriciousness of death that doesn’t care how hard we work to avoid it, that comes unannounced to children and ultimately to us all, we’re here and that is what it means to be human beings. We live, we die. 

But now, we’re told, there is one coming from outside the time when all will die. Jesus comes from the time when all will live, invading the time when all will die, coming in alongside us, with us, for us, to bring us with him into life that will not die.  And when he comes, he brings that timeless, deathless life with him, and redeems time itself, so that no longer is time for measuring and using, for wasting or succeeding. Time is for what time was made for since God made time and God made us: time is for love.

When God comes to Joseph in angel and dream telling Joseph that there is something beyond what we can see and hear and touch that is impossible but real, Joseph is called to step into a different reality from here on out. He is now claimed for love, and his life in time is for another purpose. But that purpose will unfold in the same ordinary way life always does for humans, he will do an ordinary and extraordinary thing, he will claim Mary, love her and, claim this child into his family line and raise him. Joseph’s job is to name him Jesus, literally Yeshua, or, God saves, and then to spend his life practicing trusting that this is so.

When Joseph gets up from this sleep, he will obey. The Joseph who laid down the night before will be gone. The plans he’d made, the reputation he’d built, and the terrible choice he was about to act on, which was the best of his bad options – all of it is gone. 

This is a new beginning, and from this moment on, he is a new person, defined now by love and inhabiting the eternal belongingness of God that is clocked in grace unearned and forgiveness unmerited, an abundant reality where everybody has enough and nobody is dismissed, quietly or otherwise. God-is-with-us is coming into his care, and Joseph will live present in a future that God is bringing into the world through his ordinary life. 

 

When the good news of Jesus Christ begins in the world, each person is called in as they are, from where they are. They’re called to live in trust and obedience, to surrender their lives, to be reoriented and drawn into the God-with-us project that is redeeming the world. Their clock is reset toward time, to presence and anticipation, where story and tears and laughter and trust and forgiveness mark the moments, and even in the midst of dying, lives are for participating in life that will not end. In this new reality, God gives them one another, and shows them just the next thing to do. And then when they’ve done that, the next thing will become clear when the time is right. 

This is how God has done it with all the patriarchs and prophets gone before, and how God will keep doing things with Joseph too.  After the Magi visit with gifts and a warning, Joseph will be told in another angelic dream to evade Herod’s wrath and protect Jesus and Mary by fleeing with them to Egypt, where they will live as refugees in exile for four years.

Matthew’s gospel will tell us this part too – revealing time folding in on itself, an evil king trying to kill the Jewish babies again, just like happened back in Egypt, when God plucked baby Moses out of danger by the hand of an outsider with the cooperation of those who trust God. And so, in the very place his ancestors were enslaved and from which they were freed, Jesus will find safety and refuge, and his own childhood, and Mary and Joseph’s parenting, will be shaped by walking the land of exile and exodus, where the promises of God that are coming to us in him were first spoken.

This past January my family traveled to Egypt.  We stood in temples and tombs that dated 3000 years before Christ.  And when we knelt in an ancient church and peered through glass in the floor into a small stone room atop which it was built, a room two thousand years ago Joseph, Mary and Jesus stayed for
three months, while they were living and traveling in Egypt, I felt like my solid grasp on the world, space and time, was shaken. When I saw the niche carved in the stone wall where the toddler Jesus is said to have slept, on the only remaining Christian street in Egypt, where seven churches crowd atop one another holding relics, story, and the faithful worship of our Christian siblings and forbears through a history my own imagination might not even stretch wide enough to grasp, I understood then that the same story of Jesus, God-is-with-us, is told very, very differently there than we tell it here, and that I, and you, and this congregation, is bound together in living, breathing community with every follower of Christ who has ever lived, summoned in and held by something far beyond ourselves, and all we can do is receive it and watch for what happens next.

 

Right now, life, as modern American people, feels urgent and hard, and tiring, and often sad. The world feels dangerous and confusing. But perhaps it helps to hear that we are not exceptional. That our own story is both unique and completely the same as nearly everyone who has gone before in this time when all will die. That in bodies that die, alongside children that grow up, inside buildings that crumble, and structures that collapse, on a planet in crisis,  the God who creates keeps creating anew, and the God who comes in keeps on coming in. And from time to time we taste the truth that time has been invaded by eternity, and now and then we feel ourselves in the hands of the time-keeper, where love is the purpose and the measure.

 

Maybe this week it happened for you in a Moroccan man noticing you were cold, and inviting you into his shop and offering you tea, or by the feet and voices of those alongside you with the bright sun on your heads and the sharp wind on your faces as you marched for your immigrant neighbors through the streets of our city. Maybe it was in watching another person take care of someone you love with patient tenderness, or wrestling with deep questions over coffee, or sharing with others laugher and pizza, or silence and stillness, or in being enthusiastically received when you shared your wisdom and power point for the hundredth time, or in resting your head on someone’s shoulder, that time seemed to stop passing, or passed in a blink, and you felt the truth of your life, for a moment, unbound and free, near to the God who comes and is even now here with us.

 

The good news of Jesus Christ begins in the world again. Always. Right in the middle of normal life something is unfolding that defies explanation and includes us all. So let’s help each other to obey, and trust, and pay attention, and to join in. And together we’ll see what happens next.

Amen.

 

 

 

 

Presencing, and those in it with us

 Mother Mary and baby Jesus together with Zechariah and baby John the Baptist, in 15th century painting by Lorenzo Lotto titled "The Virgin and child with Saint Zacharias and John the Baptist"

Luke 1:57-80

Yesterday a few of us gathered for brunch and before we knew it, 2 ½ hours had gone by. I had a moment in the middle of it of recognizing, while it was happening, the beauty of the timeless gift of simple presence.

 

We’re three weeks into our Advent experience with Mary, and our own practice of presencing. Last week Mike told us “presencing is is the ability to notice miracles and wonders, and the will to make an appropriate response,” like “Thank you” or silence or blessing. He called presence “The ability to feel awe, respect, and gratitude to God’s coming near, and to make some kind of answer.”

 

When the Angel Gabriel invited Mary to carry Jesus, to bear God as God comes in to love the world, she was invited have her life commandeered by love. With awe, respect and gratitude, Mary answered, Yes.

She wasn’t prepared for this and didn’t actually have what it took. That didn’t matter. God came into Mary’s impossibility with grace, and claimed her for the embodiment of love. And now, from that point onward, she must now 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 God’s love would reach into the world.  

 

And she would not be in it alone. From the moment Mary arrived at Elizabeth and Zechariah’s doorstep, she was welcomed into this truth. This small, unlikely trio became the first human beings to bear among them the coming of God into the world. They bore it song and blessing, awe and gratitude, silence and presence.  These three people were redefined as recipients of God’s grace, insiders in God’s scheme to redeem the world, and God formed them into the community of the cosmic promise to which we too now belong. 

 

Their lives were invaded by transcendence, and now right inside their human weaknesses and mundane realities, their aches and pains, their muteness or pregnancy cravings, their regular, daily existence, they were sharing together the secret of the universe’s redemption. Right up against their own impossibility and the world’s, they began learning together how to live from the “nothing is impossible for God” reality that undergirds everything, always. 

 

When the time came for John to be born, Mary was there, assisting with the birth. She was there to hear the astonishing trust and confident hope in Zechariach’s voice when his silence ended, and to witness the shock when he proclaimed the truth that God had incubated inside him for nine months, the vision of God’s future breaking in. 

 

She watched Zechariah hold that impossible little baby in his old and wrinkled hands, and she was listening the moment his mouth was opened and he announced with conviction, His name is John - his name is “God is gracious.  God is merciful, God gives us more than we could ever even know to long for”- that is his name.  

 

Look at this child! he sang out to his neighbors and friends. Look at how God’s promise to our ancestors is coming to fruition, we are part of it! I am holding it.  Oh yes, it is coming! There is no doubt that God’s salvation of us all is coming.  

 

Mary watched as Zechariah turned and gazed into the brand new, blurry eyes of this utterly impossible child in his first minutes on this earth and he said,

 And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High; for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways, to give knowledge of salvation to his people by the forgiveness of their sins.

By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.’

 

And so, God was preparing Mary for what was to come. And all the while, only she, Elizabeth and Zechariah knew this savior was already among them in that room, quietly, patiently waiting to be born.

 

Soon Mary would make the long, slow, journey back home, back to a Joseph—whom we will see next week, was even at this moment being brought into this community of promise, welcomed by an angel of God into his own place and part in God’s salvation of the world, so that by the time Mary will arrive, Joseph will be ready to welcome her and the impossible child she is carrying.

 

When, a few months later, Mary and Joseph will set out for Bethlehem, they will follow again the same route Mary took back and forth, and eventually arrive at their destination, about four miles past Elizabeth and Zechariah’s town. 

Then, while they are there, the time will come for the baby to be born. 

 

And just to correct our modern, individualistic, Western winter barn myth—where Joseph and Mary are all on their own, knocking on hotel doors, and being turned away by strangers while she’s ready to give birth any second—imagine instead the communal, first century, hospitality-committed, middle Eastern reality that archeologists and scholars describe. Here they will stay, for days or weeks, with countless relatives and neighbors, in the typical, modest, one room house, with a guest room on the roof, and a manger carved into the floor next to the lowered portion of the home that served as a kitchen in the daytime and a safe place to bed the animals at night. When God comes into the world and into their arms, they will not be alone; they will be surrounded by those to whom they belong, supported in community.

 

And so, undoubtedly, Elizabeth, Zechariah and baby John will be present. Elizabeth will attend to Mary as Mary did with her, and Zechariah will attend to Joseph, with the deep wisdom and presence formed in silence and contemplation, and the trust formed in watching the promise begin in the world through the birth of his own impossible son. 

 

The world is broken, and we live with impossibility every day. You and I can’t fix what’s broken. We can’t bring redemption. But we can be here for it. We can be with each other, ready, waiting, present to the God whose presence who comes to us as gift.

 

And tonight, we can simply acknowledge that we’ve been brought in too. Our lives, too have been commandeered by love. We too are recipients of God’s grace. We too are becoming insiders in God’s scheme to redeem the world, those who can’t not see all other people as those to whom, for whom, God comes in. 

 

We too are invited to recognize that it is by our bodies and prayers, our words and silence, our actions and stillness, our tears and laughter, that God comes into the world. In our own living and presencing, Christ is born among us.

And we too are not expected to have anything to offer to the project except our own willing selves – because, as we’ve seen over and over in the lives and stories of those gone before, this happens in impossibility and vulnerability.

 

And we’re not in it alone. We too are welcomed into the community of the cosmic promise, drawn into the now vast and timeless group of that includes people, right now, all throughout God’s beloved world, and these ancestors, and Mother Mary. And inside this small expression who gathers here, just like God gave Mary Zechariah and Elizabeth, God has given us each other, so that together we too might 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. 

 

So, tonight, as we practice presencing, and consider the appropriate responses that arise in such willingness to notice miracles and wonders, we’ll add to Mary’s “yes” and Mike’s list of thank you, silence and blessing, joy, which is perhaps the most instinctive and uninhibited response to noticing of God's presence.  

In other words, as we’re learning to live from the “nothing is impossible for God” reality that undergirds everything always, we will embrace the same readiness to deep delight and nearness to giddy awe with which angels will soon deliver to unsuspecting shepherds the good news of God’s coming near.

 

Let's move into our time of prayer with this poem by Madeline L’Engle:

"First Coming" 

 

God did not wait till the world was ready,

Till ...nations were at peace.

God came when the heavens were unsteady,

and prisoners cried out for release.

 

God did not wait for the perfect time. 

God came when the need was deep and great.

God dined with sinners in all their grime, turned water into wine.

 

God did not wait till hearts were pure.

In joy God came to a tarnished world of sin and doubt.

To a world like ours, of anguished shame

God came, the Light that would not go out.

 

God came to a world which did not mesh,

to heal its tangles, shield its scorn.

In the mystery of the Word made Flesh

the Maker of the stars was born.

 

We cannot wait till the world is sane

to raise our songs with joyful voice,

for to share our grief, to touch our pain,

God came with Love: Rejoice! Rejoice!

 

 Amen.

 

Advent in 300 Words: The Prophets, Joseph, Mary, The Angels

 ADVENT 300 WORD REFLECTIONS

THE PROPHETS (11/26) - by Kara K Root

Isaiah 11:1-10

The prophets, with their vivid eschatological imaginations, lead us into Advent.  Off the grid, out of the empire folks with fantastic stories, absurd confrontations and wild encounters, the prophets criticize and energize. They shake the façade keeping everyone content and accepting the unacceptable. God uses prophets to hold before God’s people a vision of who they really are and who God really is, because they keep forgetting. 

 

The prophets reveal God’s future breaking in now. They anticipate God’s coming, teach us how to watch for it, and show us how to live now from what will be.  In their own lives, they didn’t get to taste the fulfillment they spent their lives promising.  But their holy imagination, ruthless honesty and deep trust shaped our ancestors, our faith, and continue to stir us today.  

 

The prophet Isaiah speaks to a people living in exile, whose imaginations have shrunk to their captivity. Terrible things have happened to them, and they’ve made terrible choices. They’re stuck. Their life is small, their hope is dead. The end.

 

But if it’s not ok, then it’s not the end.  

 

Isaiah paints a poetic image of a new beginning, tender green shoot from the dead ground. Like a whisper, a stirring, a savior comes. Instead of division and striving, self-protection and fear, the savior ushers in a new reality: In the reign of God, all people, all creatures in all the world will live freely, fully, unafraid, connected in peace. Hope is the energy of peace, the anticipation of what is coming, the fuel of our faithful living now.  

May hope grow our eschatological imaginations. With holy imagination, ruthless honesty, and deep trust we wait, with and for each other and for the world, for the coming of Christ.  

We hope with the anticipation of the prophets.

A Different Way of Being

Luke 10:38-42

Most of the time, we read the bible wrong. 

By that I mean, we read the bible like its purpose is to tell us how to act, and what we should be doing.  Really the bible is here to show us glimpses of how God acts, and what God is doing.  But we forget that most of the time. And almost nowhere as much as the story of Mary and Martha. Weird we even call it that, though. Because this isn’t a story about two sisters, pitted against each other, Mary the thinker and Martha the doer, Mary the serene vs. Martha the preoccupied.  This isn’t designed to help us divide the world into Marys and Marthas and decide which one is better (Mary), because Jesus says so.  And it’s certainly not meant to send us home striving to be Marys, while secretly thinking, dear God, everything would fall apart without the Marthas.

 

This is not a story to tell us how to be and what to do. This is a story about an encounter Jesus had with a woman named Martha. It begins, A woman named Martha welcomed Jesus into her home. Let’s start there. She wasn’t wife of so and so, or daughter of who’s its.  A powerful, capable, head of the household woman named Martha welcomed Jesus into her home.  

 

Martha and her sister Mary and brother Lazarus were Jesus’s friends. Martha’s house is where Jesus went when he needed a break from the road, needed to feel like he was going home to his people. It’s where he rested. Where he found solace.  Where he felt known. So let’s get that clear: Martha was arguably the savior’s favorite host. She regularly ministered hospitality to God incarnate. 

And they were all close. They told it like it was to each other, these siblings and Jesus. Martha is the one who reminds Jesus of his power to heal when Lazarus dies, and demands to know, Where were you, Lord?

Martha is a strong, competent person.  And good grief, who knows, she might have been a terrific storyteller or a fantastic card player. I’m just saying, she was possibly really fun to be around, or at least had all sorts of great character qualities that made her an excellent friend to Jesus.  But how would we know that?

We’ve boiled her down to not her best moment.  We’ve made being overwhelmed and stressed out her entire personality.  

 

Sometimes, in my not best moments, I wonder if being overwhelmed and stressed is my entire personality.  It sure feels right now like being overwhelmed and stressed has become our national personality.

 

I could begin to name why it’s our not best moment, and why we are collectively overwhelmed and stressed out, worried and distracted, but I don’t even have to list all the things– because it’s all the things.  It feels like most of us are carrying an internal list all the time.  We’re tense and clenched. Panic-level anxiety is at the ready. All we have to do is reach for it.  And not even that, really, it’s being dropped right into our laps at every turn. For most people right now, it would be hard to name an area of life that doesn’t feel a tad precarious. 

 

So our prayers start to sound a little like Martha when she’s had it, and like the disciples in the boat, being tossed about in the flashing darkness by the loud and terrible storm while Jesus sleeps soundly in the stern, because they say the same exact thing. Lord, don’t you even care? Don’t you even care that we are drowning? 

 

And when I am in a state, what I want is for the person I am dumping my anxiety onto, to join me in the deep end of despair. I want them to say, Oh my goodness, yes! This is terrible! This is, in fact, worse than you even thought!  No wonder you are overwhelmed!  Your panic is totally justified! This ship is going down, no doubt about it! 

At least, that’s what I think I want. That’s what I believe would feel good to hear in the moment. 

 

But here’s the thing about our God, who came into this whole storm of a life with and for us all  – God doesn’t necessarily see things the same way we do.  And even better, God can’t get pulled into our flawed interpretation of reality.

 

Jesus sees Martha for real. He listens past her desperation, and what she thinks should happen to make her feel better, how she thinks things could be put right (Make Mary help me!). He doesn’t sign on to her strategy because he doesn’t buy her interpretation of reality.  Instead he hears her need. He listens to the heart of her. He sees and upholds her humanity.  

 

Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things.  There is need of only one thing.  Mary has chosen the good, and it will not be taken away from her.

 

At first this might have sounded super annoying to her. Maybe she didn’t want to give up her strategy. Make her help me.  Maybe her righteous anger felt too hot to let go just yet. But I suspect it had a different effect. There is something so powerful about being seen. Martha. I see you, Martha. You are worried. You have so much weighing on you.  I see your distress, and I see that you are pulled in many directions.  

And then he says, There is need of only one thing.

 

And oh, I wish he had expounded on this! But he goes on to say, Mary has chosen the good part. And it will not be taken away from her.

 

Jesus will not participate in the lie that we are drowning, that things are urgent, that we are alone, no matter how real or overwhelming it all feels to us. Instead, the one with the power to quiet the storm reminds us again, I care about you.  And I care about your sister. And I am right here.  You are not alone. You have a choice. And so does everyone else.  I won’t take that choice away. 

 

We don’t have to live as though we are alone, as though it is all up to us, as though we are against one another instead of in it together.  Whatever the storms around us, between us or inside us, they are never more powerful or more real than God.  We are not drowning.  The one who made and loves us all is right here in our midst, we cannot be destroyed. We can feel overwhelmed, terrified, worried, anxious and afraid. We will even die.  But however bad it feels, or even gets, we are held in the love that does not waver or falter or fail.  Love does and will prevail.

 

When Martha is feeling at the end of her rope, she actually comes to Jesus with her panic and her stress, her demand that he change someone else’s behavior, and her accusation, Lord, don’t you even care? That is courageous and faithful and honest.  And Jesus meets her right there - in her misunderstanding of reality and her misguided strategy, and her bold trust, and he invites her to freedom. He invites her into a different way of being, a deeper way of trusting.

 

And I am not going to praise Mary for ditching out on her part of the work. But I am going to listen when Jesus says Mary has chosen the good.  Maybe choosing the good has nothing to do with ignoring what can or should be done. Maybe choosing the good is about turning our hearts toward the presence of God in the midst of whatever we are in.  Maybe it’s about receiving Christ more than doing things for him. Maybe the good has something to do with letting ourselves long for the one needful thing.

 

There is need of only one thing. I want it explained. I want, if I am honest, to be told what to do and think and how to act. I keep repeating that tantalizing, exasperating phrase to myself, turning it over in my mind, There is need of only one thing. It’s mysterious, and feels deeply true, and I don’t know how to grab hold of it, and I want to grab hold of it to make myself feel better. I want to wield it like a strategy.

Instead, I suspect, that very sensation of not knowing what to do with it, of instead letting it grab hold of us like an irritating invitation, that is what we’re nudged toward today. There is need of only one thing. Only one thing is necessary.

 

Sometimes our not best moments become a gateway into a different way of being, an invitation to find a new freedom.  Sometimes dumping our anxiety and our misguided strategies onto God can result in a whole new possibility opening up before us. This is what God does.  God is with us. God is right here. We are worried and distracted by many things.  But there is need of only one thing. 

 

Amen.

 

____________________

Prayer Practice: 

Take an index card or post-it note. Write on it your name, and these words from Jesus.

Put it somewhere you will see it often this week. When you see it, let it stop you. Breathe. Imagine Jesus asking speaking the words to you. 

 

___________, ___________ you are worried and distracted by many things.  There is need of only one thing.  

The holy work of Advent

Luke 1:26-56

 This past week has been a hard week for hope, for me, and I anticipate this coming week, peace will feel like a challenge.  Which is why Advent is such a gift.  If I had to look at the circumstances in the world, in the lives around me, and feel hopeful, or say they speak of peace, I feel hard-pressed to do this.  

My kids’ school has been torn apart by incidents of racist and homophobic hate speech, with two students suspended and whole grades rising up in student-led protests decrying hate and demanding further action.  But through the week, the rhetoric and tone of the students began to change and escalate into a mob mentality of punishing, vigilante justice. It’s become a tangled mess of sin, which is to say, of people forgetting that we belong to each other – at every level –hate being met with hate, fear amping up fear. Revved up teens and exhausted, tense adults are facing off with no clear way forward, certainly not one provided by our culture, which offers nothing resembling mercy, practices vengeance in the name of justice, and persists until lives are destroyed, or until our attention gets grabbed by the next commotion.  

Our kids are doing what we’ve taught them to do, and they’re doing it to a couple of their own.  And that has been breaking my heart this week. Then the drama culminated with the announcement early Friday morning that restroom graffiti was discovered warning of a school shooting on Monday, which means hardly anybody showed up to school on Friday and school will be closed tomorrow, and now we are all suspended, in this state of tension and division. 

 

This, in the shadow of the school shooting in Michigan – the 28^th school shooting in America this year. We are averaging more than two a month, you guys, so all the administrators closing schools in an abundance of caution are not wrong to do so.  And yet another community is suffering unimaginable loss and grief. 

 

 Meanwhile, this morning’s headline read “Omnicron plunges the world into collective uncertainty.” As if we haven’t already been living in collective uncertainty for coming up on two years.  And so far we have no idea what this variant means or doesn’t mean, but that doesn't stop us from dooms-guessing.  So we let our already weary and tense selves get worked up and worried about what might be coming. And I don’t know about you, but once I get started, the apprehensions start to flow, and they’re hard to stop. Andy pointed out yesterday that I have a tell, a catch phrase that once he hears it, he knows I’ve handed over the reigns and anxiety is running the show.  It is when I start to say, with urgency and strain in my voice, how badly the dog needs her nails trimmed. 

 

So thank God for Advent. Thank God.

I welcome Advent’s demand that I wait in darkness for the light of God. Because there is darkness - around us, within us.  I believe this, I feel this, I struggle against this and often I succumb to it.  And I need to be told it’s ok to notice it and let myself feel how heavy and terrible it can be.  And yet, I also need to hear there is no darkness into which the Light does not shine; there is no darkness that can overcome the Light, and one day there will be no more darkness at all.  And that does give me hope. I am told to wait for peace, to expect it, to seek it and join it, and work for it, because I can trust that it is coming, that it comes. Into the darkest places, the most hopeless situations, God comes in.  This is what God does.

 

This story before us today pulls us back to the big picture: God comes into this life. 

It’s the continuation of my favorite story in scripture – last week we left silent Zechariah and pregnant Elizabeth, keeping mum about her pregnancy for the first five months too, because who could begin to explain? And who could she tell that would believe or understand?  Last week we jumped ahead to finish their part of the story. But that’s not how it happened – this part is what came in the middle, what shaped the next part, ultimately bringing them to tiny baby John the Baptist’s birth, and the end of Zechariah’s silence with his great proclamation to his startled neighbors, that culminates with exactly the words my soul needs to hear today:

By the tender mercy of our God,
   the dawn from on high will break upon us, 
to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,
   to guide our feet into the way of peace.’

 

So while Elizabeth and Zechariah are suspended in a state of uncertainty, Gabriel appears to Mary and invites her to share in the redemption of God, to let go of all that she though her life would be and step into this new role, God-bearer.  And when she is just as confused and questioning as Zechariah was about how the impossible could happen, Gabriel has a little more patience for her, and says, Even now your relative Elizabeth, who was barren, is in her sixth month, for nothing is impossible with God.  

 

And it doesn’t say that the angel tells her to go to Elizabeth but what else would Mary do? She immediately sets out on the 100-mile journey to visit the person she can share this with completely. And when she arrives, tired and hesitant, at her word of greeting, fetus John flip flops inside Elizabeth and kicks her out of her own silence to welcome Mary with joy and wonder, like a personal gift from God, Who am I that the mother of my Lord would come to me? She blesses Mary and her experience and trust, and Mary declares back to Elizabeth God’s greatness and what God is about to do. And right there the community of mystery-keepers and hope-bearers is formed: these two women, proclaiming the fulfillment of God’s promises with words and by their very bodies, and silent Zechariah taking it all in in wonder and witness.  Being together in this is what makes them able to trust that it is real. Bearing it together is what vanquishes fear and stirs possibility, what breeds hope and helps them anticipate the fullness of God for us all.  

 

We’ve said before that these three were church before there was a church. Even as Christ’s body was being formed, they are the nascent Body of Christ, helping each other remember the real reality breaking into this world, to see it unfolding right here in their very own lives, even. Together they are able to imagine the future God is bringing, can literally see in each other what God is doing for the future of the world, and proclaim it with confidence and trust. Together they move from suspended tension to hope-filled waiting.

 

No matter what unfolds in the world around us, in our own lives and bodies, in our communities and country, in the midst of whatever impossibility we are facing, or anticipating, or fearing, God is always breaking in. There is no life, no moment, no violence or horror, no despair or stuckness, no division, tension or uncertainty that God is not breaking into, not right alongside, not underneath and within. 

 

And we are given to one another- community to bear this reality together for the whole world, to remind each other of hope, to practice belonging and trust, to help each other watch God breaking in, and help each other live into the future that is coming. 

So we wait together in darkness for the light of God, and remind each that it’s ok to notice it and feel how heavy and terrible it can be.  At the same time we watch for the light and we seek peace, because the light shines in the darkness, and we trust that God comes in to bring redemption and life. That’s what God does. That’s who Jesus is: Emmanuel, God-with-us.  

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness cannot overcome it.

 

Amen.

 

Recipients of Grace: God-bearers and Love Sharers

 

Luke 1:26-38

 

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 4^th 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.

Don't be afraid

Luke 1:26-38

Mary

This is the famous scene, the angel’s pronouncement, which the church has called, “The Annunciation.” 

Denise Levertov’s poem, Annunciation, asks,

Aren’t there annunciations
of one sort or another
in most lives?

        Some unwillingly
undertake great destinies,
enact them in sullen pride,
uncomprehending.

More often
those moments,
      when roads of light and storm
      open from darkness in a man or woman,
are turned away from

in dread, in a wave of weakness, in despair
and with relief.
Ordinary lives continue.
                                 God does not smite them.
But the gates close, the pathway vanishes.

The suggestion that we all have moments of divine invitation to be part of something more feels like a stretch sometimes. In a week where I have spent more time than I care to admit being, as my kids call me, a “Karen,” (which apparently means someone who always asks to speak to a manager), in my case, trying to sort out delivery issues for a bed that has twice been in a truck on its way to my house but still has not arrived, between fighting a head cold, scraping my windshield and shoveling my driveway, juggling work, and parenting, and making dinner, and Christmas shopping, and ending most evenings watching the news in open-mouthed horror, this week it feels a bit farfetched for me to imagine being invited by the divine into something extraordinary.  

But imagine this is true. Imagine that we are. (Because it is. We are). 

Imagine for a moment how we might greet these annunciations.

Lots of people, this poem suggests, do great and valuable things in life without any awareness of or appreciation for it. They go through life unaffected, oblivious to the conspiracy of redemption unfolding around, and indeed even sometimes through, their own lives.

Others come to their annunciation moments with definite awareness, and so also fear and trembling at the terrible toll that risking will likely take on their equilibrium.  They back slowly away from the moment of change and choice, turn away and sit back down in their perpetual risklessness, preferring the delusion of safety, the illusion of inertia, to reckless trust.  And those people don’t get to be part of the marvelous things beckoning them to life.

But Mary.  She was open and ready when God’s Yes came. 

God said, I am about to do the unfathomable.  You, Mary, will be in this with me. And she met the moment with her heart open. She saw it for what it was, and she heard the Angel Gabriel when he told her, “Do not be afraid.” 

What is it to say Yes to God’s yes? 

To meet your annunciations when they come? 

To allow yourself to take them in - to be taken in - with bewilderment, curiosity, willingness, and courage?

How can this be? Mary asks, explaining to her celestial visitor the biological impossibility of the thing he is announcing.  It is impossible.

But impossibility is how God always chooses to come. 

So the angel tells her about Elizabeth. 

He could have told her about any of the barren wombs or stuttering spokespeople, dead seas or impenetrable walls, invincible armies or lions’ dens, enormous giants, weak-minded monarchs, messed up protagonists, or hopeless, impossible situations through which God had been bringing salvation and hope to the world since the world began. But he doesn’t look back for his stories.  Instead, he says, Right now, even while we are speaking, God is doing this impossible thing. 

And then the angel tells her about old Elizabeth, whose prayers had dried up, who is even now already bearing this great in-breaking of salvation.  

Nothing is impossible for God, Gabriel answers Mary.

And Mary says Yes. She says Yes to becoming the Mother of God.

There’s a saying in NVC – non-violent communication, that we’ve studied a bit around here – that every No is a Yes to something else. When someone tells you No, they are saying yes to another thing – whether they are needing space, or autonomy, or agency or have made other plans with someone else - there is always a Yes somewhere inside the No.  

I want to suggest the opposite is true as well, for us finite creatures.  There is always a No inside our Yeses. When we say Yes to something, we are saying No to other things – every other option, in fact.  Yes to chicken means we’re not having chili. Yes to marrying this person means No more living life completely on my own terms.  

When we say Yes, especially to God, we are called to renounce something. We must let something go. That’s how love works.  Something we’ve thought our life would be or already was, some illusions about control and invincibility, we must sacrifice something of ourselves, something must die. 

Most often what dies was not really giving us life to begin with, we only thought it was. But sometimes we are called to let go of good things. Things that are giving us a good life, making us happy and stable.  

Mary was engaged to a kind and decent man, about to start her life. A good life. A happy, ordinary, stable life. And when she says Yes to God, all that disappears. Like Elizabeth whose retirement will be invaded by a fiery prophet child, like Hannah long before them, who gave up her own child to God and Samuel became the prophet who lead God’s people, Mary is being pulled into God’s redemption of the world, and it means she is no longer going to be who she was. The Annunciation could very well be called The Renunciation. Gone is the life she had embraced for herself, the path so neatly laid out before her, she renounces it here.  

Jan Richardson’s poem, Gabriel’s Annunciation, begins with these words, 
For a moment,
I hesitated,
on the threshold,
For the space
of a breath
I paused
unwilling to disturb
her last ordinary moment,
knowing that the next step,
would cleave her life,
that this day,
would slice her story
in two
dividing all the days before
from all the ones
to come

How vulnerable it is to let go of all that gave your life meaning and purpose and order and jump into the unknown like this!  But she does, she lets all of it go in order to participate with God in something bigger. 

Hannah went in eyes wide open and offered her renunciation before even the gift arrived.  But Mary, perhaps she didn’t fully grasp all that she was letting go of, the predictable and most likely mostly pleasant life she would never live from then on out.  

She traded it away without knowing, because how can we know what our Yeses will mean until we’ve already been changed by them?  What she traded it for was a life fully alive, she traded it to see God, to be disciple of Jesus.  Mary and his brothers were there among the disciples and followers of Christ, listening to him tell about God’s salvation, watching people be healed, seeing the power of God at work in the world.  Mary watched her child die a terrible death, and she spoke to the angels sitting aside an empty tomb. She was in the room when the Holy Spirit came, and she was a leader in the early church.

Don’t be afraid, the angel says. Not because suddenly everything will be steady and safe. It’s decidedly not safe, and it’s most certainly not steady. It’s absolutely risky and will for sure change everything.  Don’t be afraid because the one who calls you is God.  You are held in God’s love, joined in God’s purposes. 

But Mary is not the only one vulnerable here.  Imagine also the vulnerability of God, not only to come into the human experience, weak and helpless, at the mercy and in the hands of those you’ve created, preparing to live, and die as they do.  But God also takes on the vulnerability inherent in love, the possibility of rejection. Mary could have said No. 

We’re at something of a deficit here, when it comes to our own annunciations. Before we even get to the question of renunciation and trust, we must first accept that God is real, that God is doing something greater, and that God might interrupt our lives and call us into it.

So perhaps the word for you this week is simply this, What would it be to go through your week assuming God is alive and active in the world?  

What if you lived this week like this is true?  

And certainly, this is enough for any of us, because most of us, most of the time, either deny, ignore, or forget that God is real. What if this week you sought to consciously remember?

But let’s go one step farther, if you’re willing, and say, not only is God alive and active in the world, God is inviting you – specifically you – to participate in God’s schemes.  You don’t know when or how the invitation will come, but your annunciation, that is, your belovedness and chosenness in God for a purpose, is as real for you as it was for Mary.  Greetings favored one; the Lord is with you!

You won’t be called to carry the actual Christ-child; that role has been taken. But to live a God-bearing life? That is a role you share with Mary.  There will be specific callings just for you within that role.  People who come across your path, a phone call, a question, an opportunity you will recognize, a vulnerability you’re invited to share.  

More than Mary, even, we are drawn into the very life of Christ – we are invited to life in Christ, a life, C.S. Lewis reminds us, that is “begotten, not made, that has always existed and always will exist.”  We will be drawn into life that doesn't end, life inside the love and connection between Jesus and the Father; and life with the Holy Spirit interfering and leading.  The God-bearing life is Jesus’ life lived through ours, our hands and feet and voice, our words and actions.

Will your moments be lived be grudgingly or unaware? Will you recognize the cost and back away from the invitation? Or will you open your heart and life and join in what God is wanting to do through you?  

Most likely, and most often, it will be to see another person in their humanity and minister to them, or to receive ministry from another person. This is who God is and how God comes, as a minister, and as one in need of ministry, and so it is how we experience God in our lives as well. We bear each other’s burdens and share each others joys, knowing that when we do so, we are joining in what God is already doing – we are where God is.

Immediately after the Angel’s annunciation to Mary, she goes to Elizabeth. When Mary hears that Elizabeth too is pregnant with an impossibility, she makes a beeline for the one person who will understand and can share this with her. And when Elizabeth sees Mary, little fetus John the Prophet in her womb does joyful summersaults, and Elizabeth just knows, without Mary saying a thing, what it means. So Elizabeth prophesies, saying, “Who am I that the Mother of God should come to me?” 

 And then Mary, having been seen, having had this whole crazy thing confirmed right to her face, breaks out in a prophesy of her own, that has come to be known as the Magnificat,which we sang earlier, about what God is doing to set the world right. 

It is not until they share this mystery with each other that they can live into it fully themselves, and I think that’s what it means to be Church.  

We do not say Yes to God alone – we are given each other, given to each other, and there we find God – in words and acts of healing and hope that pull us out of ourselves and the minutia of our self-absorbed worlds, or out of our fear about the general state of things, and into action, along with the God who is already always acting.

So, perhaps your call this week is to imagine God is alive and active. 

Or perhaps it is to anticipate annunciation and say Yes when it comes.  Or maybe, it is to step into your own renunciations and let go of what keeps you from Yes.  In any case, you are held in God’s love, joined in God’s purposes. 

Just a few months after the annunciation, when she delivers this baby and brings God into the world as a tiny, needy, human child – before priests from a far off land come to meet the baby, before she and Joseph flee to Egypt with the baby, before the potty-training, and the talkback, and the teen years – that night, lying in the hay with Joseph by her side, just after placing the sleeping child into the manger, the stable, already crowded with animals, is suddenly invaded by a group of shepherds from a nearby hillside. 

They tell Mary about their own annunciation.  They tell her about a sky full of music and light, about the Angel’s pronouncement that God has come into the human story; God’s Yes to the world is embodied, “Do not be afraid!” the angel had told them, “This is good news of great joy for all people!” 

They tell her this when they’ve said Yes to God themselves, and set out to find the baby wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger. And then, when they share their story and are received, together they all bear this mystery, they are Church.

And Mary, we are told, treasures their words, and ponders them in her heart.  Their words become for her another annunciation, just like Elizabeth’s before them.  Mary continues, her whole life long, to open her heart to God’s pronouncements of love and invitations to involvement.  And the rest of her life she keeps agreeing to be in this with God.  And for the rest of her life, she is.

The God who does impossible things is even now, right this moment, doing impossible things in the world.  This God wants to do impossible things through you.  It’s absolutely risky and will for sure change everything. You will be vulnerable, and you will have to let things go that you thought you needed.  

But, Don’t be afraid, because the one who calls you is God. And what you’re saying Yes to is to see God, to be disciple of Jesus, to live a life fully alive. And this mystery is lived by sharing it, so you wont be asked to do it alone. 

Amen.

This is part of a series, journeying with some of our Biblical ancestors: Hannah, Mary, Anna & Simeon, John, Samuel, David*, The Samaritan Woman, 

(*This is an older message about David, in this series, we had a wonderful performance of 'David" by Theater for the Thirsty)