(Preached on Sunday, December 13, 2009)
And he came to her and said, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.” -Luke 1:28
The Sunday School teacher had just finished telling her class the Christmas story, how Mary and Joseph went to Bethlehem and how Jesus was born in a stable and laid in a manger. After telling the story the teacher asked, “Who do you think the most important woman in the Bible is?” Of course, the teacher was expecting one of the children to say “Mary.” But instead, one little boy raised his hand and said, “Eve.” So, the teacher asked him why he thought Eve was the most important woman in the Bible. And the little boy replied, “Well, they named two days of the year after Eve. You know, Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve.”
Mary is a difficult figure for us. She is a hard figure for us to accept. Why her? Why not someone more important? Frederick Buechner captures our wonder and skepticism about this young girl in his description of this moment given from the point of view of Gabriel. “She struck the angel Gabriel as hardly old enough to have a child at all, let alone this child, but he’d been entrusted with a message to give her, and he gave it. He told her what the child was to be name, and who he was to be, and something about the mystery that was to come upon her. ‘You mustn’t be afraid, Mary,’ he said. And as he said it, he only hoped she wouldn’t notice that beneath the great, golden wings he himself was trembling with fear to think that the whole future of creation hung now on the answer of a girl.”
Imagine how stunned Mary was! “How can this be?” We all struggle with believing ourselves to be good enough, to be up to the task, to be “favored.” Most of us struggle with our self-esteem. Like the student one teacher had been working tirelessly with. He had been having trouble in math class; he couldn’t seem to get it. Part of the problem was that he didn’t seem committed to getting it. He consistently failed to get his work done for class. “I’m just not good at math,” the student said, excusing himself. “You know,” replied the teacher, “I get the impression that I believe in you more than you believe in you.” And she was right. The teacher was absolutely convinced that the student could succeed, if he only applied himself. But how could he apply himself to a subject that he had no confidence of ever mastering? He needed first to believe in himself and in his ability just half as much as his teacher believed in him.
I wonder if we aren’t like that with God? This congregation faces so many challenges. We wonder and worry about our future. We struggle to believe that we are up to the task, whether we can really achieve the projects and the dreams and visions and the challenges that God keeps placing before us. Yet God has called us, has placed us here, has given us amazing resources – talented, creative, capable people with amazing skills and in truth, though we often doubt it, plenty of financial means. God has gathered and continue to gather a very remarkable community of people. God has placed good news on our lips. Maybe God believes in us more than we believe in God, and in ourselves.
There was a woman who was minding her own business in a rather humdrum job in a large company. She spent her days in distribution or something. One day she was summoned to the president’s dreaded “front office.” She was horrified. She had only met the president on a couple of occasions. This couldn’t be good. Imagine her shock when the president got right to the point. “Louise, I want you to take charge of big project of ours, a new market we’re developing in the Midwest.” “Me? Why?” she asked in amazement. What were her qualifications for such a task? “People tell me that you are honest, that you can be trusted, that you think more about the good of the company than you think about yourself. You are just the sort of person we need for this job?” She was delighted, but when it sunk into her brain how much she had to learn, the complexity of the assignment, all that had to be done, she nearly gave up before she began. But then she reminded herself, “The boss chose me – me – for this job. He must see things in me that I haven’t seen in myself. The boss is not a fool. He knows what he’s doing, so if he thinks I can do this, maybe I can.”
God has a plan for God’s creation. God has a plan to bring the world to the goodness and the rightness of living, to a place of justice and freedom for all people. This is what God has intended from the beginning. And how does God plan to do that? Through people like us, like you and like me, amazing as that may feel. God has chosen us.
“Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.” Mary was stunned with this greeting. We would be, too, wouldn’t we? God, the Infinite, the Awesome, the Creator of all, announces that Mary is to give birth to the embodiment of her creator’s love. The equally amazing reality of faith is that we, too, have been chose, each one of us, to bear in our own person the embodiment of our creator’s love. … NO, IT IS EVEN MORE AMAZING. We are to BE the embodiment of God’s love. God wants to come into being more fully in each one of us, for our time and place. “Hail, Barbara, full of grace… Hail, Frank, full of grace… Hail Betty, full of grace…”
“We are all meant to be mothers of God,” wrote Meister Eckhart, a medieval mystic and theologian. “What good is it to me,” he said, “if this eternal birth of the divine Son takes place unceasingly but does not take place within myself? And, what good is it to me if Mary is full of grace and if I am not also full of grace? What good is it to me for the Creator to give birth to his Son if I do not also give birth to him in my time and my culture? This, then is the fullness of time. When the Son of God is begotten in us.”
God’s ways are not our ways, and God’s thoughts are not our thoughts. God does not always choose the powerful and the wealthy and the well connected and the smooth talkers to carry out God’s work. God often chooses the lowliest of people, like Mary – a young person in a world that values age; a woman in a world ruled by men; a poor person in a world where wealth truly mattered – to bear the embodiment of God’s love and grace in the world. And we don’t have to have it all figured out before we say “Yes” and get to work spreading God’s love.
In his book, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, Robert Fulghum tells of answering his front door on a cold and gloomy Sunday afternoon, just before Christmas: “This holy hour of Lordsdaybliss was jarred by a pounding at the door. Now what? Deep sigh. Opening it, resigned to accept whatever bad news lies in wait, I am nonplussed. A rather small person in a cheap Santa Claus mask, carrying a large brown paper bag outthrust: ‘TRICK OR TREAT!’ Santa Mask hoots again. Tongue-tied, I stare at this apparition. He shakes the bag at me, and dumbly I fish out my wallet and find a dollar to drop into the bag. The mask lifts, and it is an Asian kid with a ten-dollar grin taking up most of his face. ‘Wanta hear some caroling?’ he asks.
“I know him now. He belongs to a family settled into the neighborhood by the Quakers last year. Refugees. He stopped by at Halloween, with his sisters and brothers, and I filled their bags. Hong Duc is his name – he’s maybe eight. At Halloween he looked like a Wise Man, with a bathrobe on and a dish towel around his head. ‘Wanta hear some caroling?’ I nod, envisioning an octet of urchin refugees hiding in the bushes ready to join their leader in uplifted song. ‘Sure; where’s the choir?’ ‘I’m it,’ says he. And he launched forth with an up-tempo chorus of ‘Jingle Bells’ at full lung power. This was followed by an equally enthusiastic rendering of what I swear sounded like ‘Hark, the Hairy Angels Sing.” And finally, a soft-voiced, reverential singing of ‘Silent Night.’ Head back, eyes closed, from the bottom of his heart he poured out the last strains of ‘Sleep in heavenly peace’ into the gathering night.
“Wet-eyed, dumbstruck by his performance, I pulled a five-dollar bill out of my wallet and dropped that into the paper bag. In return he produced half a candy cane from his pocket and passed it solemnly to me. Flashing the ten-dollar grin, he turned and ran from the porch, shouted, GOD BLESS YOU,! , and TRICK OR TREAT, and was gone… ‘Trick or treat! After I shut the door, came near-hysteria – laughter and tears and that funny feeling you get when you know that once again Christmas has come to you. Right down the chimney of my midwinter hovel comes Saint Hong Duc. He is confused about the details, like me, but he is very clear about the spirit of the season.”
God makes surprising choices – a young peasant girl not yet wed, a young Asian immigrant boy, you, me – to be bearers of God’s love, grace, and joy. God has chosen us to give birth to God’s presence and good news, to be God’s body in our world today. This is not OUR idea, this is God’s. God may believe in us more than we believe in ourselves. But God’s great confidence in us gives us the confidence we need to persevere as God’s people with joy. Greetings, favored ones! The Lord is with you. Do not be afraid. For nothing will be impossible with God. With Mary, we can say “Yes!” and bear the love of God into the world this Advent & Christmas season.