2020-12-21
Brooke Strong
This service was livestreamed due to COVID-19 restrictions.
Sermon Text
Scripture: LUKE 1:26-38
When I hear the story of the angel’s announcement to Mary, I feel something of the same thing I feel when I watch a good magician. With an engaging magic act, you don’t feel deceived in the slightest. Instead, you’re left wondering, “How in the world did they do that?” It’s mesmerizing, it’s intriguing, and it’s got an unquestionably perplexing dimension to it.
It’s somewhat the same with this story. I have all three of those reactions. It’s mesmerizing—I hear those first words of the story—“In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God”—and I lean forward expectantly. It’s intriguing—even in its simplicity, and even with its familiarity, I wonder, in broad terms, where it’s going to lead. And it’s endlessly perplexing: an angel, an announcement, a prediction, and, maybe most strangely, a biologically impossible pregnancy: “But how [can this be]?” asks Mary. “I’ve never slept with a man” (Luke 1:34, The Message). Not only are we perplexed, but so also is Mary herself—“much perplexed,” says the story, “by the angel’s words” (1:29).
I suspect perplexity is not an uncommon reaction to this story, and to many other biblical stories. In our day, the dominant way of seeing is rational and scientific and logical. A contemporary hearer might hear a story like this and figuratively tilt their head like a confused dog, as if to ask, “What’s going on here? It doesn’t make sense. It’s not reasonable or plausible.” And maybe we’re tempted to dismiss it as irrelevant.
The poet Mary Szybist, who won a National Book Award a few years ago for a collection of poems inspired by this scene of Mary and the angel, reminds us of something crucial in this regard, though. The heart of faith is not reducible to facts and figures and scientific plausibility. The heart of faith is an engagement with mystery. Szybist writes about her own poetry: “I do not write out of belief. I do not write out of knowing. I write to be in relationship to perplexity” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hA1LaqwdSQ0).
That, I think, is one of the primary things we do in worship: we engage perplexity. Our work isn’t to make everything clear. It’s not to try to come up with logical explanations for all the confounding details of the Bible and of faith. Our purpose is to connect us to mystery. It’s to develop a relationship to bafflement. Yes, we’d love to have things clear and easily explained. The Bible and faith, though, are innately puzzling.
So if rationality and scientific accuracy are the measuring stick, then a story like this falls woefully short. In that case, a reminder that faith deals instead with what’s confounding and in some ways inexplicable may be in order this morning. If we grew up thinking we should be able to place our faith into neat boxes and and orderly categories, then perhaps a line of Flannery O’Connor, quoted by the poet Szybist, will serve as a corrective: “Beliefs are the light by which we see. But they should not be what we see. And they should not be a substitute for seeing.”
The story of the angel’s announcement to Mary is not a logical verification of anything. It’s not like a mathematical proof or a profit and loss statement. It serves an entirely different purpose from an instruction manual or a recipe or a news story about a house fire. All of these deal with things and facts and processes. Mary and the angel and the God who is behind it all are dealing with life on a far different level.
The only way to convey what’s being said here is just the way Luke does it. He tells a story, an engrossing, head-scratching, perplexing story. It tells an out-of-the-ordinary tale to express what is, in some crucial way, extremely ordinary. It tells a story that is not literally true in order to convey what is most deeply true. To pick up on Flannery O’Connor’s line about beliefs, it’s really totally irrelevant whether we “believe” literally in a virgin birth. If we insist on that sort of litmus test for faith, we’re essentially lost. Too many people have left Christian faith because they thought they were required to hold just that sort of factual belief. No, no, no. What matters is that we engage perplexity, and that we listen for what lies beneath the surface.
When we read this story, all of us will be struck and perplexed by different dimensions of it. Maybe you pick up on Mary’s youthfulness—a mere teenager. Maybe you perk up at an angel’s visit. Maybe you’re struck by the biological impossibility of her pregnancy. Maybe you’re intrigued by the words of the angel. Our imaginations can be piqued in a thousand different directions. And the truth is that they’re all good.
In my perplexity, I’m struck today by something the angel says to Mary. “You have found favor with God,” says Gabriel to this unknown, unaccomplished teenager. Remember who she is: Mary is totally without resume; she’s completely missing any qualifications for her now lofty status. This is not Greta Thunberg. This is not even the star of the high school musical or the genius who aced the SATs or the prolific scorer on the basketball team or the prom queen. This is simply Mary, whose CV is non-existent, whose credentials are completely absent, whose personal qualities are maybe as bland as they could be. You wouldn’t even have noticed her in the high school hallway. I’m ashamed to say I might well have dismissed her as a zero.
And it’s to her that the angel of God comes. Not because she has done anything particularly noteworthy, but simply because she is. “Greetings, favored one” (1:28), says the angel; “you have found favor with God” (1:30). I love the way that greeting is framed in Eugene Peterson’s The Message: “Good morning [, Mary]! You’re beautiful with God’s beauty. Beautiful inside and out! God be with you” (1:28).
Mary is beautiful not because of anything she’s done, or because of some special characteristic of hers, or because of the way she looks, but simply because God says it is so. “You’re beautiful,” says God, and that statement is true simply because God says it is. Mary doesn’t have to earn it. She doesn’t do anything to deserve it. That declaration isn’t really about her. It’s simply the heart of who God is: “You’re beautiful, Mary.”
And the striking, confounding, perplexing thing is: that’s what God is saying to you, and to me, and to everyone: You’re beautiful, Linda; you’re beautiful, Peter; you’re beautiful, Tim; you’re beautiful, Abbie. You have found favor with God; you are beautiful, inside and out. Not because your boss loved your work project. Not because the cool kids hang out with you. Not because of your astounding Christmas decorations or your gift-giving prowess or your mouth-watering lasagna, but simply because you’re you. That’s it. That’s what God’s angel says to Mary. And that’s what the angel says to you and me: ‘You’ve found favor with me,’ says God. ‘You’re beautiful. I love you.’ Take that in!
The story reminds us what we may easily forget, that true love is given not as a reward. It’s not a prize for a job well done. It’s not a trophy for superior accomplishment. The way God loves Mary is the way we’re beckoned to love each other. True love is an offer made to someone or something regardless of success or failure. To really love our children is to value them whether their grades soar or bomb. To love our siblings and neighbors is to cherish them no matter their politics or personal habits. To really love our spouse or partner is to embrace them in their weakness and failure, “in sickness and in health, in plenty and in want, in joy and in sorrow, as long as [you] both shall live.”
Love, says David Steindl-Rast, isn’t desire or passionate attraction. It’s not something I dole out because I approve of you. Real love, he says, is conveying a deep sense of belonging. What God is saying to Mary is: you belong to me. This is not the sort of belonging that implies ownership, like my saying that this tie belongs to me. This is belonging that means you and I are deeply intertwined; that we’re mutually dependent; that my welfare is intimately tied up with your welfare; and that I’m to hold you close, whether I know you or not, whether I approve of you or not, whether I share your background or race or age or ideological beliefs or rung on the economic and social ladder or athletic allegiances or not. I believe it tested some of us on the Federated staff this week to affirm one of our staff colleagues who said she had rooted for the Ravens when they beat the Browns last Sunday! When God tells Mary she is favored, God is telling her that they belong together, not because of anything she has done, but just because of who she is and, most crucially, who God is. And that’s what we’re beckoned to do.
Our history and our lives, of course, are replete with the feeling that countless so-and-sos don’t belong to us. We roundly condemn those we see as opposed to what we value. Historians have shown us how our nation’s founding, aspirational as it is in many ways, is also inextricably tied up with a dismissal of, and a violence toward, people who are Black and Brown and indigenous. That dismissal conveys a systemic and pervasive negating of belonging.
We see the denying of belonging in the day-to-day interactions we have, as well. The other day, as I walked up and down the aisles at the grocery store, a woman came toward me with writing on her mask. On a grim and hardened face, the message said, “Mask worn by force, not by choice.” When it’s as clear as it is that masks protect both the wearer and the people around them, that masks are part of the way we honor and protect each other, then it’s hard to read the message on the shopper’s mask as anything other than a refusal to acknowledge our belonging to each other. In no way is she conveying to the other shoppers that they have found favor, that they are beautiful, that she and they belong together. A pinched and narrow notion of freedom seems to entirely have erased any notion of her being deeply connected to those around her.
And it’s not just her, of course. We all have our ways of establishing who’s in and who’s out, who matters and who doesn’t, who belongs and who’s shunned. We may invite only certain people to our parties and pointedly omit others. We may talk animatedly with certain neighbors and steel our jaws with others. Real estate redlining, gated communities, slavery, wars, laws limiting gay or transgender people: all say clearly who doesn’t belong.
The angel’s visit to Mary reminds us of just how crucial it is that we live lives that demonstrate how we belong to each other. Three vignettes that show what physicists call quantum entanglement—just how deeply connected we are to each other, and how crucial it is that we live out our belonging-ness.
First vignette: In 1665, the bubonic plague took hold in a small English village called Eyam. A rat or a flea had conveyed the bacteria to the town, and one after another, townspeople began to get sick and die. Early in the epidemic, with the guidance of the town’s minister and his predecessor, the town acted in a decisive way to prevent the spread of the disease beyond the town’s outskirts. They established a quarantine, with the expectation that no one would leave the village and spread the disease. It was an actual line around the village and no villager was to pass it. Signs warned travelers not to enter the village. Townspeople left coins at the village edge so that neighboring townspeople could purchase and deliver supplies. The church stopped having indoor services and moved to outdoor, socially-distanced services. People were buried right where they died so the virus wouldn’t spread. The upshot was that while a third of villagers died, the virus was completely contained to Eyam. In quarantining the entire village for fourteen months, countless lives in surrounding areas were spared. A Victorian historian called them “moral heroes, who with a sublime, heroic, and unparalleled resolution gave up their lives . . . to save the surrounding country” https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofEngland/Why-Is-Eyam-Significant/). To put it simply, they knew they belonged to the wider world, and in a supreme conviction of moral clarity, they were able to give of themselves to save others. They embodied God’s love.
Or a second vignette. I was walking through our neighborhood one day recently when, from the street I could see a sign hanging from a tin tub on a table on a neighbor’s front stoop. Going closer, this is what I saw: a tub filled with snacks and bottled water, and this sign attached: “Dear Delivery Drivers: After dropping off our packages,/ Please take a drink and snack for the road./ During this Christmas shopping season,/ It’s a little thanks for helping to lighten Our load.” How easy it is to take our delivery drivers for granted. Not these neighbors, or others I’ve seen since. They want these drivers to know that they belong, that they matter. Offering them a snack is a sign of God’s love.
Last vignette, this one reminding us of our eternal connections. The mother of a neighbor of mine named Sarah died recently. The mother had declined for several months. Shortly before she died, and with her rational capacities clearly compromised, she said to her daughter Sarah one day with a kind of desperation, “I can’t get into my sister’s apartment. I seem to have lost the key.” Sarah knew that her mother couldn’t possibly have made it to her sister’s apartment. Nevertheless, Sarah left her mother’s room to “find the key,” and returned shortly with that “key” in her hand. And she mimed letting her mother into the sister’s apartment. Soon thereafter Sarah’s mother died. And strangely, several weeks later, the mother’s sister also died. And Sarah senses that her mother had had a kind of premonition, about both her own death and the death of her sister. The mother wanted to make sure that, in whatever was to come, she and her sister were together, in the same “apartment.” And the deep truth is that, in the words of Jesus, “In God’s house, there are many dwelling places.” Those sisters have gone together to be in one of those dwelling places. Because at their core, their lives are inextricably intertwined. They belong to each other. And it’s a vivid embodiment of God’s love.
We may, most of us, much of the time, live in a kind of perplexity about the fullness of God and about what matters most, with countless unanswered questions and confounding mysteries aplenty. But here’s what’s at the heart of everything: in God’s eyes, we are all showered with boundless favor. All of us. All the time. We all belong—to God, and to each other. And our very vocation as human beings is to express that belongingness, that love, with everyone we meet. May it always be so.