Below, for your consideration and reflection, is the sermon from Bethel's December 18, 2005 Sunday worship service.

---

Annunciation

Luke 1:26-38

Bethel 12/18/05 Fourth Sunday of Advent

Rev. Marc Sherrod, ThD

Amahl and the Night Visitors is a Christmas classic. It is a tale of the night the three magi following the star to Bethlehem, stop for shelter at the home Amahl, a crippled shepherd boy who plays a pipe and lives with his poor, widowed mother. Melchior, Balthazar, and Kaspar have brought their gold and other treasures to deliver to the new born baby king. The real miracle occurs, however, when Amahl, who also wants to worship Jesus, realizes he has nothing to offer but his crutch as a gift. And in that moment when he offers all that he has, he receives the gift of healing. The story ends as Amahl climbs aboard one of the camels and joins the caravan of these exotic pilgrims who continue the journey on their way to worship Jesus in Bethlehem.

Everybody loves a good story. And even the oldest fool knows that children’s stories are best. We shift forward in our seats, lean into a fantastic world of make-believe where animals talk, heaven and nature sing, and, in the end, they all live happily ever

The blessing of a good story is when it helps us see that the tired, old reality is no longer acceptable – with a little kiss, frogs can become princes; the glass slipper won’t fit the vindictive stepsisters; and there is always inner beauty beneath the outer beast.

“Once upon a time . . .” usually signals the beginning of a children’s story, and upon hearing those words, we suspend disbelief and bravely enter a world beyond time and space yet a world deep down inside each of us. “Once upon a time . . .” may set the stage for any kind of story: an old yarn or even older fairy tale; a heroic adventure when a fair maiden gets rescued or a moral allegory that teaches a lesson about how life should really be lived. And if it is a good story, it reaches across the page, grasps our hand, and takes us on a quest for personal transformation.

Luke’s story of Mary, while no fairy tale, strikes me as a bit like one – a fantastic, otherworldly creature named Gabriel, bearing no resemblance whatsoever to the angels of gold foil that adorn our Hallmark Christmas cards, delivers a fearsome and troubling message; a Jewish peasant girl, perhaps no more than 12 or 13 years old, receives an assignment that anyone in her right mind would have declined flat out; the air is thick with anticipation and whether she will say “no” or “yes” as the fate of the whole creation hangs in the balance.

Luke begins the annunciation with these words: “in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph of the house of David; and the virgin’s name was Mary.” If it were a native American telling the story, this might be considered a naming ceremony, for Gabriel greets Mary with a new name, calling her: “favored one. The Lord is with you!” Or, if it were a midwife telling the tale, perhaps we’d get less about the Holy Spirit overshadowing and more about how pregnancy itself will so consume the next nine months of Mary’s life, or a warning that there will be times as she carries the child when she may not feel all that holy, but through it all, how she will feel caught up into something so much larger than herself.

“In the sixth month . . . “ A time, a place, a set of characters, which is common to all stories, that something is coming, something interesting or significant or exciting is about to happen. This is what life is, when we whittle it down to its essence – a story. And if we take even the fanciest and most metaphysical kind of theologian or preacher and keep on questioning him far enough – why is this so? All right, but why is that so? Yes, but how do we know it is so – eventually he is forced to take off his spectacles and push his books off to one side and say, well, you know, ‘once upon a time there was,” and then everybody starts to listen. Because then, we know, a story will say it all.

Now, if you have the tired ears and heavy eyes of an adult, truly listening to the nativity story can take considerable effort, colored as it always is by nostalgia. But if you are a child, the echoes of “once upon a time” make it real and entirely possible.

Problem is, of course, we’ve heard the story so many times, we believe we know precisely how it will end. But what might we hear if we heard the story less as the grand prologue to the unfathomable theological mystery of incarnation and, instead, heard the story of an unsuspecting, vulnerable Jewish maiden who had no inkling about getting involved, but who got tapped on the shoulder, nonetheless? Instead of parsing the meanings of this holy figure who became the holy mother of God, maybe like all good stories, this one asks, “have you ever stood at a crossroads and wondered what you’re supposed to do next?”

Gabriel summoned Mary from the rather safe place of conventional wisdom to a realm where few of the old rules applied. She entered the unknown. She was on her own there. No one else could judge for her the validity of her experience. Yes, she could measure her reality against scripture, the teachings of her tradition, her reason and intellect, and the counsel of wise friends. But finally, it is up to her. The redemption of the creation is resting on her consent – the choice of this mortal woman to believe fearlessly that what she is experiencing is true.

Unplanned parenthood is not on the agenda today of groups promoting family values, which is to say, today, Mary’s situation would raise plenty of eyebrows. But it strikes me as significant that she not only heard the angel out, but accepted the cards she’d been dealt.

And after pondering the repercussions, she replied: “I am the Lord’s servant. May it be to me as you have said.” Often, a work of God within us, like birthing a child, comes with two edges: great joy and great pain, and in that matter-of-fact response, Mary embraced both. She was the first person to accept Jesus on his own terms, regardless of the personal cost.

Think of it. Nine months of awkward explanations, the lingering scent of scandal – it seems that God arranged the most humiliating circumstances possible for the divine entrance, as if to avoid any charge of favoritism. Think of it. If it happened today, if Mary had been an East Tennessee girl, we’d be muttering contempt beneath our breath, something like “children having babies,” because the combination of her age and assumed poverty and family neglect would be too much for us to say otherwise. How easily from the vantage point of our adult world we would pass judgment if Nazareth had been our home town.

But children’s stories rarely cater to adult prejudices and biases, especially when it is the young themselves whose story is being told. And Mary, despite this adult responsibility, was still, in age, quite close to her childhood.

Mary said “yes” to her new identity, to the immense and wondrous possibilities of her new and holy name. Truth is, the same possibility is placed before each of us. However our story, or a new chapter of that story, begins, whether, with words like, “I love you,” “I do” or “I baptize you” we all need to be told that God loves us, and the mystery of the annunciation reveals a timeless aspect of that love.

God keeps calling us and, surprisingly, God’s call is often answered by the least among us, the most unlikely people. It is the barren Sarahs and Hannahs, the young Davids, and innocent, vulnerable Marys who hear and believe and further God’s reign on earth. God’s story is always the story of underdogs, the powerless, the poor in spirit. And all of them, which is to say all of us, are tabernacles of the holy.

Once upon a time there was a child named Lucy, who was playing hide and seek with some other children in an old house. It was her turn to be “It,” and finding herself in a room where there was no furniture except for a big old-fashioned wardrobe, and hearing the sound of the others clattering down the corridor in search of her, she stepped into the wardrobe to hide. There were clothes hanging in it and mothballs on the floor, and as she moved farther in toward the back of it, she could feel the clothes brushing against her face and arms and could hear the sound of the mothballs under her feet. C.S. Lewis writes in the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe:

It was almost quite dark in there, and she kept her arms stretched out in front of her so as not to bump her face into the back of the wardrobe. She took a step further in – then two or three steps – always expecting to feel woodwork against the tip of her fingers. But she could not feel it. “This must be a simply enormous wardrobe,” thought Lucy, going still farther in and pushing the soft folds of the coats aside to make room for her. Then she noticed that there was something crunching under her feet. “I wonder is that more mothballs?” she thought, stooping down to feel it with her hands. But instead of feeling the hard, smooth wood of the floor of the wardrobe, she felt something soft and powdery and extremely cold. “This is very queer,” she said, and went on a step or two farther. Next moment she found that what was rubbing against her face and hands was no longer soft fur but something hard and rough and even prickly. “Why, it’s just like the branches of trees!” exclaimed Lucy. And then she saw that there was a light in front of her; not a few inches away where the back of the wardrobe ought to have been, but a long way off. Something cold and soft was falling on her. A moment later she found she was standing in the middle of a wood at night-time with snow under Her feet and snowflakes falling through the air [quote in Beuchner, Telling The Truth, 74]

Thus, later joined by her friends, begins Lucy’s quest for Narnia and the magical, transforming encounter with King Aslan, a beast of a lion who is Christ figure and who will ultimately bring these child-pilgrims to a deeper sense of themselves.

The child in us lives in a world where nothing is too familiar or unpromising to open up into the world where a path unwinds before our feet into a deep wood, and when that happens, neither the world we live in nor the world that lives in us can ever entirely be home again anymore.

Like Mary, when the angel comes to us, we had best be ready to become as simple-hearted as children, ready to believe in the magic and mystery of the gospel, for as Jesus once said, “Unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of Heaven” (Mt 18:3).