I don’t know about you, but some of the gifts I give for Christmas I like to use before I give them. Now, that doesn’t work too well if the gift is soap-on-a-rope or a fruitcake, but it works very well if the gift is a book. One year, after I had finished reading it, I mailed a gift book to my parents, a gift they probably liked better than what I got this year, which is a bug zapper from Browder Hardware. That earlier gift is entitled Night on the Flint River: An Accidental Journey in Knowing God (Robert C. Bondi). It’s an easy read of 168 pages, a small book, that is part autobiography, part adventure, part devotion -- a story about a sixty year old woman’s experience with two friends as they went on an afternoon canoeing trip on the Flint River in Georgia.

Because, however, there are an unanticipated number of trees that have fallen across the river, this day time canoe trip turned into a night of walking alongside the river trying, in complete darkness, to make their way back to a parked car. They are unprepared for the darkness, not even being able to see their watches to figure out what time it is. Since they had planned to be gone only a few hours, no one knows of their predicament. Much of the time that night is spent walking through thick undergrowth and beneath overhanging trees, but without even shadows to mark where they are going since clouds and fog obscure even the stars and whatever light might be cast their way.

The author who tells this story uses this timelessness and this stumbling in the darkness as a narrative device for remembering her struggles through the dark times of life: her parents’ divorce when she was a preadolescent; her deep yearning for self-confidence and acceptance by her peers; sundry struggles in her own marriage and with her own children; her divorce and later remarriage; career crises of various kinds. But she also recalls moments in the journey of unspeakable joy and inner peace, such as the Christmas morning when she was 53 as she lay inside her warm bed and suddenly had a vision of the light of Christ surrounding her. She writes: “’The light of Christ!’ On that Christmas morning, it shone into my dark and ugly places with the focused intensity of a laser. That day what it meant for me that God should come among us, full of light and truth, was this: I would have to stand in that terrible, cleansing light.”

After this encounter with the light of Christ at age 53, she goes on to make some changes in her life, a new outlook that brings redemption, healing, a new direction. And as her accidental journey through the night alongside the Flint River proceeds towards a destination she cannot see, she realizes that God has been with her, both in the times when his presence was felt as present, and even in those times when his presence was felt as absence.

Thus it was for long ago Mary, I think, a kind of accidental journey in knowing God. “How can this be?” she asks the angel Gabriel. Not the same depth of disbelief, perhaps, as Zechariah in the temple who was struck mute for his incredulousness, but, nevertheless, an unsought surprise for Mary. As the Angelic presence of Gabriel intrudes into her life with a message that seems, at least to us post-modernists, beyond belief, Mary can, at first, only say: “How can this be?”

In my own imagination, I see Mary perhaps bowing in reverence, but maybe even more, I see Mary pulling back from that angelic brightness, trying quickly to find a shadow to stand in, a shadow even to hide behind, in order to shield her eyes from the radiance. We can undoubtedly imagine that scene in many different ways. And over the course of art history, not to mention Christian history, it has been rendered thousands of times. But I, for one, think not only of light, but also of shadows and the fear of that moment and the developing fear in future moments as she nurtured her son and watched his ministry unfold and then watched it come to an apparent end on the cross. Surely, fear overshadowed Mary and wrapped her in its tight, unrelenting grip in those moments of the annunciation. And later, after giving birth, when she ponders these things in her heart, it seems realistic to expect that fear was one of those things she dwelt upon, along with many other thoughts and emotions.

I have been thinking that in these days of Advent, we seem to speak mostly in terms of absolutes, there is light and there is darkness, much as it was in the beginning, in the story of creation in Genesis. Or, we make an evaluation either that something or someone is good or that something or someone is not good, because often times that is the only way we can make sense of this world in which we have a hard time determining who’s right and who’s wrong, because the issues are so complicated anymore. Yet, isn’t it also true that in between the light and the darkness, the good and the evil, that there are also shadows, and maybe somewhere inside the shadows is where most of us, in fact, live, most of the time?

This week, I have thought of those shadows where people live. Melvin Ethridge came knocking on the church door this week, a tall, articulate, professorial-looking African-American man, hitchhiking, he said, toward Indianapolis and a VA hospital there. He had encountered some problems that I was able to help get resolved, mainly retrieving his personal bags that had been inadvertently left in the vehicle of someone who had dropped him off in Kingston, bags that he indicated contained some important personal papers, addresses, and phone numbers of contacts of friends around the country. But the shadow he seemed to live in was that, even with all of those addresses, he had no address for himself. I had asked him that question earlier, and when I took him to the motel for the night, they asked him, too, but his reply was the same, “I have no zip code.” I asked about family in Indianapolis, and his response was “maybe I have some cousins there” but then he added, anywhere I go, I might walk right past a cousin and not recognize them.” At first, I thought to myself, maybe this guy is delusional, or maybe, upon second thought, the word cousin meant something to him that it doesn’t to us. Unlike many of the people who stop by for help, Melvin seemed at peace with himself and with his own accidental journey, and at peace with the shadows where he lived each day. I don’t say this lightly, but in my mind’s eye, if the Messiah is coming to Roane County, he might have looked just a bit like Melvin Etheridge.

Whether, finally, shadows are a place of fear, or a place of withdrawal to become more fully one’s true self, I don’t know, but Mary was caught between the radiant light and the darkness of not knowing exactly what the future would be like. And so, whether our experience is one of grief or one of struggling to care for an aging parent, or dealing with enormous disappointment and regret or whatever else it might be, what do we make of the shadows and how do we choose, then, to live inside the shadows?

Perhaps we assume too much when we speak only of darkness and light in these days and nights of Advent. If we are to have any accidental journeys in knowing God, then we will also have to find ways to be at home in the shadows.

Since Advent and Annunciation both tell us about our Christian beginnings, perhaps it is good for us also to cast a glance back to our other beginning even deeper in time, to Genesis – to creation and the Fall and to the first tree with its fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. We cannot escape the fact that this first tree casts the dark shadow of sin, suffering, and death across time, even to our time. And the shadow of this first tree was there when Gabriel surprised Mary; it was there because that shadow and that first tree are always there in human life and relationships. But, in a way, Mary answers God in a way that Eve did not, and Mary overcomes the temptation of Eve by saying yes, instead of saying no, to God.

But try as we might, we cannot escape the shadow of fear and the shadow of that first tree.

But there is yet another shadow from another tree intimated in this passage I read. Luke tells us that Gabriel comes to “a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendent of David.”

There is a family tree represented by Mary in her union with Joseph, another tree than the first tree of the Garden of Eden, a tree also with a long shadow that tells of God’s hand forming and shaping salvation history. The Church has often referred to this tree as the Jesse tree, recalling Isaiah’s prophecy that “A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit.” And so, from the time of Adam and Eve’s first sin, God has kept alive the promised hope of a redeemer, through Noah, Abraham and Sarah, and a host of Old Testament patriarchs and matriarchs and prophets and assorted others like Ruth, Rahab, Samuel and David, and David’s father, Jesse, a tree whose shadow reminds the world that God has forsaken neither us nor others who live in darkness or in shadows.

The shadow of that Jesse tree is there at Gabriel’s annunciation to Mary, and in a way, it is there at the end of salvation history as well. In the book of Revelation, on the banks of the river of life stands the tree of life, and, the writer tells us, “the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.” The shadow, then, of God’s reconciliation and triumph are there in the end and that shadow, somehow, passes over the scene of this annunciation to Mary.

Gabriel announces to Mary that “the Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the most high will overshadow you.” This overshadowing presence recalls the cloud of God’s glory over the tabernacle of Israel during Israel’s wilderness wanderings, and this coming of the Holy Spirit looks forward to the overshadowing presence of the Spirit when Jesus will be baptized in the Jordan River by John. The shadow of God’s freedom for Israel and God’s redemption through Christ stretch forward and cast a new light on all that is to follow.

And then, finally, there is one other tree, a tree whose shadowy outline is only faintly visible in the opening chapter of Luke, but which we must see if the good news of a coming birth is to be more than merely a sweet story of angels and shepherds, of soft hay and sparkling gifts.

Sometimes, artists who try to render the scene of the annunciation or the later scene of the birth in Bethlehem put the shadow of a cross somewhere in the background or even across the face of Mary or the baby Jesus. A reminder of where birth and life will have both their end, and their beginning.

The shadow of the cross stands between the darkness and the light, the night and the day of our sin and our pain, our hopes and our longings. Gabriel reminds Mary in what is the bedrock and the foundation of all Christian creeds: “nothing is impossible with God.” Even something as ugly and life-denying as the cross, in God’s hands, can be beautiful and life-giving, and the impossibility of divine forgiveness for human sin, like the impossibility of seeing in the dark, is transformed into the possible by what begins in the shadows of this annunciation to Mary.

Last Sunday night at the Hanging of the Greens, I shared a folk story called the Tale of Three Trees, three trees on a hilltop, each with their own ambitions for usefulness. One longs to be a fancy treasure chest, another a mighty ship, and the third wants to grow to be the tallest tree in the world so that people would stop and look when they saw it and raise their eyes to heaven and think of God. In time, all three trees, even the one that wanted to keep growing, were cut down and taken away.

The first tree thought that now his ambition of being a fancy treasure chest would be realized, only his wood was used to make a feed box for animals, coated with sawdust and filled with hay for hungry farm animals. The second tree whose ambition was to be a mighty ship was hammered and sawed into a simple fishing boat, taken to a little lake to haul loads of dead, smelly fish. And the third tree was cut into strong beams and left in a lumberyard.

After the passing of many days and nights, when the trees had nearly forgotten their dreams, the first tree, one night, received a new born baby into its manger and the tree knew that he was holding the greatest treasure in the world. Later, the second tree was caught in a storm on the lake and doubted whether he had the strength to carry his passengers to safety when a man stood and said, “Peace” and calmed the storm, and the second tree knew that he was carrying the King of heaven and earth. And the third tree, one Friday, was carried by a man to a small hill where this man was nailed to the tree. And somehow, the tree knew that God’s love had changed everything, and that every time people thought of the third tree, they would think of God.

In the end, the three trees received what they desired, but not in the way they had expected. The gift of their life’s destiny surprised them, and they were used for a purpose they could not have imagined.

So it was for Mary, and so I think it often is for us as well. The shadows of the unexpected and the expected come, yet we are called to live in the shadows and to trust in the light that is coming into the world.

In the end, my parents got their wrapped book and placed it under their tree; the woman and her friends lost alongside the Flint River made it to their vehicle and returned home; Mary gave birth to her baby; and the three trees became vessels of blessing to the world.

In the end, what would the angel Gabriel ask of you this Advent Season? And deep down inside, what is it that you really want as God’s gift for you this Christmas?