January 24, 2010
Good morning.
We are quite a distance from the scripture readings for Advent and Christmas. In today’s scripture reading, the third Sunday after Epiphany, Jesus is already a grown man! Filled with the power of the Spirit, he has come through 40 days of temptation in the desert and he has begun to teach in the synagogues. Jesus visits his home synagogue and reads from Isaiah, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor”. Jesus is, as Becca Stelle put it in her teaching several weeks ago, “going public” as a true revolutionary.
This morning though, I invite you to step back with me to an earlier part of the liturgical calendar, a part that never really caught my attention until this year. But this year, I have been thinking quite a lot about the story of the Annunciation to Zechariah and to Mary by the angel Gabriel. I have been pondering the mystery of Annunciation and Incarnation because of several sweet connections that have come to me at Joseph’s House.
One connection is the friendship I have with a woman whose name is AG. AG is a resident at Joseph’s House. She and I sometimes pray together in her room after dinner, before she goes to sleep. When we pray, AG asks me to light a candle and pray out loud to Mary for her. There was a time long ago when I, a Protestant raised woman, would not have been able to collect my thoughts and feelings and find the words to pray to Mary – but that was then. Now, because of AG I pray to Mary. And I find myself thinking about Mary at other times.
AG invited me to go with her to the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception – “I want to take you to Mary’s house”, she told me. Inside the shrine are many small chapels, each one dedicated to a different aspect of Mary. From the chapel of Our Lady of Perpetual Help to the chapel of Our Lady of Sorrows, AG hurried as though hurrying to meet a friend. There, in each chapel, she stopped and caressed the hands and feet of the statue of Mary. She murmured her love to her. She thanked her and blessed her.
AG’s prayers to Mary are specific – she prays for healing from her cancer and for an apartment of her own. Thus far AG has not received the answer to her prayers that she is asking for. But AG continues to pray and to bless Mary. To her, Mary is the blessed mother, Mary is her sister; Mary is her friend. Mary has never hurt her or disappointed her. I am moved, knowing this.
My other connection to the Annunciation is through a particular essay in a book of readings for Advent and Christmas. Joel Zimmerman is a Bruderhoff friend who helps out at Joseph’s House on Friday mornings. Joel brought us a copy of Watch for the Light. Some of you may have it. Every day there is a different essay by someone who has reflected deeply on the Advent and Christmas scripture readings. The reading for November 30th is by Kathleen Norris, a poet and convert to Catholicism. In this essay she reflects on the Annunciation by the angel Gabriel, and reading her essay, I was deeply attracted to that story for the first time.
“Annunciation” means “the announcement”. It is part of a language of story, poetry, image and symbol that for centuries our Christian tradition has used to convey the central tenets of our faith. It can be a kind of scary word, can’t it? The Annunciation story is a sort of scary story. It’s a story about Mystery. I’m surprised, actually, that I am here this morning wanting to share with you my attraction to this Mystery story. More often I am moved by the social message of the Gospels.
Kathleen Norris tells the story of a woman pastor who addresses an ecumenical assembly. “We all know there was no virgin birth”, the pastor said. “Mary was an unwed, pregnant teenager and God told her it was okay. That’s the message we need to give girls today, that God loves them, and forget all this nonsense about a virgin birth”.
In contrast to the pastor there was a Benedictine, an Assiniboine Indian, who preached on the Annunciation to a First Nations congregation. “The first thing Gabriel does when he encounters Mary”, the Assiniboine priest said, “is to give her a new name: ‘Most favored one’. It’s a naming ceremony”, he emphasized, making a connection that excited and delighted his listeners.
“When I brood on the story of the Annunciation”, Norris writes “I like to think about what it means to be “overshadowed” by the Holy Spirit. I wonder if a kind of overshadowing isn’t what every young woman pregnant for the first time might feel, caught up in something so much larger than herself.”
There is the wonder of the pregnant mill-town girl in James Wright’s poem, “Trouble”. The butt of jokes, the taunt of gossips, she is amazed to carry such power within herself. “Sixteen years and all that time, she thought she was nothing but skin and bones”.
……………………
Leering across Pearl Street
Crum Andersen yipped
Hey Pugh! I see your sister been rid bareback. She swallow a watermelon?
Fred Gordon! Fred Gordon! Fred Gordon!
Wayya mean? She can get fat, can’t she?
Fat? Willow and lonesome Roberta, running
Alone down Pearl Street in the rain last time
I ever saw her, smiling a smile
Crum Anderson will never know,
Wondering at her body.
Sixteen years, and
All that time she thought she was nothing
But skin and bones.
……………….
Wright’s poem seems to do what the pastor talked about doing – it expresses God’s love for a girl who finds herself – we used to say, “in trouble”, but without the shallow assurance that “it’s okay”.
Told all her life that she is “nothing”, the girl discovers in herself another, deeper reality: A Mystery; something holy, with a potential for salvation. What would such a radically new sense of oneself entail? Could it be a form of virgin birth? Perhaps Mary’s “yes” to her new identity, to the immense and wondrous possibilities of her new and holy name, can provide a means of conveying to girls, to young men – to fully grown women and fully grown men –
that there is something in them that no one can touch: that belongs only to them, and to God.
In the presence of Mystery, of a radically new sense of self, the remarks of the pastor at the conference reveal a narrow and impoverished concept of what virginity and virgin birth is. It’s in the monastic world that one finds a broader and more relevant grasp of what it could mean to be virgin. Thomas Merton describes the true identity that he sought in contemplative prayer as
a “point vierge” at the center of his being, “a point untouched by illusion, a point of pure truth…which belongs entirely to God, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point…of absolute poverty,” he wrote, “is the pure glory of God in us.”
It matters for us to hear the message that God loves us, and the mystery of the Annunciation reveals an aspect of that love. It also suggests that our response to this love is critical. A few verses before the Angel appears to Mary in the first chapter of Luke, another annunciation occurs. The Angel announces to an old man, Zechariah, that his equally aged wife is to bear a son who will “make ready a people prepared for the Lord.” The couple are to name him John. He is known to us as John the Baptist.
Zechariah replies to the Angel, “How will I know that this is so?”
Such a completely understandable response! Maybe he was afraid to refresh his dream of having a son in case he would be disappointed – devastated - yet again. Maybe he knew and didn’t trust himself – after all, the Angel did not say that Elizabeth’s pregnancy would happen by immaculate conception. How could he not ask of the Angel, “How can I be sure of this? How will I know that this is so?” given that he was old and his wife was past menopause?
Yet, Zechariah’s was a very different response from the one Mary makes. Mary replies to the Angel, “How can this be?” How can this be?
For Kathleen Norris, Zechariah’s response seeks knowledge and information from God. In her response to the Angel, Mary is receptive to wisdom; she is pondering a state of being. God’s response to Zechariah is to make him speechless during the entire term of his wife’s pregnancy. He doesn’t speak again until after the child is born, and he has written on a tablet “His name is John”. Perhaps Zechariah’s punishment was actually a form of grace in that for nine months he could quietly think about his initial response when confronted with Mystery. When he does speak again, it is to praise God. He’s had nine months to think it over!
Mary’s “How can this be?” is a simpler response than Zechariah’s and also more profound. She does not lose her voice, but finds it. Like any of the prophets, she asserts herself before God saying, “Here am I.” There is no arrogance, however, but only holy fear and wonder. Mary proceeds – as we must do in life – making her commitment without knowing much about what it will entail or where it will lead. Like the writer Kathleen Norris, I am compelled by the story of the Annunciation because of the questions about myself that it raises:
· When the Mystery of the love of God breaks through into my consciousness, do I run from it?
· Do I ask of it what it cannot answer?
· Or… am I virgin enough to respond from my deepest, truest self, and say something new, a “yes” that will change me forever?
There is a poem by Denise Levertov that takes us to where our salvation hinges – to the place of our ‘yes’, or our turning away from, Annunciation.
Here are a few lines…
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.
Would it be true to say that the questions God asks us are always questions of being, rather than of knowing? And that simply recognizing those moments of announcing - stopping for a moment because something or someone wants our attention - can matter. Chances are, we will not see or hear an angel. But it will be clear that we are being asked to say either “yes” or “no”; to embrace or ignore what God has set before us…
Let us Pray
Mary, Mother of compassion, you yourself know that the gift of God’s Spirit within the flesh carries costly, necessary responsibilities. Your brave responsiveness is beloved wherever communities struggle for dignity, justice, liberation and spiritual refreshment. Mary, Mother of Mercy, guide us upon the way.
O Holy One,
With a pounding heart, in those fearful moments in the presence of Mystery and awe, when we stop and listen to your Annunciation to us, help us turn toward the roads of light and storm. Open the gates for us. Open the gates again and again we pray.
Amen.
Edwin Muir: The Annunciation
The angel and the girl are met.
Earth was the only meeting place.
For the embodied never yet
Traveled beyond the shore of space.
The eternal spirits in freedom go.
See, they have come together, see,
While the destroying minutes flow,
Each reflects the other’s face
Till heaven in hers and earth in his
Shine steady there. He’s come to her
From far beyond the farthest star,
Feathered through time. Immediacy
Of strangest strangeness is the bliss
That from their limbs all movement takes.
Yet the increasing rapture brings
So great a wonder that it makes
Each feather tremble on his wings.
Outside the window footsteps fall
Into the ordinary day
And with the sun along the wall
Pursue their unreturning way.
Sound’s perpetual roundabout
Rolls its numbered octaves out
And hoarsely grinds its battered tune.
But through the endless afternoon
These neither speak nor movement make,
But stare into their deepening trance
As if their gaze would never break.
###
For me the power of this poem comes in the intensity of the encounter between Mary and the angel. The sense of totality in the meeting – the moment in which heaven and earth are met.
See, they have come together, see
While the destroying minutes flow,
Each reflects the other’s face
Till heaven in hers and earth in his
Shine steady there.
As Mary and the angel stand rapt in their attention for one another, each one is changed – she is left with the impression of what? Angel as the face of God? While he is affected by the fullness of her humanity. In that moment’s meeting, Muir points to the truth of incarnation – where humanity and divinity are held together – so that the meaning of each is known most fully only in their union.
Time is frozen in their gaze. The sense of awe, the bliss that from their limbs all movement takes and the intense physicality of their rapture – so great a wonder that it makes each feather on his wings tremble.
Muir is playing with this moment of divine conception: How does the Spirit come to Mary? As a word? As a feeling? As a physical encounter? How does annunciation bring about virgin birth?