He-Qi, the Annunciation
May my thoughts and words today be acceptable to God. Amen
An Episcopal priest died and was waiting in line at the Pearly Gates. Ahead of him is a tough looking fellow with tattoos, blue jeans, and a leather jacket. St. Peter says to the man, “Who are you, so I’ll know whether or not to let you into the Kingdom of Heaven?” The man says, “I’m Tom Hitchens, and I drove a cab in New York City.” St. Peter looks at his list, and says, “Take this silk robe and gold staff and enter the Kingdom of Heaven. NEXT!”
The priest steps up and sticks out his chest very proudly, and says, “I am the Reverend Andrew Simon Ellington, Rector of Christ Church, Albany for 42 years!” St. Peter again checks his list, and says, “Take this flour sack robe and hickory staff and enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”
The priest says, “Hold on, that man was just a taxi driver, why did he get a silk robe and gold staff?”
St. Peter says, “When you preached, people fell asleep. When he drove, people prayed!”
I hope my words today will not have you sleeping.
I actually wrote three sermons for today. The first followed the lectionary for this Sunday, the 17th and although I thought it an acceptable sermon, it just didn’t move me when I read it aloud. I asked a Deacon, whose preaching I love, for some advice on what to say when one is asked to preach, and the lectionary just doesn’t speak to them, but they have a sermon they would like to preach. She said to always preach the sermon that’s in your heart, and find a way to make the lectionary fit! So I wrote a second sermon, which I loved very much and worked the lectionary in. BUT, last Sunday, I found out that we were not using the lectionary for the 17th had to write a third sermon for today. Let this be a lesson that if Fr. Richard asks you to give a homily, always check which readings will be used for the date before you say yes! Since you no longer have to feed the parking meters on Sundays, I contemplated delivering all three sermons, but I know you, and none of you have been bad enough to deserve that!
Raise your hand if you have ever been a teenager. Now keep your hand raised if you did everything your parents told you to do as a teenager without questioning why. That’s about what I expected.
Today we celebrate a very special teenage girl named Mirium, or as we know her, Mary. As she entered history, she was just a normal country girl in a backwater village, still living with her parents and biding her time to be married to an older man, a carpenter named Yusef. On just another average day, when she was probably at her chores, maybe sorting lentils for a dinner stew, or spinning some wool into cloth, or hanging up the family laundry, something absurd and shocking happened to her. As she looked up from her work in the house, she was startled by a stranger standing before her.
Don’t you imagine she was even more than startled? After all, young girls were never in the company of a man without being chaperoned. That was strictly forbidden in Jewish society!
The stranger shocks her with the salutation, “Greetings most favored one! The Lord is with you.” One minute she is doing her work, daydreaming about what her life will be like outside her parents house, and what it will be like as Yusef’s wife, and this apparition just pops in and says she is ‘most favored.’ Luke says she was ‘deeply troubled’ to hear this. I think I would be too! It might be like having your phone ring one evening as you’re watching TV, and a voice on the line says “Hello, you are VERY special, and God has a huge job for you that’s going to make you world famous!” I imagine most of us would hang up immediately. But Mary kept on listening to the message.
The angel Gabriel could plainly see that Mary was troubled, so he told her not to be afraid of this greeting. It is only the prelude to the message that she is soon going to be the most favored woman in
the world. That in fact, people for centuries afterwards will call her blessed among women. How on earth did she wrap her teenage mind around THIS news?
Then Gabriel tells Mary she’s going to have a son who will be great, and eventually be ‘King over Israel forever.’ How would you react if someone appeared in your house and gave you news like that on a Thursday afternoon? Don’t you suppose this information set of a chain of questions in Mary’s mind about who is this Gabriel, how he knows these things, and how on earth is she going to bear a son when she’s only just engaged to Yusef? And that last question would be the scariest to Mary, because a girl who got pregnant before marriage was libel to be put out of her family and community at best, or stoned to death at worst.
So it would be only logical that Mary had a whirlwind of thoughts and questions, with confusion, wonder and excitement crowding in as well. But somehow, for some reason, she had clarity and presence enough in her stunned condition to say to Gabriel, “Here I am. I am the Lord’s servant; as you have spoken let it be.” BAM, the biggest unquestioning and unequivocal YES to God in all Judeo-Christian history, and it comes from a teenaged girl!
I usually don’t trust people who say YES to God that readily. As Susan B. Anthony said, “I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.” I’ve seen too many televangelists bilk people out of their money, too many self-avowed Christians who are so full of hate that I can’t see where they have any room for God, too many people who have blessed lives but don’t want others to have the same blessings. Many people only say yes to God as a bargaining chip, hoping to get the best out of the deal. God, if you find me a job, if you heal my daughter, if you bring us rain, I promise I will....
But Mary wasn’t asking what she would get out of it from God. She was pure enough and simple enough to decide that if God was calling her to do this, then she would honor that call, and do as God wished. And deciding to do so as quickly as she did must indicate that her trust in God’s plan and providence was much greater than her fear of losing her reputation, family, and perhaps her life. It was a decision of ‘so be it’, given whole-heartedly. The decision to give in to God’s will is one that most of us wrestle with all our lives.
Along with you, I say every week that I want to follow God and do God’s will via The Lord’s Prayer, but the rest of the week, it’s a struggle between my will and God’s; whether or not to sleep in on a Saturday morning instead of volunteer at the pantry, to have a nice lunch with a friend on Thursday instead of standing in the windy cold outside the Federal Building with a “No More Wars” sign in my hand, to watch that movie from Netflix instead of walking around the Mission at night saying I want the gun violence to end.
Our minds are constantly bombarded with messages about what we need to buy to be happy, what we need to drive to be thought well of, what we need to eat to be satisfied or the ‘right shape.’ And we don’t often stop in the midst of all this noise to ask what it is God wants. It takes some quiet and prayer in the midst of all the distracting noise to discern what God wants us to do in the world, to be for the world. And if we sometimes think we’ve gotten a clear message, we are sure it must not be quite right because it requires some action of us that we’d rather not do.
The question of what we are to build with our lives as we answer the clear calls to justice, is addressed in a poem called “So?” by the late Cal Berkeley professor Leonard Nathan.
So you aren’t Tolstoy or Saint FrancisGod’s message and request to Mary certainly required of her hunger, choice, and pain in plenty. Her entire life would become God’s living parable of surrender to, and acceptance of, a higher calling . Being the theotokos, the literal bearer of God’s eternal love would tax anyone to the depths of their soul, as Mary would find out towards the end of that job. And that a young, inexperienced girl could say YES to God shows us that all of us, deep down, are capable of doing the same. Thank you Blessed Mary for being that example for all us. Amen
or even a well-known singer
of popular songs and will never read Greek
or speak French fluently,
will never see something no one else
has seen before through a lens
or with the naked eye.
You’ve been given just the one life
in this world that matters
and upon which every other life
somehow depends as long as you live,
and also given the costly gifts of hunger,
choice, and pain with which to raise
a modest shrine to meaning.
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