A Sermon
for the Fourth Sunday of Advent, Year B
The angel
said, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God.”
The angel Gabriel comes to Mary and greets her: “Hail favored, one. The Lord is with you!” St. Luke tells us that she was much perplexed by these words, and wondered greatly at what sort of greeting this was. Well might she be perplexed, puzzled, unsettled, disturbed by these words.
So Gabriel, perhaps intending to calm her, says, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God.” Now this is where I suspect Mary really began to be afraid or if she didn’t, she should have.
A glance at the
history of her people Israel that she surely carried in her heart would remind
her of all those before her who had found favor with God -- and found their lives harder because of it: Abraham and Sarah called to leave their
homeland and their family; Rebecca who
left her family to marry a man she’d never met; Joseph sold into slavery by his brothers, and
Moses, called to lead a complaining people out of slavery into a promised land he never set foot in himself. Then came Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, Ezekiel –
all the prophets who discovered that having received the ‘favor” of a call to
speak God’s word meant life got more challenging, not easier.
And so it would
be with Mary. “You will conceive in your
womb and bear a son,” the angel tells her. She is to be the Mother of God. God will grow within her very body, stretching
it, changing it from the inside out, even as she is hidden away like every
unwed pregnant teenage girl in those days. Then after a long journey, she is to endure
the pain of labor and give birth in the midst of straw, mud, animals, and
barnyard smells.
And that was
just the beginning. For the son she bore
would be a troublesome child, a worry to his parents as he grew. As a man he would turn away from his mother
and his siblings – “Who are my mother and my brothers and sisters?”[1] he said, when they were
standing just outside. But Mary, faithful to the end, would stand by his cross
and watch him die, the sword of grief piercing her heart. Well Mary should have been afraid when she was
told she was favored by God!
And yet….
To dwell only on what Mary had good reason to fear is to miss half the picture. There is a reason that we call her blessed among women, a reason we sing of her as favored by God in away that calls for joy. That reason is seen in Christmas cards, Renaissance paintings, and Orthodox icons that depict Mary again and again, holding in her arms the infant Son of the Most High. Can you imagine holding the very presence of God in your own arms? What a blessing to have such closeness, such intimacy with the incarnate Word of God! How favored Mary was to carry that Word within her own body, to bring him forth into the world, to nurse him at her breast, to worship the beloved with a kiss, as the carol says. Hers was an intimacy with Christ unique in human history. Mary was favored indeed.
Fear and favor:
intimacy with God inevitably contains both.
We, like Mary, should fear when God comes close – not because God is
mean or vengeful or wishes us harm – but
because when God comes close, lives change bodies, hearts, minds, individuals,
parishes are stretched and pushed as God is conceived and grows within; painful labor accompanies Jesus’ birth among
us; we may well be led on paths we
wouldn’t choose that have crosses at their end. A wise friend once said, “Intimacy with God
isn’t fun.” It isn’t always
sweetness and joy and ease and delight, that peaceful sense of the presence of
God that sometimes is given to us.
.
But intimacy
with God is real, and that is favor indeed. When God comes
near we are changed, yes – but the changes bring gifts of love and renewal and
resurrection and hope. We receive
blessings in which we find that the stretching of conception, the pain of
labor, even the agony of loss and death can lead to new life we could not have
imagined, a life both richer and more challenging, a life more deeply joyful
and, at times, more shot through with the pain that comes of loving. Our lives are to be, in short, like Mary’s –
lives in which intimacy with God with all its awe-ful fear and wondrous favor
is real.
I said that Mary’s intimacy with the incarnate
God she held in her arms was unique in human history – and in one obvious sense
that is true. But it is also true that
Mary’s intimacy with God conceived within her that stretched her in pain and
blessed her with joy is a model of what all our lives are to be.
That intimacy
came unbidden to Mary when the angel appeared on her doorstep. That intimacy has been given to us, as well,
in our Baptism into Christ and in the Eucharist, in which take Christ within
our own bodies every Sunday. But if we want that intimacy with God to become alive
in our lives we would do well to ask for it.
St. Ita, a bold
medieval Celt asked for that intimacy in these words, “I will take nothing from
my Lord unless he give me his Son from heaven in the form of a baby that I may
nurse him.” [2]
If that sounds
a little extreme for modern Anglican sensibilities, recall these familiar words
we’ve all sung many times and will again this season:
“O holy child
of
Cast out our
sin and enter in, be born in us today.”
“Be born in us
today.” If that isn’t a prayer for the favored
intimacy with God we should both fear and desire, I don’t know what is. May we pray it with all our hearts.
The Rev. Jack
Zamboni
December 21,
2008