Faithful Wonder

Fourth Sunday of Advent

2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16

Luke 1:26-38

Stephanie and I needed a few final Christmas gifts.  And we were looking at some of the witty, snarky t-shirts at snorgtees.com.  And now that I’ve mentioned that website, about half of you will spend the rest of this sermon surfing that site.  I should have arranged for a fee for driving up their traffic.

A picture of two moles inside a glass beaker.  “Two moles per liter”

Two atoms having a conversation.  “I lost an electron.  Are you positive?”

“Home is where the wifi connects automatically.”

Always give 100% . . . Unless you’re giving blood.

“That’s too much bacon.”  - Said no one ever.

A picture of an adorable sloth.  “Cutest of the deadly sins.” 

A picture of Mary holding baby Jesus.  “Abstinence - 99.99% effective” 

 

On that rather irreverent and possibly blasphemous note, let’s return to our gospel reading.  Let’s return to it not out of obligation, but as if we’re unwrapping a gift with anticipation that there is something life-giving and important here for us.

The story of the angel Gabriel’s visit to Mary can help us remember why we were drawn to God's love in the first place.  We weren't drawn to rules and demands.  We weren't drawn to any soul-crushing expectation to conform with someone else's expectations for us.  We weren't under the illusion that faith makes us know-it-alls.  Nor that faith fixes everything that's wrong with us.   

What drew us to life with God was something like grace-filled wonder - wonder that we are loved; that all others are loved like we are; that all things exist within God's expansive love. Mary can be for us a model of the most fitting way to respond to God's love: faithful wonder.

Luke doesn’t mention whether the angel Gabriel visited Mary at night during a dream.  But whenever it happened, it was startling.  Even at the angel’s greeting, Mary is troubled, wondering what’s going on.

The angel has to reassure her, “Don’t be afraid.  God favors you.”  And so Mary listens.  And there is a lot to take in.  Almost too much to process.  God’s Spirit is going to envelop her body in a way that leaves her with child.  And this child she bears will be God’s long awaited promise for a David-like king whose reign will never end. 

Those writing the gospel could have framed the story with Mary saying something like, “Well of course, Lord.  It’s a no-brainer.  I mean, who am I to ask questions.  It all makes sense to me.”  But that’s not her response.  She pushes back.  She asks a question.  “How will this be, since I’m a virgin?”  How is this going to work?  What you’re saying doesn’t make sense.  I hear you but I don’t see how it can be true.

Mary’s questioning response to the angel is a model for us.  There is room to ask questions, to doubt and consider, before finally getting to Mary’s beautiful prayer . . . “I am the Lord’s Servant.  May it be to me according to your word.”

Mary can pray this way because she trusts that she is dealing not with a dangerous or harmful strange power or alien force.  She trusts that she’s dealing with the powerful mystery of love at the heart of all things.  She trusts the God who humbly descends to take up dwelling in her womb.  She trusts that God’s visit is the long-awaited comfort for all those in distress.

What is it about Mary that enables her to say “I am your servant.  May it be to me according to your word”?  Why does she open herself and make herself available to this experience rather than shutting off and closing down in the face of something strange?  This deep trust in God marks her not only as the mother but also as the sister and friend of the child she bears.  Jesus’ life was a life with the trust of Mary’s faithful wonder woven through it completely.  He is the one who makes himself available to God for our benefit – and at great cost to himself.

Let me put a little sharper point on this.  You and I are in a bit of a pickle.  Here we are in church.  We’re part of the religion machine.  And congregations like ours are potentially places where we gather to open ourselves to God and others.  But there is also the danger that we will live through the religious trappings but fail to really open ourselves to anything at all.  You can, of course, go to church with a heart and life that’s closed down.  You can, of course, live through Advent but never really make yourself available to God’s arrival in the midst of who you are.

So our gospel reading on this final Sunday in Advent offers us all another chance to join our hearts with Mary in praying before God, praying in the most sincere and personal way possible, praying together with one another, “We are your servants.  May it be to us according to your word.” 

And in praying that prayer we open ourselves fully to the reality of a world invaded and pervaded by the quietly powerful love of God.  And we can do this without fear because with Mary we’ve come to trust in the goodness of the God who arrives.  We may not understand the ways of God, but we rejoice in God’s arrival to decisively alter the world’s future, as well as our own personal lives.

So what’s at stake?  Why does it matter that we learn to pray in this way?  Because Mary’s prayer offers us a life-giving path in a difficult and dangerous world. 

What Mary knew is that you cannot open your life to God without opening your life to the whole world.  To absolutely everything and everyone.  You have to take in the whole big confusing, messy thing.  And love it.  And let God love you in it. 

You have to open yourself to the hard conversations about race between whites and blacks in Ferguson, in NYC, and with your own neighbors.  All the media outlets will ask you to figure it out, find an answer, get on a team, and argue.  But that process will leave you only half-human, not to mention smugly self-righteous.  Your calling is to keep yourself open.  To listen to the pain of others.  To drink it in and be with them.

You have to open yourself to a newly dangerous world.  A world in which Taliban militants can invade a school and kill young children and women.  A world in which groups recruit and train young men for hatred and violence.  This is not an easy world to live in.  It’s a world where we entertain ourselves by playing video games where you score points by shooting and killing others.  It’s a world where adolescent frustration, confusion, depression, and mental illness is leading more and more young boys to take guns to school and murder others in an act of final nonsense.  You try to keep the thought from creeping up in you that this is the kind of place something like that could happen.  But you can’t.  Because it could.

You have to open yourself to a world with grinding poverty, with the despair of drug use, with parents who cannot love and protect their children.  This is the world.  This is your world and mine.  And it’s hard to keep yourself open to it all.

But this is also the world God loves.  This is the world where God arrives and dwells.

God could run away but God arrives.  God could have stayed away but God arrives.  God could have spoken from a safe distance but God draws close to us.  God loves the world from within it, in all it’s mess and gore, in all its pointlessness and confusion and despair.

Friends, this is cause for joy and celebration.  This is good news that can pull us into a new way of being in the world, a new way of being with others, and a new kind of prayer.  “Here am I,” we pray with Mary.  “I am your servant.  May it be to me according to your word.”

Albert Camus is a French philosopher and novelist who wrote in the early and middle of the 20^th century.  It’s likely that some of you were assigned books of his in high school or college.  The Stranger and The Plague are two of his often read novels.  His basic insight was that life often feels absurd.  We want to live in a meaningful world, but it doesn’t always appear that way. If you’re looking for something inspiring or uplifting to read the week before Christmas, I definitely do not recommend Camus.  But I did come across a quotation that I like . . .

“[Our life's] work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover . . . those two or three great and simple images in whose presence [our] hearts first opened.”

Camus is making the point that early in life we have a few heart-opening experiences.  Now what does he mean?  He means that if you pay attention, you will find that most of your life has been routine.  Get up, go to school or work, eat, see others, piddle your time away doing this or that.  Go to bed.  Repeat. 

But most of us have had a very few, very special, breakthrough moments of clarity and light.  In these special experiences, something clicked.  We got lost in wonder for a few minutes.  Something struck us as absolutely, stunningly beautiful.  Something called to our curiosity.  So can you identify these experiences for yourself? 

It might be the beauty of the grain of wood that appears when the darkened varnish is sanded from an old door.  It might be the pleasure of making something – baking bread or sewing a dress or soldering a pipe.  It might be the thrill of competition in an athletic event.  It might be the feel of cool, moist soil as you work in the garden.  It might be the bolt of lightning that hit you at the last line of a wonderful poem.  It might be the thrill of getting lost in the woods.  Or the marvel of visiting a far away place and finding something utterly strange and peculiar about the way the buildings look or how the streets bend just so.

Any of these things could do it.  In these rare but important experiences, our hearts first opened.  We experienced wonder.  We stopped in our track, shocked out of the routine for just a flash of a moment and thought to ourselves, “the world is beautiful and I fit here.”

The problem is that we lose track of these experiences.  They get buried and forgotten.  That’s why Camus writes that our life’s work involves the trek of rediscovering these heart-opening experiences.  And the goal of rediscovering them is so that you can return to them, and give more of yourself to them.  So that you can open your heart more widely, to let more of life in.  To let more of yourself into life.

It seems to me that something like this is what happens for Mary when the angel Gabriel visits.  She has a heart-opening experience that God is with her in a life altering way.  And she gladly opens herself into this mystery.

It seems to me that all of us have this experience in some form.  And yet it gets buried under routine.  It gets shoved to the back of our mind and heart by our fretting about this and that.  It gets crowded into an ever smaller place in our hearts by thousands of other experiences – experiences of sadness, anger, despair, loneliness, frustration, and confusion.

Mary shows us how to keep our lives and hearts open, full of wonder.  Not an uncommitted, rootless wonder.  But a faithful kind of wonder.  A glad acceptance of our calling to stay open to God and others without needing to know everything.  “We are your servants.  May it be to us according to your word.”  Amen.