I've been meaning to post this sermon for several months now!
Sermon 3/24/26
Luke 1:26-38
Between the Question and the Answer
I’ve been a United Methodist my whole life, and so I can’t say that I have ever celebrated the Feast of the Annunciation before, which is technically tomorrow, March 25th. The small Methodist community of my childhood, ever mindful of doing anything that seemed “too Catholic,” would definitely have been suspicious of a Feast Day focusing on Mary, mother of Jesus. As I was looking at the lectionary readings for this week, though, I noticed the readings for the Feast of the Annunciation tucked in there, and I just couldn’t pass them over. And then when WoMA focused on Mary’s Magnificat for part of their chapel last Tuesday it felt even more “right,” this tugging toward Mary’s story.
The Feast of the Annunciation is the day that we remember the Angel Gabriel visiting Mary with the news that Mary has been chosen to carry and give birth to God-in-the-flesh, a child who will be named Jesus. In the Roman Rite, the Feast of the Annunciation is a solemnity, a holy day that celebrates a mystery of faith. And indeed, the incarnation of Jesus, and Mary being filled with the Holy Spirit as means of the incarnation - that is full of mystery, isn’t it? The Feast of the Annunciation is celebrated, sensibly, nine months before Christmas - the length of a pregnancy. And so it falls, always, during Lent - only adjusted if it actually falls during Holy Week itself. Today, then, we celebrate the Annunciation - the beginning of the beginning of Jesus’s life - even as next week we will remember his crucifixion. The juxtaposition is a little jarring.
I, like many of you, am preparing to graduate from Drew this May, but also like many of you, I am not quite there yet. I have a dissertation that’s written, but not yet defended, and a graduation fee that’s been paid for months, but no diploma in my hand. But even though I am not yet finished, and there is no guarantee yet of finishing, I’m planning for, I must plan for, and imagine the future, working on the assumption that there is a “what’s next” after this. I know some of you are in similar situations - making plans for a future that isn’t yet guaranteed, not quite. To draw on President Obama’s language, it is the audacity of hope.
And I think that’s what celebrating the Annunciation during Lent is like. It’s this audacious, bold hope that is planning on new life that comes after heartache. In the sombre wilderness of Lent, we’re already hearing about the incarnation of God in our midst that is to come. It’s Dean Tanya’s family preparing for new life in their midst even as they are mourning her death. It’s people living under fascist and authoritarian rule planning for a future that’s dependent on the end of oppressive regimes. It’s building for a future that trusts that the present heartache is not endless, not the only thing, and not the last thing. And so, Annunciation. An announcement of good news. This incredible, miraculous, seemingly impossible hope for the future that shows up right in the thick of Lent.
So, what exactly happens in this annunciation text, an account we find only in Luke’s gospel? God sends the angel Gabriel to deliver a message to Mary, a young women - a virgin, we’re told, who was engaged to a man named Joseph, who was of David’s house, and who was living in Galilee, in Nazareth. Gabriel shows up and says, “Greetings, Mary, favored one” - which literally means one to whom grace has been shown. “God is with you,” Gabriel says. This greeting alone is confounding to Mary, and she ponders the angel's words - which here means that she has a kind of internal debate about them, weighing and measuring these words. Although it would make for some nice symmetry, the word used here is not the same as when Mary is pondering everything that happens with Jesus’s birth in Chapter 2. This pondering is a bit more deliberative, perhaps even more skeptical, or at least uncertain.
Gabriel, perhaps reading that uncertainty, tries to assure Mary: “Don’t be afraid.” He reiterates that Mary has found favor with God - God’s grace is with her. And then the Big Thing: “You will conceive and bear a son named Jesus, and he will be the Son of God, who will have an eternal claim to the throne of David, and he’ll reign endlessly.
Mary asks, “How can this be, since I have never had sex?”
Gabriel responds that the Holy Spirit will come upon her, and she will be “overshadowed” by the power of the Most High - language that we see again during the transfiguration of Jesus on the mountaintop. Mary’s child will be holy. Mary’s child will be God’s son. And, in case that’s not enough, Mary’s relative Elizabeth, an older woman, who was thought to be unable to have children, is pregnant too. Because, as Gabriel concludes, “nothing will be impossible with God.”
And then Mary says, “Here I am, a slave of God,” language that Mary returns to in Magnificat, when she envisions the systems of domination-upending that God will do through her. “Let things happen to me just as you’ve said.” And Gabriel, satisfied, departs.
I don’t know about you, but my initial reaction to this text is that I’d have had a few (hundred) more questions than Mary seems to have. She asks one question, which Gabriel answers in weird language. And that’s enough for Mary to respond, “Yes, fine, that works for me.” Uh, what? How about: Why me? How about: What will I tell Joseph? How about: How much trouble will this get me in? How about: What do you mean, God’s child? How about: Will you protect me if I agree to this? How about: so many other questions!
I’d like to believe that we’re seeing here what we often see in Biblical accounts of conversations. The scriptures have a different sense of time than we do. This conversation seems to take mere seconds as we read it through. But maybe this exchange happens over the course of hours, or days. Maybe Mary’s pondering lasted for some long time, giving her ample time to think it all over. And maybe we’re not seeing here what we regularly don’t see in Biblical conversations: the whole story. So many conversations in the scriptures seem to drop off without resolution, like how on TV shows people never seem to end conversations when they’re on the phone. They don’t say goodbye. They just hang up. So I’d like to believe that Mary really asks every question she has, but that Luke considers all of this uninteresting. All that matters to Luke is that Mary agrees with the plan.
And no doubt, that’s an important detail. But there are some other parts of this exchange between Gabriel and Mary that interest me too. What I find most interesting is this: Although we don’t hear Gabriel pose God’s plan as a question to Mary - “Would you be ok, Mary, with being overshadowed by the Most High?” - she seems to receive it as one. Mary says “Yes,” and her yes, her consent, implies her understanding that she was being asked, even if everything we read in this story is expressed as a statement of what will assuredly be according to God’s plan.
Mary says yes - and her yes implies that she could also have said no. And that is so, so important. Because I don’t believe that “God’s will” is something that is supposed to be visited upon us by force, without our consent, without our participation. Rather, I think we do better when we think of “will of God” as God’s dreams, God’s best hope, God’s most creative, inspired plan for what might be, what might become, what might be called forth if we, God’s partners, God’s co-creators, you and me - if we say yes to God’s imagination. I like all of those images better than “God’s will,” which makes God a dictator, and us passive recipients. Mary did not hear Gabriel’s announcement passively. Indeed, many biblical figures do not. Jesus does not. Mary listens, ponders, and decides that she can see God’s vision, can see that saying yes will lead to the liberative work she proclaims just verses after our text in the Magnificat.
Mary could have said no, I think. And thinking about that made me wonder - maybe there were others who were visited by Gabriel who did say no. Maybe Mary was not the first. Maybe she was just the first to say yes.
We do not have to say yes to the potential futures God lays before us. God’s will - if we must call it that - isn’t coercive. We can say, “I just can’t imagine that future right now, I’m sorry.” And I think that’s ok - truly. I don’t think God punishes us for not being ready, for not embracing God’s dream. Sometimes, we are not ready. Sometimes, we have a different vision to offer to God. Sometimes, we need to do some more healing, or more growing first. Sometimes, we need to ask a lot of questions before we’ll be ready to say yes. And sometimes, we just can’t grasp, yet, the new life that’s coming beyond the Good Friday that looms large before us. We can say “Take this cup from me.” We can say no. Or not now.
But I do think we miss out, then, on being part of the impossible becoming possible. Saying “yes” is like imagining, even in the midst of our worst grief, that there will yet be joy.
Somehow, Mary could imagine exactly what God was imagining, and ever is imagining: the humbled exalted and the exalted humbled, the hungry filled with good things. Liberation. Justice. Life. She could imagine with God, and so she answered what she knew to be an invitation. “Here I am. May it be so.”
In these days of Lent, in these quickly waning days of another semester, in these days where we can barely stand to look at the news, in these days when our community is in mourning, in these days when it seems that less and less is possible for our planetary future, in these days when it sometimes feels as if evil will prevail… in these days, can you imagine - will you imagine - will you cultivate your imagination - will you listen to what God is imagining - what comes after this grief?
Amen.
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