Luke
1:26-38
26 In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in
Galilee called Nazareth, 27 to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph,
of the house of David. The virgin's name was Mary. 28 And he came to her and
said, "Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you." 29 But she was
much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be.
30 The angel said to her, "Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found
favor with God. 31 And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and
you will name him Jesus. 32 He will be great, and will be called the Son of the
Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David.
33 He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will
be no end." 34 Mary said to the angel, "How can this be, since I am a
virgin?" 35 The angel said to her, "The Holy Spirit will come upon
you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to
be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God. 36 And now, your relative
Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month
for her who was said to be barren. 37 For nothing will be impossible with
God." 38 Then Mary said, "Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it
be with me according to your word." Then the angel departed from her.
I remember back in 1999 while most folks were
talking about the new millennium and worrying about whatever the Y2K was, I
only had one thing on my mind—turning sixteen in February of the year 2000. I
had all these dreams about what it was going to mean to turn sixteen and get my
driver’s license. For most of 1999, I had been driving either my mom’s
blistered-burgundy Ford Taurus station wagon with her in the passenger seat, or
one of the number of cars that passed over my dad’s driveway (a white Chevy
Celebrity station wagon, a blue Dodge Dynasty, his old ’75 Custom Deluxe…). I
couldn’t wait to be free from the requirements of having a licensed adult in
the passenger seat, to be free to drive my own, much cooler, hot-rodded Chevy,
to do secret burn outs on some quiet stretch of state highway, to take it off
some old dirt pit, getting mud up to the roof. I had all these daydreams about
what it was going to be like, expectations taken from car magazines, the car
shows I watched on Sunday mornings, and Saturday night parking lot beside the
Dairy Queen where my older half-brother used to hang out in his Mercury Capri
with his friends who drove lifted pickups. Like so many soon-to-be-sixteen-year-olds,
I had all sorts of grand expectations about what it was going to be like to
drive. Then I turned sixteen.
My dad borrowed $300 from my grandma and took
me to the Ray Dean Auto Auction just outside of Dothan, where we bought a ragged-out,
1988 Plymouth Sundance, with only two matching wheels and more than one and a
half rotations of play in the steering. I remember jumping it off in the dirt
lot outside the auction barn and driving it back to Dad’s house without a
battery. When I got my license a couple of months later, I went from
volunteering to drive, to being
volunteered to drive, acting
as a free taxi service to my sister and stepsiblings. I had to buy my own gas
and insurance—on top of paying my grandma back for the $300 Dad borrowed “for
me,” so I got a job at the Chevy dealership, where every dollar I made was
spent on gas to get me back and forth to work, groceries for our house, a
different bill depending on the month, and the liability insurance required to
register my faded white jalopy. So much for expectations.
Reality has a way of correcting our
expectations I suppose, but then again, we don’t pull our expectations out of
thin air. A young person graduates from college and expects to find a job. Why?
Because her parents did, because her high school counselor told her she would,
because the brochure from the university promised a 98% placement of graduates.
A couple gets married, spends a couple of years together building a life, a
home, expects to have a baby. Why? Because their friends are, because their
social media feeds are filled with pregnancy photoshoots and baby pictures. A
man expects a raise and a promotion. Why? Because he’s worked hard for nearly a
decade at the same job, with the same company, rarely missing a day, always
putting in his time and doing his job well. But sometimes, no one’s hiring a
college graduate. Sometimes a couple can try, pray, and undergo private and
invasive procedures, but still the pregnancy test is negative. Sometimes a man
can work hard for years and still get overlooked for someone younger, someone
more willing to sacrifice their integrity for a promotion. Sometimes—maybe most
times—our expectations go unfulfilled, and maybe that’s God, the call against
our expectations. That seems to be how God shows up for Mary.
I know
this story is usually reserved for a much cooler climate, but maybe our hearing
it a bit outside of its usual context will help us to notice something from a
different perspective, something outside of our expectations. “In the sixth month the angel
Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin
engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin's
name was Mary.” First, Mary isn’t engaged to Joseph in the way
you and I may think of engagement. Mary is betrothed to Joseph, and that
isn’t nearly as romantic as it sounds. Mary’s father would have arranged for
Mary’s marriage to Joseph. She’s likely a teenager, maybe fifteen or sixteen,
and Joseph was likely much older, possibly a widower with his own children from
his first marriage (a notion born out of the Catholic tradition concerning
Mary’s perpetual virginity). After their official betrothal, Mary would live
with her parents for a year, with the wedding lasting a week. For all intents
and purposes, Mary and Joseph are married: if Joseph were to die during their
betrothal, Mary would be a widow.
Now, Mary’s expectations would involve continuing in her betrothal to
Joseph, being properly wed to him, bearing him children (preferably sons), and
living her life out quietly as a woman in a culture where the most she could
hope to be is a subservient wife and mother. Mary, as far as we know, was a
devout Jewish woman, so her expectations of God would have been rather
ordinary: a divine Being, who resides “up there” or perhaps in the Most Holy
Place of the Temple, a God who mostly lets the world play out as it is, judging
us in our sins, requiring atonement through sacrifices and the devout adherence
to the Law. The thought that God would intervene in such a personal way…to a
woman…a young woman…a poor, young woman in some backwater town like
Nazareth…that’s against expectations in so many ways.
When Gabriel, an angel (literally a “messenger”) sent by God shows up at
Mary’s place, the effect of his presence is perhaps more than we may realize.
You see, in Mary’s day there was a popular story (Tobit, included in a
collection we call the Apocrypha) told about an angel who would appear to a
bride on her wedding night and kill her soon-to-be-husband, an act that happens
more than once in the story.[1]
So, when Gabriel shows up, Mary may have likely thought of that story, and
perhaps the appearance of an angel would have caused her to think that perhaps
he had showed up to kill Joseph, leaving her a widow, making her future that much
harder. Or perhaps something even darker had crossed Mary’s mind, something
that had never crossed my male mind in all the years I’ve read this story:
Gabriel (for all we know in the appearance of a man), a stranger, shows up in
Mary’s home, knowing her name, telling her she is about to conceive a child…I
can imagine for any number of women such a thought might be terrifying,
terrifying in ways most men will never understand. Whatever her initial
feelings may have been, Mary’s expectations of life are soon to be shattered by
Gabriel’s pronouncement.
"Greetings,
favored one! The Lord is with you…Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found
favor with God. And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you
will name him Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most
High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. He
will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no
end."
“Favored one…you have found favor with God…you
will conceive in your womb and bear a son…” Perhaps these words sound nice set
to a composition by Handel, or read in the soft glow of a Christmas tree, but
think with me for a moment of just how disruptive these words must have been
for Mary. How can a woman be “favored” or blessed if she’s about to become
inexplicably pregnant? I don’t care what culture or what time in history it is,
nor does it seem that most people care about the facts of the case: it always
seems that when young girl turns out to
be pregnant, she is immediately labeled, shamed, and ostracized. Why, remember
when I was in high school, even junior high, whenever a girl would wear a baggy
sweater when it was clearly too hot outside for one, how kids would whisper
around their lockers, “You know she’s pregnant, right?” how some girls would
disappear over Christmas break, only to be seen again the next fall, held back
a grade, telling everyone she had gotten sick or that her parents had to take
her out of school to travel or something. Whenever a young girl, out of
wedlock, begins to show, the boy involved is often forgotten and the
finger-pointing, criticisms, and judgements start. I don’t doubt it was the
same for Mary—in fact, it would have been worse, because she was betrothed—as
good as married—and now she’d start to show the signs of pregnancy. Who’s going
to believe this is God’s baby?
How is this proof that she’s a “favored one
with God?” What’s more, having a baby wasn’t wrapped up with all the joy and
candy-coated almonds that is today. There were no maternity wards, no OBGYNs,
no epidurals, no neo-natal units. The chance of a baby surviving childbirth
wasn’t near the guarantee it is now (which is not to say it is such even
today). If the baby did survive, you’d have to feed him, raise him, shield him
from all of those who would likely bully him for being that “bastard child of
that loose girl from Nazareth.” And on top of it all, Mary would come to learn
that her son—her oldest son, the one she had been told was God’s son—would be
belittled, mocked, betrayed, nailed to a cross, executed as a criminal, and
abandoned…what mother wants that for her son? How is this being “favored by
God?”
If you want to be favored by God, well, that
comes with a different set of expectations, doesn’t it? If you’re favored by
God, you tend to stand a bit straighter than everyone else. You might wake up
in a slightly better mood than the rest of us “unfavored folks.” Things tend to
go your way more often than not: you always get a closer parking spot at
Walmart, an extra wing in your basket at Struts, a rain-free vacation, the
winning raffle ticket. Why, to be favored by God is to be envied by others,
right? It means life is just a bit easier; you’re just a bit happier; things go
a bit smoother. And when someone asks why you’re in such a good mood, why
things seem so great, you just tell them (as a friend of mine over in Atlanta
likes to say), “I’m blessed and highly favored!” That’s the expectation, right?
And there’s nothing wrong with that—hear me: there’s nothing wrong with that,
to give God the credit for those things in your life that seem to break your
way. But what if being favored by God can also mean answering the call against
such expectations? What if God is found in the disruptive call against expectations?
Mary
cannot help but ask Gabriel, after hearing his annunciation about her upcoming
pregnancy, “How can this
be, since I am a virgin?"
It’s an appropriate question, but Gabriel’s answer isn’t exactly comforting,
not exactly one Mary can offer with much proof to her betrothed, her family,
and her in-laws when they will eventually ask: "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the
power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will
be holy; he will be called Son of God. And now, your relative Elizabeth in her
old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month for her who was
said to be barren. For nothing will be impossible with God." Maybe Elizabeth’s own miraculous pregnancy would
bring some relief to Mary, some bit of evidence to use in her own defense.
Regardless, Mary is facing a future that is less than exciting. The next months
will be filled not only with the pains and discomforts of pregnancy, but the
rumors, accusations, explanations, and confrontations she’ll no doubt have with
Joseph, her family, and others in her community.
But as potentially scandalous as Mary’s
pregnancy may have been, such a scandal could not come close to the disruption
it promised: God was no longer “up there;” God was no longer “out there;” God
was no longer some distant deity waiting on the scent of our burnt offerings to
slake his wrath for us and our sins. No, as it turns out, God was never that.
God so longed for us, so loved us (as the Fourth Gospel put it), that God
entered into the very matter of this world to prove it to us.
You see, it’s not just Mary’s unexpected
pregnancy that runs against our expectations. It’s not just the miraculous
conception of her son that calls her to something else altogether different
from that which she expected. No. The call comes in the very reality that God
is entering into human life, into this dirty, destructive, depraved, corrupt,
and weirdly wonderful world. For our expectations of God are that God remains
God somewhere else, in some time else, on a throne in heaven, not in the womb
of a teenager. Our expectations of God are bound up in God’s location above or
beyond us, on some plain where God is able to omnisciently record our every
infraction, not born into this world in the painful, sticky mess of birth,
wrapped in rags and placed in a feedbox. Our expectations of God are so often
bound up in images of power and might, victory and triumph, glory and strength,
not in scared girl, with a shaky voice saying, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me
according to your word."
Our expectations of God are too often caught up in the grand images of the
Renaissance masters, muscular men with piercing eyes and forceful gestures,
commanding our attention by the very physicality, not the stumbling attempts of
a toddler to walk, holding the hand of his mother Mary towards the outstretched
arms of his adopted father Joseph. Our expectations of God seem too often to be
expectations forged from our own desires for a God who judges sin with an
immovable will and an iron resolve, not a God who hangs bloody and beaten on a
cross, asking forgiveness for those who nailed him there.
Perhaps
the call of God comes to us in ways we expect, through blessings and feelings
of favor that lift our spirits and cause us give thanks. Then again, maybe the
call of God is a bit more disruptive, calling against our expectations, forcing
us to accept what we may not accept otherwise. If that’s so, I pray we all have
the faith of Mary, that we may answer against our expectations: “Here am I, the servant of
the Lord; let it be with me according to your word," according to God’s call. Amen.
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