December 19, 1999
4th Sunday of Advent
Year B
Theme: Mary’s story here is the eternal story of being met by grace that
doesn’t make sense; it is the first story of many, many stories in which
we, like Mary, are stunned by how much we are given by without knowing
why, without having any idea about why we are given the grace we are
given.
Its hard to believe that Advent is almost over, that we are about to begin
the Christmas Season, the time when we are no longer waiting in
expectation for Christ,but we are in the midst of what we have waited for
the this whole Advent season—the birth of the Christ Child. And so we
have before us today in the Scriptures the story that begins a much
larger story, a story that we are even now, even on the cusp of the
millennium, living out here with each other. It is the story of God’s
relentless pursuit of the world, God’s ceaseless and passionate pursuit
of you and me, your neighbor, your friends, your enemy, your children,
the grocery clerk, the lawyer, all of us. The story begins here with this
moment, when an angel visits Mary, when the absurd happens, when a
virgin is promised a child without the benefit of sex. It is an important
moment, not only because of what the angel says to Mary—that she will
conceive a child who will be the Savior of the world—but because it is a
pattern that all of us, all of us here in the community of faith, and even
those beyond these four walls, will experience. It is the pattern, the
eternal story, of being met by a grace that doesn’t make sense; it is the
first story of many, many stories in which we, like Mary,are surprised and
stunned by how much we are given without knowing why, without having
any idea about why we are given the grace we are given. Mary is simply
a young woman in a small town in Nazareth; the passage never mentions
anything extraordinary about her—I mean, the passage never mentions
much about her virtue or her goodness, or why God chose to pick her, of
all the young woman who were in her extended family, a family with
connections to a now defunct monarchy. All we know is that an angel
comes to this woman, this woman among so many women probably just
like her, and says, “Greetings, most favored one! The Lord is with you.”
One of the things about that word “favored” is that it can actually be
translated as “grace” instead of the “favored.” So you could just as
easily have translated the angel’s greeting as “Greetings, most graced
one! The Lord is with you.” The word “graced” and even the word
“favored” hint at the fact that it is God who is doing the choosing, it is
God who is offering grace to this young woman, in an unimportant town,
in an unimportant country. The angel never tells us her why she has
been picked, why she has been chosen to be a recipient of God’s grace,
a recipient of God’s favor. And this disturbs her—the Scripture says that
“she was greatly troubledby what he said and wondered what this
greeting could mean.“ “Why me?” What I have done to deserve God’s
attention, God’s grace?!” You know, sometimes we run past this moment
and jump to the angel’s reason for being there. I think we should step
back at this moment where Mary is troubled, where she is disturbed to be
the object of God’s gaze—she doesn’t know why God has paid attention
to her, she doesn’t know why God has graced her, why God has favored
her when there were probably other people who were nicer, who were
kinder, who were more committedto the rules and regulations that
surrounded Jewish life at that time. “Why must I be the object of God’s
grace?” This question must have been the first thing she thoughtwhen
the angel finished telling her that God was gracing her. You know, I didn’
t realize how much this question must have disturbed Mary at that
moment until recently, until I had a conversation that brought home to me
how hard it is to really accept God’s grace, how hard it is even accept
another person’s help, to be honest. This person is going through a
particularly rough time, a time when this person has to accept help from
other people, financially and otherwise. It’s a painful time, a disturbing
time, a troubling time, because like most of us she has worked hard not
to have be on other side of need—this one, like most of us, would prefer
to give rather than receive. In the midst of an incredible but painful
conversation, my friend said, “You know, it really hard to be always the
one on receiving end. I want to be able to give too.” At that moment,
my friend spoke so much truth—my friend is right:it is hard to be on the
other side of grace, on the other side of someone else’s favor. The
rules say that you get what you work hard for; the rules say that you get
what you deserve. Don’t the rules say that good things come to those
who are good, those who do all the right things, to the people who follow
all the rules?
And then a moment comes when, like with my friend, when like Mary, you
receive something you didn’t work for, something you didn’t ask for,
something that just came to you, not because you were good enough,
but because God chose to love you, God chose you to be the object of
God’s grace. You become the recipient of God’s grace through other
people. Like Mary, my friend was troubled by being object of so much
grace, so much goodness. It really is hard to be on the other side of
grace, it is hard to be on the other side of love when you don’t feel all
that lovable. Indeed, It is hard to accept grace. So Mary is troubled
here, she is like my friend, she doesn’t know what to do with all this grace
she feels she doesn’t deserve, especially from the God of the universe.
It hard enough to accept the grace and help of our friends in our time of
need—imagine what Mary is going through at this moment! In the end,
though, she accepts this moment, this moment when grace itself will fill
her womb and she will give birth to the human form of grace, this Jesus
of Nazareth, the son of Mary, the son of Joseph, the child of the Most
High. She says, “I am the Lord's servant, may it be as you have said.” It
took a moment to get her to that place to accept God’s grace, but she
got there, probably, faster than most of us.
And the great thing about this moment, and ultimately the great thing
about the Gospel—this good news of how much God loves the world—is
that God’s gracewas not dependent on whether or not she had decided
to be the Lord’s servant. The grace was there, always there, whether or
not she decided to accept it. It wasn't going to be dependent on whether
or not she accepted God’s grace, God’s attention:the attention, the
grace, would always remain because God’s loves the world because God
simply loves the world, not because we love God back. The hard partis
accepting the grace, isn’t it? The hard part is accepting God’s love
because it breaks every rule we know of—we don’t know how to handle
love that doesn’t require anything back. It is nothing we have ever
experienced as human beings—in fact, it is nothing we will ever
experience with another human being, whether it’s our family or our
friends or even our partner. It is love that makes no sense—isn’t that the
heart of the Gospel? —love that is passionate and ceaseless because
God ispassionate and ceaseless in God’s pursuit of us? Mary is
experiencing this—she is never given a reason why God has chosen her
to be an object of grace—and it’s not an easy thing to accept. But its not
an easy thing for any of us to accept, this grace so freely given. We
don’t even have to accept it, really, God’s grace just is. Mary is
experiencing our story—the story of being accepted by a grace that
doesn’t make sense—it is the story of being surprised, stunned, even, by
how much we are givenwithout knowing why, without having any idea why
we are given the grace we are given. That is Mary’s story. That is my
story. I suspect that it is your story as well. It is the story of the Gospel.
And the story of the Gospel begins a few nights from now,in a manger, in
a child born to a woman who, like us, is stunned, utterly stunned, by how
passionately she is loved by God. Amen and amen.
