Fourth Sunday of Advent, Year B, December 24, 2017, The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

O God in whom is heaven, may we have the wisdom, the strength, and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth – come when it may and cost what it will.

Today our liturgical calendar is giving us the Fourth Sunday of Advent in the morning and Christmas Eve in the evening. Buckle up! For the past three weeks, our scripture readings have been full of prophetic calls to vast numbers of people for large scale civil engineering projects, leveling mountains, filling in valleys, and making travel easier for God. Today, in a dramatic downshift, we are invited into intensely intimate scenes between David and Nathan, between Mary and Gabriel. You can almost hear our theological engine revving as we slow down to make this big turn.

In what might be the most important theological development of the Biblical literature of Deuteronomistic History (that is, the large chunk of scripture of Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, 1 & 2 Samuel and 1 & 2 Kings), we learn about King David’s desire to build a house for the Holy One of Israel. David tells the prophet Nathan that God should not be living like a nomad in a tent, but should have a proper dwelling place, a seat of power. At first Nathan agrees, but then Nathan has a dream in which the Holy One acknowledges David’s desire, but insists on not a building, not a secure location, but a lineage and a heritage of everlasting love. There’s a word play going on here on the Hebrew word “bayt” which is the word for house or dwelling, temple or palace, family line or dynasty. In English we use the word house the same way: house is a building a person might live in, a “house of worship” means a church or temple or mosque, and the House of Windsor means generations of a royal family of the United Kingdom. Same word, house, or in Hebrew, “bayt.”

This story marks a huge theological shift from the conditional covenant delivered on Sinai, that essentially says, “if you will be my people, then I will be your God,” to what Biblical scholar, Bruce Birch, calls a “nevertheless” promise of unconditional love. It’s not that obedience to covenant requirements is somehow no longer considered essential. It’s just that no matter how people miss the mark, no matter what bad behavior people engage in, the love of the Holy One will be everlasting and unbroken. [1] Devastation of a building and exile of a people cannot destroy the house of God – or the house of Love, or Desire for the Shalom or the well-being of those who are beloved (also known as the House of David). This story teaches that God will not be confined to a single location and God’s love for the people will be steadfast (chesed in Hebrew).

This ancient promise was a message of hope for the generations of Jesus followers and other Jews in the devastating time after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Roman Empire toward the end of the first century of the Common Era. It is a hallmark of Rabbinic Judaism – that the Holy One was not confined to the Temple in Jerusalem, and that fidelity to the covenant didn’t require a particular geographical location, but rather a particular inclination of the heart. Our collect for today begs that Love will purify our conscience daily, so that Jesus Christ will find in us a big roomy house – a mansion prepared for himself.

What our Gospels of Matthew and Luke assert is the importance of this theological heritage and they go to some lengths to demonstrate the lineage of Jesus back to the House of David (even though they don’t exactly agree on how to get there). It’s not so different from our Episcopal Church’s concern with Apostolic Succession. (Apostolic succession is a little sketchy if we are asserting something literal rather than spiritual, something factual rather than something true.) As you know, I prefer to stake my life’s work on spiritual and true, and not get stuck in the weeds of literal or factual. I so love the teaching that, “just because it didn’t happen, doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”

“Just because it didn’t happen, doesn’t mean it isn’t true,” is my suggested way to hear the magnificent story of the encounter with Mary (or Miriam) and a divine messenger whose name means “God is my strength.” Why Gabriel and not another angel of the Lord? The text assumes we know so we are not told, but, perhaps it’s because Gabriel is the angel who is known for providing sudden insight and guidance for the future when explaining the prophet Daniel’s perplexing visions in the First Testament. While we don’t know how long this surprising encounter and understanding actually took, the story reads like Mary’s insight and guidance for the future came in a flash. Mary goes from perplexed and afraid to “all in” in the course of just a couple hundred words.

Prior to our lesson for this morning, the Gospel of Luke first tells the story of John the Baptist’s mother Elizabeth’s impossible pregnancy, saying that Elizabeth spent the first five months of her pregnancy in seclusion and her disbelieving husband, Zechariah the priest, lost his ability to speak. It sounds like a very difficult time. Then in the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, Mary was told that she was about to become pregnant with Jesus and got the news that her relative Elizabeth was also expecting a child.

There are three things that I want you to understand are deeply true, even if they didn’t happen. They have to do with angels, virgins and cousins. First, the deep truth of angels. Angels come in all shapes and sizes. They usually start their message with “do not be afraid.” That’s the most reliable clue that angels can be frightening or that they arrive in the midst of very frightening circumstances. In the book of Daniel, Gabriel is described as looking like a man. That says to me that there were probably no wings involved. The artistic depiction of wings on angels might be a way of visually communicating that they came out of nowhere, or that they came directly from the heavens, like a dove or an eagle or a sparrow. In the Bible, angels are only recognized in hindsight, after the message from God has been delivered. In the Second Testament book of Hebrews, Jesus’ followers are instructed to “stay on good terms with each other, held together by love. Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers because some have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it!” [2] The Biblical idea of an angel is one sent by the Holy One who is not visibly different from any ordinary person. I am quite sure that we have all encountered angels of the Lord.

Second, I want to say a word about the deep truth of virgins. This is not a medical record that we are reading. This is a great love story. Consider this: we have a a great love story here about the Savior of the world being entrusted to a young woman without prior knowledge or consent of a man. Think about the power of that in a patriarchal social construct like the Roman Empire. The Song of Hannah is one of the prime role models in Judaism for prayer. It’s a song of salvation history – about the great Love of God working through nobodies, born in unimpressive places, in unlikely and even scandalous circumstances. It’s a song of God’s ability (Love’s ability) to bless, to overturn wrong, and to set things right. And here’s the thing. Before Mary sings Hannah’s song and makes it her own, before she travels to visit Elizabeth, what Mary says is, “Here I am.” I don’t want you to miss that. It’s at the end of our Gospel portion for today. Here am I – Here I am.

In Biblical literature, this is the disclosure of divine availability – of presence and promise. Abraham says it. Jacob says it. Moses and Joshua say it. Samuel and Isaiah and Jeremiah say it. And most of all, God says it. God says it in the revelation to Moses in the burning bush and throughout the books of the prophets. Here I am. To say, “here I am,” is to pause to make a statement of radical and intense availability for whatever impossible situation might come next. It’s deep calling to deep.

A word about the deep truth of cousins. Whether one spends a lot of time with cousins or rarely sees cousins, there is a relational security in shared heritage, a strong bond, a fierce loyalty that doesn’t carry the baggage that can weigh down or trip up siblings. According to Luke, Mary didn’t have to go through this impossibly difficult thing alone and neither did Elizabeth. Although Elizabeth isn’t mentioned after Luke’s birth narrative, I imagine their kinship was also a source of strength and comfort when the most terrible things happened to their beautiful sons.

We are to understand that this story is not just about Mary of Nazareth or her cousin Elizabeth 2000 years ago. It’s about the impossible situations we are in. Perhaps you remember David Whyte’s poem, “Everything is Waiting for You.” It goes:

Your great mistake is to act the drama

as if you were alone. As if life

were a progressive and cunning crime

with no witness to the tiny hidden

transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny

the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,

even you, at times, have felt the grand array;

the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding

out your solo voice. You must note

the way the soap dish enables you,

or the window latch grants you freedom.

Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.

The stairs are your mentor of things

to come, the doors have always been there

to frighten you and invite you,

and the tiny speaker in the phone

is your dream-ladder to divinity.

 

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into

the conversation. The kettle is singing

even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots

have left their arrogant aloofness and

seen the good in you at last. All the birds

and creatures of the world are unutterably

themselves. Everything is waiting for you. [3]

It seems to me that that God is calling on you, on me, on Emmanuel Church, to give birth to something entirely new if and when we find ourselves in an impossible situation. None of us is alone. And everything is waiting for us to say yes.

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