Advent 4 BLuke 1:26-38God-Bearers

One of the first things I bought after returning to Philadelphia was a membership to the museum of art. Though I cannot claim any special knowledge about the subject, I am a self-professed Renaissance and Medieval art junkie, and there are so many depictions of the Annunciation there that they help me to understand Mary better, someone to whom the gospels give so much attention yet continues to remain an enigma, at least to me. There is the intimacy of face to face encounter, the look she gives the archangel over her shoulder across a fifteenth century Dutch altarpiece, even the picture by Henry Ossawa Tanner, to which Pete Deacon introduced me, where she eyes Gabriel from her bed as a pillar of light across the room. But I will confess that my favorite depictions are the simplest, ones that portray her as the Theotokos, the God-bearer, from the Eastern Orthodox traditions, icons that compel us to look inside her to understand what it is to participate in God’s plan in such an intimate way, to say yes to something that could not have been comprehensible except as the revealed will of God I rely upon these icons because the contrasts within the gospel itself could not be more striking. A young girl-- tradition has her at fourteen or so-- being visited by an angel telling her that she will bear a child, one that will be great, the Son of the Most High, who will reign on David's throne, and whose kingdom shall have no end. Luke calls her 'perplexed' at the arrival of this angel and this news, but it would be hard to think of something so completely disorienting. She asks, “How can this be”? And if we had not heard this story so many times, seen it in so many pictures, our own reaction would probably be a little more emphatic: “Are you kidding me--this CANNOT be! Look how young I am, my husband to be isn't on the scene yet. What will my family think? Why now? Why me?” The beauty in the Annunciation is that it is a mirror for the infusion of God's love into our lives at the most unexpected, deeply inconvenient moments. The decisions we make with our lives, the really big decisions, are things we take time with. We spend weeks, months, sometimes years mulling over their implications, in prayer and trust that the outcome will be what God wants for us. We give these processes names like discernment and the effort they represent is important, indispensable in the work of the kingdom. But most of the situations we confront in our lives, however central they are to God's plan, are not ones we choose. Gabriel, for instance, does not offer a choice to Mary: he informs her of the audacious plan God has set in motion, and informs her of her crucial role in it. What is left to this young woman of few resources and fewer options, is her response. And so it is with us. We are confronted with situations in our lives over which we have little say, the sickness of a loved one, the loss of a job, even the unexpected birth of a child, and our responses are reduced to a yes or a no. We throw our energies toward denying that this thing is really happening to us, and when we fail to stave off the consequences: the accident whose effects we cannot ignore any longer, the job loss that increases our dependence on those around us, we can become stoic or resentful. This should not be happening to me: I've tried to take care of myself, I'm a reasonably good neighbor, I've even paid my taxes on time. There are no guarantees about the results, of course, except maybe a hardened heart, relationships that begin to unravel, but chances are that you would hardly notice these things after time. The other option is to say yes. There is very little certainty about the world we inhabit and, if we bother to listen to the news for five minutes a day, things aren't appearing to become any more sure, at least over the short run. So we have the option actually putting down the

newspaper or the knitting or whatever distracts us from the fierce intractability of our lives and actually say yes to the new opportunities for relationships that the car accident or the job loss or the counseling may be offering us, however spectacularly inconvenient they may be. It even allows us to say yes to the stranger with the wings who shows up when we are minding our own business and tells us that we have won the divine lottery of all time and are going to bear a son who will turn the world upside down. Last year, the poet Mary Szybist published a wonderful book of poems about the Annunciation, about the encounters with the sacred to which we have to be alive, encounters that are life-changing, whether planned or not. “God could have chosen other means than flesh,” she says about a portrait by Veneziano; “Imagine he did/ and the girl on her knees in this meadow-/ open, expectant, dreamily rocking, her mouth open, quiet-/ is only important because we recognize the wish”. Indeed, our own wish at the end of Advent must be that kind of openness, the open meadows and doors in these pictures an echo of our own openness to the divine, the abandonment of expectation in pain and in joy. They are about how God looks with favor on his lowly servants, all of us God-bearers, and slowly upends the world. It is not easy to be aware of all the angels entering our lives but, icons of the holy that we are, our charge is to look for an opening onto the sacred in all we see. It is worth remembering that to be chosen, to be highly favored by the most high, has nothing to do with what any of us would consider glorious. There is paradox, even scandal, deeply embedded in the thought of God entering a broken world as helpless as an infant, his mother the least likely of God-bearers. But in the ordinary is an invitation: we are all summoned to be God-bearers, icons of the holy, nurturers of the divine in a world beset by grief, corruption and violence. All that is necessary is our assent. The miracle of the annunciation is not in the appearance of divine messengers with amazing stories about the role of the unlikely in salvation; it is in the yes, in our willingness to be servants of the Lord, whatever our circumstances. So do not be afraid, highly- favored ones, for nothing will be impossible with God.