I preached this sermon at St. Lydia's on Sunday, December 2, as part of our exploration of the Gospel of Luke. The text is Luke 1:26-38. You can read it here.
Most highly favored lady.
That is what we call Mary.
That is what the angel calls her,
what we sing in all the hymns.
She is highly favored,
because God has chosen her to birth God’s son.
She is the bearer of light.
The one though whom God will do impossible things.
She is highly favored,
but as we have learned from so many of the stories
we tell about who God is,
being favored by God
is not at all the same as being lucky.
This is not a rewards club.
Abraham and Sarah do not earn extra miles on their gold card
or get bumped up to first class
because they’re chosen by God.
Instead they wander in the wilderness their whole lives
and wait for what seems like forever
for a son Abraham is then commanded to kill.
Moses does not get access to the Skymiles lounge
or even free meal vouchers
when he’s chosen by God.
Instead he ends up, just like Abraham,
in the wilderness.
Only he has a lot really grumpy, impatient, wayward people on his hands.
Mary’s outlook is similarly bleak.
Her reward for accepting God’s call on her life
is a child out of wedlock,
a flight to Egypt,
a son who is executed as a criminal.
Most highly favored lady.
What would she tell us,
at the foot of the cross,
about what it means to be favored?
*
I think that every life
has an annunciation.
I think that each of us is visited,
at some point in our lives,
by the angel Gabriel.
For some of us,
he appears, complete with wings of drifted snow and eyes of flame,
there in the middle of our apartment
delivering a message that is bold, shocking, and concise.
For others, Gabriel takes a more understated, long-term approach.
The message come in fragments.
Perhaps an envelope outside our door each night,
each containing a piece of a puzzle.
It might take us our whole lives to put those pieces together.
And still others become very skilled at avoiding him.
He rings the doorbell and we pretend no one’s home.
He rings the doorbell again and we pull the covers up over our heads.
He takes to lurking at the cafe on the corner.
We scurry by him and avoid making eye contact.
No matter how he finds you,
no matter how he appears,
the message is always the same.
He comes to you and says,
Greetings, favored one.
The Lord is with you.
And then he tells you that you,
you
are highly favored.
That the Holy Spirit is at work in you.
That God has a claim on your life.
That through you,
like Mary,
God’s light is coming into the world.
What does Gabriel have to tell you about what you are being called to do?
*
Four years ago
on the first Tuesday of Advent,
I was in an unfamiliar grocery store
in the financial district
buying ingredients
for the very first worship service
of this church, St. Lydia’s.
I think there were 12 of us there that night,
eating some kind of a stew in Daniel Simons’ apartment on the 17th floor.
And during those four weeks of Advent, we read
from the first chapter of the Gospel of Luke.
We read about Mary,
and this wild, unruly, scandalous claim
that God placed on her life.
Throughout these four years,
I’ve thought about Mary a lot.
I’ve thought about that word the angel used,
that she would be “overshadowed”
by the power of God.
She gives up so much in saying yes.
If her life is a play,
she goes from being the director
to being an actor on the stage.
She hands over all the directing to God
and agrees to just to take cues.
I’ve felt that same sensation,
as the seasons have turned
and I’ve watched all of you become a community of love.
I’ve felt that,
in saying yes to God’s call,
to plant and nurture this community,
my life was not entirely my own any more.
That I had moved from the director’s chair
to taking direction.
But more than that,
that God had something wild and unruly and maybe even scandalous
in mind.
We give up a lot when we say yes,
when we let go of directing our own lives
and let God give us our cues.
But maybe, in the end, all we’ve lost is an illusion.
Maybe we were never really directing it all in the first place.
Maybe we only liked to imagine we were.
*
There’s a word for all of this.
A word for when Angel Gabriel shows up in your apartment
with something to say.
It’s called “vocation,” and it comes from the Latin,
vocare, which means, “to call.”
That’s what Gabriel does -- he calls us.
For a role God’s decided we shall play.
And the good news
(or maybe the not-so-good news,
if we think back to what happens to folks in the stories
when they’re called)
is that God has a call for everyone.
Back in the medieval period,
folks used to believe that some callings were higher than others.
That being a monk or a nun was a more worthy calling
than being a blacksmith or a thatcher or a mother.
As if, in order to be a “real” Christian, you had to be a pro.
But Luther disagreed with all of that.
Luther said that we do God’s work
in the ordinariness of our lives.
That every work of your life is a work for God.
Even if you’re shoveling manure in a barn
or changing diapers
or taking out the trash.
Centuries later,
his namesake, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,
echoed his sentiments
in a speech to teenagers at a high school in Philadelphia in 1966:
“And when you discover what you will be in life,
set out to do it as if God Almighty called you
at this particular moment in history to do it.
If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper,
sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures.
Sweep streets like Beethoven composed music.
Sweep streets like Leontyne Price sings before the Metropolitan Opera.
Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry.
Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth
will have to pause and say,
‘Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well.’”*
Luther and Martin Luther were both radicals that way.
They believed that every person,
every soul on this earth,
had an opus to write,
and that we write that opus in the most ordinary moments
of our most ordinary lives.
A baby,
born to a girl too young
and too poor.
It is the oldest story in history,
the most ordinary kind of story.
And God chooses her.
It is through her that God enters in.
It is through her,
so young, and so poor,
that God is revealed.
Most highly favored lady.
*Philadelphia Inquirer, January 8, 2006
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