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What We May Expect Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis December 7, 2008, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Luke 1:26-38 Revelation 1:1-8
Mary was not expecting the angel Gabriel on that day when he greeted her. In fact before the moment of his appearance her expectations likely were as minimal as what we know of her: a life lived out in the narrow streets of the village of Nazareth, a marriage arranged with the town carpenter, children to raise, chores to do, loved ones to bury. No doubt she shared with her kinfolk some vague expectation that God would send Israel a king like David to save God’s people from Roman occupation. Yet the latter expectation had very little to do with the former. According to human accounting, Mary was destined to be a nobody from nowhere, a peasant who could expect nothing out of the ordinary to happen to her between birth and death. Enter the angel Gabriel, requiring us along with Mary to rethink what we may expect. This is no simple mental maneuver! In order that our minds and hearts may inhabit a story counter to the culture’s story in this season, we must cross the frontier of history, says Karl Barth, “and enter the sphere of imagination and poetry….The whole history of the Bible,” he says, “while it intends to be and is real…history [in time and space], has a constant bias towards the sphere where [events] cannot be verified by the ordinary analogies of world history but can be seen and grasped only imaginatively and represented in the form of poetry.” Angels mercifully appear, therefore, as figures who mean to accompany us from the kitchen table that exists because we scrub it to the table set before us by him who was conceived by the Holy Ghost and born of the Virgin Mary. They are the incommensurable reaching into the commensurable, grace almost entering gravity, mystery invading matters of consequence. Angels appear in Scripture when God has something to say to the creatures made in God’s image and given breath for just such a conversation as this. The something God had to say when the fullness of time had come was Jesus. Not Jesus as a mouthpiece for God like the prophets; not Jesus as a demigod appearing in human flesh, but Jesus as God with us in an embodied life and facing the inevitability of death; as God with us in our finite human existence of flesh and blood yet somehow with us also as eternity glimpsed in the sick healed, the dead raised, the prisoners released, the bread broken, the cup shared. Now in order to say Jesus, God had to go through the ordinary means God had created for human procreation: God had to go through Mary. If with Mary you find yourself asking “how” at this point in the story, I can only pray that the poetic substance of Gabriel’s announcement will override your reasonable doubts, will jump start your imagination lest you dismiss the truth and be left only to expect parties and presents in the weeks ahead. Fortunately Gabriel took Mary’s “how” to mean “How can a human being conceive the humanly inconceivable?” According to Gabriel and for the sake of the world, Mary needed to know not the biology but the theology involved in what she soon may expect: that it was God who was about to say Jesus in the son she would bear. Without that revealing word spoken in her ear, she simply would go on to marry the carpenter’s son unless he abandoned her in shame; would carry clay jars and draw water from the well as she always had; would hang the clothes out to dry, prepare meals, give birth, bury the dead. The angel was essential if our merely human expectations were to be given a whiff of eternity. Therefore from the moment of God’s unexpected address through a messenger named Gabriel, what Mary could expect was forever redeemed from insignificance. Gabriel’s announcement marked “the beginning of that time of which every minute is costly and must not be lost,” wrote Barth, “because in every minute decisions [now may be made] in anticipation of the ultimate future.” Put another way, Gabriel had been sent to communicate the pregnancy of time itself: the hopes and fears of all the years were about to be met in Mary’s womb. In the first place, said Gabriel, she could expect to fear God alone. “Fear not,” he commanded and henceforth each little fear that might haunt the mind of a maiden in first century Palestine—fear of humiliation, of hunger, of abandonment, of sin and judgment, of death—would be born by the child she was about to bear to the world. In the second place, Mary could expect to live in hope because the future of the nation and of God’s people and of her own human existence was in God’s hand. “My times,” the psalmist had written presciently, “are in thy hand.” Therefore every political arrangement and each pretender to power could not counter or quell her hope in the God whose kingdom would have no end. Soon she would sing of what she may expect because in Jesus the promise of God, though still a promise, is fulfilled and potent: the proud scattered, the powerful brought down, the lowly lifted, the hungry filled, the rich sent empty away. Another would also sing that this holy child--in whom old Simeon’s expectant eyes had seen God’s salvation--was destined for a death that would pierce her heart. This piercing, then, is also part of what Mary may expect in the midst of the darkness that has yet to be vanquished; but now the one who is born of her will accompany her as “a light shining against an unfathomable sea of darkness.” “It is not that a better world is visibly or invisibly present” wrote Barth in 1930, “but that because of the advent of Christ it has only now become necessary and possible to expect a new heaven and a new earth.” What, then, may we expect because of Christ’s birth? What is necessary and possible for us to expect two millennia and almost a decade after Christ’s birth? For like Mary, we live in no real expectation that the God who has come to us in Jesus Christ will come again. We wake and work and wander through our days obsessed about the future—our stocks plunging still, our bodies growing older, our children at risk, our nation at war--never imagining the time really to be in God’s hand. Then as though he were the angel Gabriel sent by God to announce what is, in the face of human history, inconceivable to those of us who verify truth by the ordinary analogies of world history, the elder John says “Look! He is coming in the clouds.” What may we expect? Expect Christ to come again, says John. “How?” we ask, as troubled at the prospect of Jesus returning in a cloud as Mary was troubled by Gabriel’s speech. Instead of the ear being the organ of revelation this time, John tells us that our eyes will see him. We cannot help but receive the news as if John were speaking of an event in ordinary history and so try to fit his words into the world we know. By the end of the second century an early church father named Tertullian was “convinced that the end of the age was at hand, in part because he believed the heavenly Jerusalem had been spotted hovering in the skies over Jerusalem for forty days.” John’s words have been misunderstood in this way since he wrote them, interpreted by those who cannot cross over the frontier of history to enter the sphere of imagination and poetry. “All who have published such effects and schemes,” writes theologian Jeffrey Siker, seeking to align the symbols in Revelation with current events, “probably owe their readers refunds.” Nevertheless, John’s words have directed the sight of those who walk in darkness throughout human history Godward. No obscure cave on the outskirts of Bethlehem with cattle lowing the second time around will do. No select shepherds run, run, running in response to the heavenly host. Everyone will see him and recognize his reign, says John, even those who persecuted him. This cannot be verified by the ordinary analogies of world history. Yet without the poet we cannot seem to cross over the frontier of history to the sphere of imagination where angel voices are audible. What may we expect? What must we expect? How shall we live in time such that every minute is costly and must not be lost because in every minute decisions are made in anticipation: anticipation not of our fearful and hopeless little futures, but of the ultimate future when the proud will be scattered, the powerful dethroned, the lowly lifted up, the hungry filled, the rich sent empty away? Perhaps we must begin simply as Mary did: living in response to God’s address. “Each year you are born again,” writes poet Robert Cording, imagining the conversation for us. “It is no remedy
Here I am again, huddled in hope. For what Do I wait?–I know you only as something missing, And loved beyond reason As a word in my mouth I cannot embody…. We’ve strung colored lights on our houses and trees, And lit candles in the windows to hold back the dark. For what do we hope? – That our candles will lead you To our needs? That your gift of light will light These darkest nights of the year? That our belief In our own righteousness will be vindicated? The prophet Amos knew the burden of your coming. …knew the shame of What we fail, over and over, to do, the always burning Image of what might be…. Because you come again and again to destroy the God We keep making in our own image. Will we learn To pray: May our hearts be broken open. Will we learn To prepare a space in which you might come forth, In which like a bolt of winter solstice light, You might enter the opening in the stones, lighting Our dark tumulus* from beginning to end? |