Room for Spirit

“Room for Spirit”
Luke 1:46b-55     Luke 1:26-38
Fourth Sunday of Advent, Year B, December 20, 2020
First Presbyterian Church, Sandpoint, Idaho
Andy Kennaly, Pastor

          Good-bye!  Good-bye!  Are we leaving?  But I just got started!  Sounds a little strange saying, “good-bye” at the beginning of something.  Unless you remember, of course, that “good-bye” derives from a longer form, meaning, “God be with you.”  We have cell phones, social media, the internet, telephones, emails, even letters if we get a little retro.  We stay connected to our group, our friends, family, our social network.  But most of human history, when people parted ways, communication was minimal and you may not know when you would see someone again, if ever.  As you parted, you each said, “God be with you.”  That’s a way to entrust someone to God’s care, a way to ease your troubled heart as it faces uncertainty.  If you can’t be with your loved one, it helps to know that God is with them.

This morning we read of the angel, Gabriel, sent by God to deliver a message to Mary, a young woman engaged to Joseph.  Gabriel uses similar words as a greeting, saying, “Greetings, favored one!  The Lord is with you.”

During worship there’s usually at least one reference to the phrase, “The Lord be with you.”  The appropriate response is, “and also with you.”  One half of the formula unites with the other half, and the sentiment is complete, inviting awareness of God’s presence with everyone involved.  This presence changes everything, why settle for anything less?  Yet even as the angel greets her, “Greetings, favored one!  The Lord is with you,” Mary is perplexed, pondering.

On a Sunday of Advent as we focus on Peace, Mary is not experiencing peace.  She’s troubled.  Sure enough, the very next thing Gabriel says is an encouragement, confronting her experience of fear, her troubled heart, her perplexed mind, offering peace.  “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God.”  This is now the second time the angel has told Mary that she is favored by God, that the Lord is with her, that she doesn’t need to fear.  Gabriel hasn’t even gotten to the message yet, the part about her having a child.  She is not ready for that news, that invitation.  First, she needs to be receptive, to trust.  Mary is “much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be.”  Mary is doing inner work as her soul opens and grows.

Mary is an ordinary person, without royal position or prestige.  She’s engaged to Joseph, a man from Nazareth in Galilee, kind of a small town out away from places of power.  The song she sings, as Dyno read earlier, this reflects her inward spiritual reality as she sings outwardly of being blessed by God.  There’s a humility there, she recognizes her “lowliness” even as she praises God who does great things.

In a podcast about the Universal Christ, talking about Deep Time, Richard Rohr says something in passing that caught my attention and I assigned it a pivotal interpretation for this scene of the angel greeting Mary to share some news.  Rohr says, “The face you turn toward the self is the face you turn toward the world.”  The face you turn toward the self is the face you turn toward the world.  (Richard Rohr, Another Name for Every Thing podcast, Center for Action and Contemplation, Universal Christ in Deep Time, April 17, 2020, 12 min. 30 sec.)

One dynamic at work is the tension or paradox between Mary being favored, very special and unique, blessed by God, and yet also ordinary, “lowly” as she calls it.  In her conversation with her older cousin, Elizabeth, and in some, but not all, translations of the passage we read from Luke as Gabriel greets Mary, one phrase that comes around is how Mary is “blessed among women.”  Again, she is blessed, but she is one of all women, she’s among women, and not above or separate from the rest of us human beings.  In that sense, Mary is more archetypal, that her experience is an indicator, a pointer to what we can experience also in our soul as people blessed by God.

The face you turn toward the self is the face you turn toward the world.  Mary is learning what that face looks like, what her self involves, and story blooms based on these discoveries, these revelations as God reveals her blessedness.

But just as Mary needs to decide that the angel’s greeting is acceptable and accurate and received by her heart and soul, that God is with her and she has favor, so we too, by extension, need to look inside and decide if God is with us, if we are blessed, even favored, not so much in an exclusive way, but as Luke writes his gospel to include the outsider, in ways that embrace us even in the frailties of our humanity, what Mary calls, “lowliness.”  It’s very important that we allow the angel’s greeting to stir our hearts, perplex our mind because our thinking won’t confirm what only our soul is equipped to embrace.

Recognizing that we have a soul is the first step.  We have some part of us, deep inside, that knows who God is because God is there and has created, from eternity, this special core of who we are.  The next step is allowing ourselves to recognize the presence of God in our own soul, and then, of inviting God’s action and activity in our lives.  “The face you turn toward the self is the face you turn toward the world.”  If that face recognizes God’s presence, then you share God’s presence with the world.

All of this that we’ve talked about so far is like Act One in the drama of this passage.

Act Two begins as Mary receives the message from Gabriel, hearing about having a child who will have a kingdom with no end, and yet Mary is not convinced and has questions.  It’s like a classic narrative, the character going about life unaware, suddenly something unexpected happens that creates a situation that needs dealt with, and in this process there is tension, a conflict that needs resolved or overcome, and then there’s resolution, an outcome that would not have been possible without the disruption that changed life as we know it.

Act Two, and Mary has questions.  “How can this be, since I am a virgin?”  She’s young, she’s engaged.  Rather than get into the mechanics of how this vision is enacted, Luke simply reports the angel saying that God will inspire the birth.  They point to Elizabeth, Mary’s cousin, as an example of God doing amazing things that don’t always fit our perceptions of how things work.

“How can this be?” is a question that shows Mary at one plane of existence, and in her reality this conversation makes no sense and is frightening.  In her question she adds a descriptor: “How can this be, since I am a virgin?”  She is assigning an identity, an ego understanding of herself, and this, by default, has limitations.  Act Two is about her transcending the limitations of the egocentric self, and God becomes the central actor; the one taking action in and through her life.  Will she make this shift?  Will she open herself to a higher plane of existence?

The world waits, holding our breath as we wonder what Mary will choose in this conversation that, so far, has been troubling, encouraging, invitational, and somewhat conditional: for all this to happen everyone mentioned has to do their part.  Before we get to Act Three and the resolution, let’s set the stage through Henry David Thoreau, an American writer from the New England of the mid-1800’s, writing in one of his journals this short line from June 20th:

“Praise begins when things are seen partially.  We begin to praise when we begin to see that a thing needs our assistance.” (The Heart of Thoreau’s Journals, Edited by Odell Shepard, Dover Publications, 1961, pg. 14).

Mary is discovering that she is invited to give assistance, and her response is praise.  That’s Act Three: Mary says, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.  Then the angel departed from her.”

Gabriel does more than deliver a message.  This shared conversation in the heart of Mary brings her through confusion into active trust.  It shares a vision of possibility, one involving calling, an invitation to participate in God’s larger purposes, which is only possible through the heart of a servant, of one willing to give of themselves for the sake of another.  This doesn’t just happen, but involves transformation.  Mary recognizes this takes work on her part, and a degree of eagerness to be open to what God is doing.  The invitation to participate in something that needs her assistance inspires praise.  She takes her place in the fullness of humanity in relationship with divinity, partnering to bring about reality, as spirit and matter merge in and through Christ.  And as she sings, we too are invited, as people sharing in awe for God from generation to generation.

We too are blessed and are encouraged to face our True Self, which allows God’s light to shine as we face the world.

Thanks be to God for Hope, Love, Joy, and Peace, shared in the Spirit with all things seen and unseen, hidden in God through Christ as we lean into our part of opening to the promise of Christmas.  God be with you.  Amen.