Sermon: Favored Ones

Text: Luke 1:26-55

Date: December 18, 2011

Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, Eagle Harbor Congregational Church

          Greetings, favored ones!  Good morning, God’s favorite children!

          That is what you are, isn’t it—God’s favorite children?  I mean, look at you, so gentle, so congenial, so attractive!  So fully dressed, clean faces so ready to smile, sitting up straight, hardly fidgeting at all.  You must be God’s favorites.  I see no evidence to the contrary.

          I see no evidence to suggest you wouldn’t be God’s very favorites, yet for some reason it doesn’t sound quite right.  My saying it’s not quite right is not about you—you are delightful people—but about God.  It doesn’t sound quite right to say that God has favorites.  That’s why I always wonder a bit when I read the story of the Annunciation why Gabriel addresses Mary like he does: “Greetings, favored one!”  Was Mary a favorite?  Was she special, more special than you or me? 

          I looked into some of my scholarly sources for what Gabriel’s greeting might mean.  As in many cases in translating from an  antique language to a contemporary one, there is some latitude in choosing which words might convey the meaning of the original.  Raymond Brown, one of the foremost scholars on Jesus’ infancy narratives, suggests that a more accurate rendition of Gabriel’s greeting would be “Rejoice, full-of-grace one!”  I’m no Greek scholar, so I’m going to take his word for it.  For one reason, it sounds more like something God’s angelic representative would say.  Especially when followed by the next line, “The Lord is with you!”  That’s something to rejoice about!  What’s more, since God is one delivering grace, you could say of anyone and everyone that they are full of grace, full and overflowing, if God has God’s way. 

          So…Gabriel’s greeting of Mary is not just a “Hey there,” and it’s not necessarily singling Mary out as a particular favorite of the Lord’s.  Does this matter?  I think it does, for this reason: it makes a difference whether you think Mary is extraordinary or ordinary.  Methodist minister John van de Laar wrote about this in his lectionary reflection this week.  He began by critiquing the culture of celebrity, a world that obsesses over being extraordinary or honoring those who appear extraordinary for some reason.  We have created a strange world, he says, in which those few who do succeed in being recognized as extraordinary for their talent or achievements are estranged and isolated from the many millions who  feel like failures because they are never good, special, rich or happy enough. 

          In looking at the Christmas story, Van de Laar suggests that if you conceive of it as being about a Very Special Baby born to a Very Special Woman, it has a distancing effect.  We ordinary people in this scenario could only be spectators, passive observers in the story of God’s salvation.  Van de Laar makes a case that it’s more true to the spirit of incarnation if we understand Mary not as extraordinary at all but the very epitome of ordinariness.   She was an ordinary poor girl of marriageable age in an ordinary town (not some kind of princess in disguise); any one of thousands of other girls could have taken her place.   Christmas is not about extraordinariness; it is about the power of the ordinary to effect God’s purposes.[1]  He writes,

How could a commoner like this give birth to a child that would be both the fulfillment of God’s promise of an eternal dynasty to David, and God’s Son? How could the child that fulfilled these promises be born into such ordinary circumstances, grow up under such ordinary parents, and do such ordinary work (carpentry)? The answer, I believe is simply this: God’s Reign does not come through extraordinary people. God’s Reign stands or falls on ordinary people embracing it and living it out in their daily lives. The very essence of God’s Reign is that it infiltrates the smallest, most ordinary parts of the world, the tiniest details of our lives. In the same way that it is usually the ordinary people who shift the course of history, more than the generals and leaders and heroes who are remembered, it is the ordinary people who bring God’s Reign into being in the world.

          There is a medieval definition of God as a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.  In the story of the annunciation, the center of “God with us” zeroes in on young Mary.  [If you’ve ever used Google Earth, picture what it looks like on screen while you zoom in.]  The storyteller draws the focus in, moving from general to specific, beginning with mentioning God, then zooming into the region of Galilee, then the town called Nazareth, to a young girl engaged to a man descended from David, and finally to the specific individual: her name was Mary.   The next dramatic phase of the inbreaking of God’s Reign needed a woman to bring a child into the world, a child who would change everything.  The pregnancy, birth, and mothering of this child would demand a great deal of Mary.  But God knew her assent—her “Yes”—would  make her capable of all that was needed.

In this story, God sends a messenger in a form Mary would have recognized, an angel.  To me the salient feature of this angel is that he had a face; God put a face on in order to make contact with this ordinary country girl.  I asked Anna to read Edwin Muir’s poem “Advent” [i] [see endnote] a few moments ago because I was enchanted with the poem’s depiction of the angel and the girl gazing at each other in a trance wrapped in silence while the rest of the world goes about its busy-ness outside the room.  I like the way the poet envisions them looking intently at each other for so long that heaven begins to be reflected in her face and earth begins to be reflected in his. 

          Think about the intensity of that encounter, if it happened the way the poet imagined.  I could ask you to make eye contact with someone seated near you right now, and you might comply in order to humor me, but if I said we were going to maintain 5 minutes of steady eye contact with a neighbor, most of us wouldn’t feel up to it.  It’s such an intimate thing to do, to look someone in the eye, that we don’t often do it for more than a few seconds at a time.  We reserve lengthy gazing into another’s eyes for our lovers, for the most part.  Perhaps it is true that eyes are the window to the soul; there is something about looking someone in the eyes for more than a fleeting moment that seems intrusive unless it is in the context of complete trust and vulnerability. 

          Let's say that the way Mary and the angel looked at each other was as important or more important than the words that were spoken.  If God sent Gabriel to look at Mary as much as to speak to her, how do you think he might have looked?  Wouldn’t you think that Gabriel would have been instructed and empowered to look at Mary with such full love, trust  and admiration that it would have been difficult for her to look back?  That must have been his assignment; “Go and look at Mary as if you have never seen anything so lovely as her countenance.  Look through the window of her eyes in a way that she understands that she is wonderful right down to the kernel of her soul.” 

          Most of us could only endure such a look for a brief span of time, am I right?  We don’t feel worthy of being looked at with unmasked and unadulterated love.  We feel, based on our history of failures, that we don’t deserve it.  We harbor a lurking suspicion that only really extraordinary people are really and truly loved by God.  It would be somewhere between embarrassing and excruciating to meet a gaze of such love by God’s ambassador.

          I remember talking with a friend at a time when she was deeply depressed and grieving the end of a relationship.  Her eyes were downcast all the time we were talking about the situation; it seemed like a great effort for her at the time to lift up her eyes from their focal point on the floor, which actually felt more like she was looking at the dark cobwebby cellar of the earth.  If God had sent Gabriel to speak to her in that bleak hour, surely he would have had to plead with her to look at him; and it probably would have been a mighty struggle to do so. 

          If Mary was an ordinary woman, she might well have had grief or guilt or self-hatred that would have initially pinned her eyes to the floor like my friend.  But somehow she managed to look up into the eyes of the Holy One, and she saw reflected there love of such magnitude that it swept away grief and shame and self-doubt.  I like to think that she kept on looking and looking, as the poet suggested; that time became irrelevant, and the judgment of other humans shrank in importance until it became completely inconsequential to her.  Spanish mystic John of the Cross wrote about a such an experience once, addressing God with these words: “When You regarded me, Your eyes imprinted in me Your grace:  For this You loved me again, and thereby my eyes merited to adore what in You they saw.” 

          I was chit-chatting with long-married friends on the ferry one day when the husband told a little story about one of his wife’s early suitors.  In a flirtatious moment, this rival had said to her, “Your eyes are so blue I don’t know where they leave off and the sky begins.”  Quite a line, eh?  That came back to me while I was meditating on Mary and Gabriel gazing at each other.  I think God’s purpose was to expand Mary’s vision of herself and what she could accomplish by offering herself as a channel for God’s incarnation so much that one could look into her eyes and not be able to tell where they left off and the deep blue sky began.  That she would be a portal of the blue horizon of infinite possibility.  Not because she was so special, so extraordinary--but because she held God’s gaze of magnificent love for long enough that she was imprinted with grace beaming at her from the face God donned that ordinary day. 

          Any of us might be likewise imprinted with the grace of God, because God truly has no favorites but gazes at all of us with unfathomable love and confidence.  The language of being blessed is used about Mary by her cousin and by Mary herself—“From now on all generations will call me blessed.”  Her “Yes” to God should be remembered and celebrated.  However, she is not to be merely admired, she is to be emulated.  She is blessed because of her faith, not because of her extraordinary character.  Later in Luke’s gospel, when a woman calls out to Jesus, “Blessed is the womb that bore you, and the breasts that nursed you!” Jesus responds, “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it!”  He is not denigrating Mary; he is affirming every person’s ability to respond to grace as an agent of grace.  As John van de Laar writes, “Mary was not a unique human being who was uniquely chosen, and who we must simply watch and celebrate. No, Mary is all of us – ordinary, loved and called. We are all visited by God. We are all overshadowed by God’s Spirit. We are all parents of God’s Reign. Which means that it is time to stop using our addiction to the extraordinary to let ourselves off the hook. It is time for us all to accept the “calledness” of our ordinariness, and begin to give birth to God’s Reign in our own small way. It is time for us all to choose, daily, to bring Christ and the Reign of God that Christ revealed, into our world.”[2]

          I was moved and inspired this week by a story from a Seattle clergyman who is striving for the Reign of God in his way.  John Helmiere, a United Methodist pastor, was participating in a peaceful protest this week when he was beaten up and arrested by a member of the police force.  It was a painful and frightening ordeal for him.  In his written account, he ends with a call to transformation, urging others to do three things: to listen deeply to those whose stories challenge our own worldviews; to “have the tenderness of heart to become upset when human beings are violated and oppressed;” and to generate love.  He writes:

“By generating love, I mean channeling [our] passion into creative and liberating action.  There are so many excuses to avoid it: “The issues are so complex,” “There are two sides to everything,” “I don’t want to alienate anyone and lose a chance at making an impact later.”  But as the great preacher/activist William Sloane Coffin once said, “Not taking sides is effectively to weigh in on the side of the stronger.”  As finite creatures, we cannot fight every worthy battle.  But refusing to participate in any struggle for a more loving world is a rejection of even our very finite power.  Right now I am praying for the courage to transform the molecules of my anger and the raw material of my frustration into the greatest, most indestructible, most transformative power on earth: unconditional love in action.”

          Not everyone is going to be called to join in the struggle for liberation the way Helmiere is.  But everyone can tap into and employ unconditional love.  I was sampling a book written by a religion scholar I admire greatly, Huston Smith, and found a passage that speaks to giving birth to the reign of God in small ways.  In it, the author is answering a question about what Christianity means to him at his stage of life.  Now, I think Smith is rather extraordinary; his research and his teaching have advanced the cause of interfaith understanding immeasurably.  But when he wrote this particular book he was 90 years old and had recently had to leave his home and his wife of 65 years to move into an assisted living facility.  He writes, “Such a transition no one will imagine as easy.  Yet purpose is still woven into the very fabric of my days.  For the last time surely, I am the youngest kid on the block—blessed with relatively better health, and feeling happier to be alive, than most other residents here.  I enjoy my fellow residents; I delight in leading them in singing or in creating verse spoof-commentaries about what’s happening here.  And I think continually of what good I can do for them, even if it’s only moving a chair from the path of an oncoming walker.  Where is Christianity in my life today?  Consciously or not, it’s everywhere.  At…times… the spirit of Christianity becomes almost palpable, a zone of safety and nonfear around me.  Twenty times a day, in my room or in the hallway, under my breath I say, “Jesus Christ, have mercy upon me.”  Better than any pill.”  He goes on to say that his faith, which has become for him experience more than truths to be believed, is something like the understanding he overheard his 4 year old daughter expressing years earlier: “God is everything.  God is everywhere.  God is in me.”[3] 

          Isn’t that the truth ordinary Mary, full of grace, ultimately reveals to us?  God is in me.  God is through me.  God is gazing at you and me with such love that any one of us who can bring ourselves to look back find ourselves imprinted with grace—grace enough to fill us to the brim with unconditional love and grace enough to overflow into a bruised and broken world.  Through us ordinary people grace flows into the boldest stands for righteousness, like facing down an armed force for a just cause, as well as the smallest exhibitions of mercy, moving a chair out of the way of an oncoming walker.  God longs to catch the eye of each of us, beloved, greeting us with just such words as Gabriel spoke to Mary: “Rejoice, full-of-grace ones!  The Lord is with you.”