BLESSED INDEED December 20, 2009, The Fourth Sunday of Advent Luke 1: 39-45 Michael L. Lindvall, The Brick Presbyterian Church in the City of New York Theme: A blessed life means something deeper than an easy life. Almighty God, as you draw nearer to us in these Advent days, may we draw nearer to you. As Mary heard her cousin s greeting and responded with a song of acceptance and obedience, may we hear your word and respond with a like acceptance and obedience. And now may the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer. Amen. It is dear doctor Luke, writer of the third of our four Gospels, who tells us most of the Christmas story we love. Matthew adds his Wise Men and nefarious Herod; Mark and John begin the Gospel story with the adult Jesus. But before ever Luke tells us his beloved Christmas story in Chapter 2, he sets the narrative stage in Chapter 1. He sets the stage by telling the stories of two remarkable visits. The first story is that of the visit of the angel Gabriel to Mary, traditionally called the Annunciation. The second visit is less known. It s the story we heard Don read and saw Charlotte sign a moment ago, the story of the visit of Mary and her cousin Elizabeth. Both woman are pregnant, Mary with Jesus; Elizabeth with John, John the Baptist. At the beginning of the earlier visit story, the angel Gabriel had greeted Mary with these words: Greetings, favored one. At the beginning of this second story, Elizabeth greets her cousin by saying, Blessed are you among women. Incidentally, these two greetings will later be combined and expanded to form a traditional prayer called the Ave Maria, or, in English, The Hail, Mary. What strikes me about both greetings is how profoundly ironic they are. Favored one, Gabriel says. Blessed are you among women says Elizabeth. What a strange kind of favor it will be; what an ironic blessing it is that will come to this young girl in the years ahead. Think about it: - 1 -
First, there ll be scandal as Mary s swollen womb comes to the watching eye of her fiancé and her village. Joseph briefly considers breaking off the engagement. Hard-liners could have demanded a stoning for such apparent indiscretion. Blessed indeed. Such ironic favor. And in her ninth month of pregnancy, of all times, there ll be a long and exhausting journey to the south, to Joseph s ancestral village of Bethlehem, all because some government bureaucracy demands it for reasons of census and tax accounting. Blessed indeed. Such ironic favor. And when the birth comes, circumstance will relegate this mother to a stable of all places; no mother or grandmother, no midwife in attendance. And her firstborn, light of her life, will spend his first night in an animal feeding trough. Blessed indeed. Such ironic favor. And the day they bring him to Jerusalem for his bris, his circumcision, an old prophet will accost her with words she perhaps feared. And a sword will pierce your heart whispers Simeon on the temple steps. And a sword will pierce your heart, words that will doubtless haunt Mary for nigh onto thirty years. Blessed indeed. Such ironic favor. And then, as she always feared, Mary s son will follow a road that leads him away from her, away from Nazareth, away from a quiet life as a village carpenter and into the heart of controversy, then shame, and finally tragedy. Mary will follow him all the way, all the way to a city dump on the outskirts of Jerusalem named Golgotha, all the way to the foot of a Roman cross where she ll watch the unspeakable. Blessed indeed. Such ironic favor. Elizabeth and Gabriel s ironic greetings naming Mary favored and blessed invite an eternal question. What, exactly, is a blessed or favored life? In secular terms you might ask, What exactly is a good or fulfilling life? Does a full life mean a life that s perfectly smooth? Does a favored life mean a life without disappointment or loss, a life without tears? Is a blessed life simply an easy life? - 2 -
M. Scott Peck sub-titled his mega-hit book of two decades ago The Road Less Traveled, A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth. Dr. Peck began his book with a famous three-word sentence that casts its shadow over the 300 pages that follow. "Life is difficult, he began. This is a great truth, he says, but one that most people just don't want to believe. Instead, they want to believe that life SHOULD be easy. He continues by noting that people moan more or less incessantly, noisily or subtly, about the enormity of their problems, their burdens, their difficulties as if life were generally easy... As a pastor, I have seen no perfectly easy lives. Some may look like it on the outside. They may appear smooth and effortless to others, but most always, there s more than meets the eye. Sooner or later, every life passes through sorrow. In time, every life meets some great disappointment. No life that dares any kind of risk is ever saved from failure. No life that dares to love deeply is ever spared the loss of someone loved. If blessed means perfectly smooth and ever-easy, no life is blessed. But maybe, just maybe, a blessed life means something more than an easy life. Neither Gabriel nor Elizabeth promised Mary a perfectly easy life. And God does not promise you or me perfectly easy lives either. But Gabriel and Elizabeth do promise Mary something. It is hinted at in the Gabriel s address to her. Listen to the angel s greeting: Greetings, O favored one, he says. And then the promise, The Lord is with you. And listen to all of Elizabeth s greeting, first the greeting, Blessed are you among women, and then the promise, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. The fruit of her womb is Jesus, the Jesus who will be called Emmanuel, God-With-Us. Mary responds to Elizabeth s reference to Jesus with a stunning poem, we call The Magnificat, a poem that begins, My soul magnifies the Lord This, then, is the great promise: not ease, but the presence of God through all of it. The faith offers no guarantees that God will save us from troubles. There is no divine promise of comfort, no assurance of a life free from disappointment and sorrow. The promise is simply this: God is with us through all of it. Whatever comes, we are not alone. We don t grind out our days pointlessly in a God-empty - 3 -
universe. We don t live in some dark, hollow, godless void. This is the promise, not ease, but presence. This promise is the precise meaning of the whole Christmas drama. Christmas is the narrative promise that God is not up there, or out there. The promise implicit in the nativity story is that God has chosen not divine distance or majestic isolation. Rather God has chosen to enter into the nitty-gritty earthliness of human existence, my human existence, your human existence. For millions of the faithful over the centuries, this insistent trust that God is somehow with them has transformed their lives. An abiding trust in the presence of God has again and again empowered people of faith to do more than get through it all. This trust that they are not alone has empowered men and women to come through the rough stuff and through it, or in spite of it, grow stronger and wiser, with a leaner and more muscular faith. Some examples: - John Milton went blind and then wrote his greatest poetry. - Beethoven lost his hearing, and went on composing music anyway. - Nelson Mandela spent a lifetime on a prison island off Capetown, and became the first black president of the Republic of South Africa. - Helen Keller suffered the unimaginable isolation of deafness and blindness, but came to thank God for them both, because she said they led her to her life s work. - Dickens was able to go to school a total of four years of his life, but became perhaps the greatest novelist in the English language. - Dostoyevsky was sentenced to death, led to the gallows, pardoned just as the rope was to take his life and exiled to Siberia. He returned to write greater novels than ever. - Terry Waite, who was held hostage for years in Beirut back in the 1970s, is a deeply committed Christian. After his release he reflected on such experiences with these words: Christianity doesn't in any way lessen suffering. What it does is enable you to take it, to face it, to work through it and eventually to convert it. - 4 -
There is not a life in this room that has not been touched by some pain. Even in this well-blessed corner of the world, suffering and disappointment, sorrow and anguish come close. You know the names of your own woes. I can t look you in the eye and glibly tell you that they re simply for your own good. I just don t believe that God sends us adversity to make us better people. It s just how life is. But I can look you in the eye and promise you two things. I can tell you that you are not alone; God is with you. And I can promise that it is possible that the Presence of God in your life can empower you to not just get through it, but to pull something good from the teeth of any fierce beast you might meet. I know, I know: some grow embittered, jaded and broken; but I also know that so many grow the other way: newly compassionate, grounded deeper in love, and freshly alert to God and neighbor, better tuned to what it all means. I would never dare say that any suffering ever justifies the good that may come of it; my trust is simply that good is often born in pain. In this life it is so often the hard passages, the rough roads, the lonely miles that finally really open us up to God, to life, to one another. A Presbyterian minister friend of mine named Bob Short, famous for his wonderful book, The Gospel According to Peanuts, put it like this in a lovely Christmas meditation: The way Christ first came into the world is also exactly the way he must come into the lives of each of us: he comes in the night, our own personal emotional nights; he comes into the winter's deep coldness, the coldness of the heart that all of us will sooner of later feel...; he comes into the empty loneliness of the field, the sense of being desperately alone and in the middle of nowhere on a cold, cold, night. When some lonely passage teaches you afresh about love of neighbor, when some loss tunes you to a deeper love for friends and family, when some emptiness carves out a space for God, then, in spite of it or through it, you like Mary are blessed ironically blessed, but blessed none the less. - 5 -
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. - 6 -