Luke 1:26-38; 47-55

December 21, 2008     Fourth Sunday of Advent

First Congregational UCC/Reverend Deb Davis

     I had one of those coincidences this past week.

     You know the kind … the ones that – in hindsight - you decide probably aren’t coincidences at all … but are instead what a friend of mine calls a “God-incidence.”

      On Wednesday I was in my car … driving back to Angola from Fort Wayne … listening to WBOI …one of Fort Wayne’s Public Radio stations.

     I had just pulled into the parking lot at church and was getting ready to turn the car off and get out … when I heard a promotional piece for NPR’s Day-to-Day …  a nationally syndicated program that airs at noon each weekday.

     The promotion said that the next day … on Thursday … the show would feature a segment called “After the Forgetting” … a story about a Vermont man named Greg Sharrow who cares for his mother … who has dementia.

     Now because I know a Greg Sharrow … and he lives in Vermont … I continued to listen. The promotion continued … by playing a brief part of the segment that would air the next day … and as unlikely as it was … I heard a familiar voice.

     It was the voice of Greg’s mother … Marge Sharrow … a former member of this church …who moved from Angola to Vermont a few years ago to live near Greg … as her dementia became more and more apparent.

      So on Thursday … I listened to the entire program … listened to a segment with Greg and Marge having this wonderful conversation … with Greg’s partner, Bob, also a part of the conversation from time to time.

     During the segment … they talk about various things. At one point Marge says she doesn’t know how old she is … and Greg asks her, “Do you want to know how old you are?”

And Marge says, yes … so Greg tells her she is 91 … and there is an audible gasp from a disbelieving Marge … and she says, “Holy Mackerel … maybe you should put me in bed and throw the dirt on me.” But later she adds, “I don’t mind being old … I’m not unhappy.”

      Then Marge asks Greg if he is married … and he gently tells her yet again about his partner, Bob … and Marge responds, “Oh … I forget that men and women are changing things.”

      And then there was – for me - the most poignant part of the segment … when Marge says to Greg, “I love you … there are not many people I do love … but I love you completely.”

     She can’t remember her son’s name … but she says, “Seeing you, feeling you, hearing you … there’s a delight.”

      And then Greg continues … by saying that’s it has only been in the last year that his mother has begun telling him she loves him … it is something he had wanted to hear his whole life but never did …… before the dementia … his mother had never been able to say the words.

     It was not until “After the Forgetting” that she was able to say “I love you.”

     Marge now requires a very patient love … the kind of love some of you have also provided to one with dementia.  Marge is receiving that from Greg and Bob … over the past few years she has been carried and labored over … loved and nurtured by them … so that now … even in the midst of dementia … in some ways … love continues to make her more whole.

     Luke’s gospel tells us this morning … that God’s word became flesh … and came to us as an infant … who was only given … only truly needed … a family’s patient love … to become.

      And this mother … this Mary … really still a child herself … probably about the age of Anna Finley … about that age … this young peasant girl living in obscurity in an occupied land … says yes … she is willing to provide that kind of love.

     On this fourth Sunday in Advent … it’s all about Mary in Luke’s Gospel … the only gospel that gives us Mary’s story … the only gospel that tells us of this strong, determined young woman.

     The past two weeks John the Baptizer has preached … but today it’s Mary that preaches … it is Mary that sings … Mary who gives us this prophetic, radical statement about her God … in response to all that is happening to her.

     There are many New Testament scholars who today challenge the accuracy of the translation of that word virgin … even though the church has made a mountain of doctrine out it … many Christians today who no longer really embrace the possibility of a virgin birth. 

     But no matter where you stand on that issue this morning … no matter how factual or less than factual you think these words are … I would ask you to look at this story as one that nonetheless offers us a deep truth … offers us a deeply true story about the power of love … not just Mary’s love … but also the possibility of our own love … a story about how we respond to God’s call … a call which is always, at base, about bearing love into the world. 

     During the two years he was imprisoned by the Nazis before his death … the German pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer was able to smuggle some of his writings out of his prison cell … and in a part of those writings he speaks about that very cell … and he compares it to this season of Advent.

     “It is,” he wrote of his prison cell, “a place where one waits and hopes … a place that is completely dependent on the fact that the door of freedom has to be opened from the outside. That,” he adds, “is not a bad picture of Advent.”

     As I have been thinking about Bonhoeffer’s words … laying them down beside the story of Greg’s patient love for Marge … laying them down next to Mary’s story … I think this is a way to describe Advent from God’s perspective, too.

     Here is God … waiting to be born … not just into the world once a long time ago … but into our lives today … God with us … Emmanuel … completely dependent on the fact that the door has to be opened from the other side … the entry has to be created by us.

     In other words … incarnation requires our willingness to embody it … to give it birth.

     The author of Luke’s gospel let’s us know that Mary could have said “no” … and maybe a thousand other young girls would have. When the angel comes to Mary she doesn’t consult anyone … she doesn’t seek permission … she makes her own decision … she chooses to open that door and say “yes … let it be with me.”

     Today we might say … it was different for Mary … unlike us she was able to say yes because she was too young to know what she was doing … because she had nothing to lose … because she was poor and powerless and naïve … of course she said yes.

     Or we might kid ourselves into thinking it was all pre-arranged … that she was some super human … who would never say no. But if we think that … we should remember … Luke’s Mary wasn’t some Jewish mystic sitting around waiting for God’s call … no matter what the church has tried to make of her over the centuries.

     Rather she was just a normal young peasant girl living a life filled with poverty and oppression … and she still said yes … yes, I agree to be part of things … yes, I agree to allow love to grow within me … yes, I am willing to buy into God’s vision … no matter what that means.

     And through the telling of Mary’s story … the author of this Gospel gives us a radical reversal … a taste of the world God will bring into being … and so Mary sings her song.

     In the very same way … God comes to us … while we are just living our normal, ordinary lives. God comes to every single one of us … calls us many times throughout our lives … calls us over and over again to say “yes” … yes, I will bear love into the world … yes, I will help to bring about that radical reversal Mary sings about … where the poor are lifted up … where the rich are emptied out … so they can be filled up with God.

     But like Mary we always have a choice … we can say “yes” or we can say “no” … we are free to open that door and let God in … or not. We have the freedom to say, “No, not this year” … “Not this time” … “Maybe another day” …”I’m too busy” … “I have to put away a little more money first” ... “What would my family think?” … “This will be a major inconvenience in my life.” … “Thanks for the offer … but I don’t think so.”

     We can always say “no” to the offer … “no” to God’s plan … “no” to incarnation in our lives. Because as I’ve said in this pulpit before …our “yes” would mean nothing … if we didn’t have that freedom to say “no.”

     Sometimes we hold back our “yes” because we are merely apathetic. But more often, I suspect, we hold back our “yes” because of fear … fear that we might be hurt … fear that the other might not love us … fear that we might not get it exactly right … fear that we might look silly … fear that others might not agree … fear of a million different things … fear that is probably just like the fear that kept Marge Sharrow from telling her son she loved him … for all those years.

     Perhaps it is only “After the Forgetting” … after the letting go … of all the damage done to us … of all the pain and betrayal we’ve experienced … of all of our crazy ideas about who is worthy of the kingdom and who is not … perhaps it is then … that we might be ready to give birth to something new … might be ready to give birth to love.

     Even though the angel tells Mary her son would be great … her son wouldn’t know greatness like the world defines greatness … his kingdom wasn’t to be among the chosen or the rich or the powerful of this world.

     Rather His kingdom would come … in prison cells where the innocent wait and hope … and somehow forgive ... His kingdom would come … each time people choose to love in response to violence and hatred … His kingdom would come … around a kitchen table where the gentle, patient love of a son nurtures his mother to the point when she can finally say, “I love you completely” … His kingdom comes every time we say “yes” to God’s way … and choose love over every other choice.

     As we come to the end of Advent … come to the end of this period of expectation and waiting … we need to ask ourselves what it is we are actually waiting for …and if sometimes … we aren’t more comfortable with the waiting … than with the possibility of incarnation.

     The angel announced to Mary that all things are possible with our God … all things … imagine that. Imagine what that might mean … in your one precious life. Amen.

To read more about Greg and Marge Sharrow, click on this link:

http://transom.org/?p=518