Dwelling in Perplexity on the Edge of Incarnation - The Fourth Sunday in Advent

A sermon preached by the Reverend Holly Huff at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on December 24, 2023, the Fourth Sunday in Advent (and the morning of Christmas Eve).

Here we are, right on the edge of Incarnation, having not quite made it to evening on Christmas Eve. And meanwhile squeezed into this briefest morning of the Fourth Sunday of Advent, Annunciation and Magnificat and a Baptism to boot! Heaven and earth in little space, as the hymn says of the baby still to be born.

I want to spend some time with this mystery of the Annunciation, the angel appearing to Mary announcing that she will be the mother of our Lord, and in a very real way through him the mother of all living. We are very blessed in this congregation to have right up front above the high altar this marvelous rendering of the Annunciation in Tiffany glass, littered with lilies, the angel arriving on a tidal wave of overshadowing cloud—much like the holy spirit moving over the deep at creation and the spirit’s breathtaking appearance at Jesus’s baptism in the River Jordan! The message Mary hears is this: The Lord is with you. You will bear a beloved Child. Do not be afraid. God’s favor and unbreakable mercy and promise are strung out between these two scenes, Annunciation and Baptism. Mary’s prophetic Magnificat song proclaims the coming of the long-awaited one who will set the world right, who lifts up the lowly and poor and scatters the haughty oppressors. Important to hear ourselves in both groups, I think, those desperately in need of divine rescue, and those who have trusted in their own righteousness at the expense of others and at the expense of a real abiding faith in the God of our lives, who loves us and wants to love us into loving others, too. “There are no events but thoughts, and the heart’s hard turning, the heart’s slow learning how to love and whom,” as Annie Dillard writes. The drama of our lives is the gentle, easy, hardly-know-it’s happening coaxing by divine invitation, angel just out of sight, into trusting God and loving our neighbor. 

This is God’s work. All the Advent readings have been reiterating this the last few weeks. Regard God’s patience with you as your very salvation. The one who is faithful will do this, will keep you, body, spirit, and soul. The tale of the house of David we hear in 2 Samuel today reminds us just how hard this is for us, just how hard it is to let God be the doer, the giver, the generous one in whom we place our trust. David, resting in his new cedar-paneled palace, takes it upon himself to build as equally fine a dwelling place for the Lord, who has been sleeping rough in tents and tabernacles all through the wilderness times. But the Lord replies with not a little sarcasm, “Are you the one to build me a house to live in?” I like my tent fine, I’ve been on the move with you wherever you went, and moreover, I am going to make you a house. David’s attempt to put himself in the place of the generous giver doing good works serving God is exposed as a faithless withdrawal into self-reliance. 

Carmelite sister Ruth Burrows, recently of blessed memory, writes in a book that incidentally features a medieval fresco of the Annunciation on its cover, that “to maintain a simple, trusting exposure to divine Love inevitably means resisting the temptation to ‘make a success’ of prayer….Keeping our deepest heart exposed, refusing to usurp God’s place by making ourselves the agent, the giver….” As she’s talking about prayer she goes on to say that staying humble, poor, open-handed, and receptive before God may mean that we often “have no sense of having prayed well or having prayed at all.” 

Mary’s Magnificat shows us one example of keeping our deepest heart exposed, refusing to usurp God’s place by making ourselves the agent or the giver. “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord!” “He has looked with favor on his lowly servant.” “The Almighty has done great things for me and holy is his name.” Not a trace of self-aggrandizement in it—nor self-annihilation. Mary simply sings without apology the marvel of what God has done, is doing, and will do. Her prophetic vision sees the promise on the edge, about to be fulfilled, rippling across time, to generations past and generations yet to come.

God’s promise is a promise of mercy. A promise of abundant love, which cannot be taken away and never runs out. The bond forged in baptism is indissoluble, reads the Book of Common Prayer, in a short little rubric that punches above its weight class. Sealed as Christ’s own forever, promised to mercy. If we are to stay, abide in humility and trust, letting God be the giver and the doer, letting God be the one who builds the house, it will mean giving up the DIY project of self-salvation, into which we backslide again and again. Oof! Repenting of our constant temptation to re-take control, to redundantly earn our way into a grace already freely given. It takes some tolerance of uncertainty to do this! It takes trust in God even when we do not know what we are looking for, or how it will come. Waiting with patience for an unseen hope, through the travail of a new creation still groaning in longing, waiting to be born. 

If you look at our window again, you can see Gabriel has brought the fog machine with him… clouds roll in on this garden scene. Mary, full of grace, dwells in the uncertainty of the promise being made to her: how can this be? Yet held in trusting patient other-centered waiting—the obedience of faith the Letter to the Romans talks about—Mary sits with that question, and also with the angel’s word that “nothing will be impossible with God.” Then let your word to me be fulfilled, she assents, displaying the trusting, patient equanimity John Keats called “negative capability,” which he described as a capacity for “being in uncertainties, Mysteries, and doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Negative capability, the capacity to let the clouds roll in, to allow the overshadowing Spirit to do its work in darkness beyond our understanding, as the Lord builds the house, and the Spirit prays in us with sighs too deep for words. “Let it be with me according to your word.” “Jesus, I trust you.”

Our trust in God, in God’s promise of mercy, is guaranteed by Jesus. Our trust is guaranteed by God’s very self given to us in the baby wondered at by cattle and oxen, so vulnerably exposed to the pain and darkness of this world, in the rabbi who is content without a house to call his own, wandering to teach and heal and restore, and especially in the feeding and washing steadfast Jesus who goes to the cross for our salvation, and comes back forgiving enemies and breathing peace.

So, Leroy, as you come up to this baptismal font in a minute here, I want you to remember that God is going to build you a house. God is making a home for you. Those same words Jesus heard at his baptism, “You are my beloved Son,” are now spoken over you. “You are my child, the beloved.” The water that washes over you is the tiniest drop out of the whole ocean of mercy and goodness God has to give you, and is giving you, and will give you, throughout your whole life. You’re being folded into a promise that stretches across all generations, everyone who ever came before you, and everyone who will come after, all of us held in God’s favor, God’s grace freely given without price. Your part is just to say “Here I am,” like Mary answers the angel. “Do you desire to be baptized?” “I do, here I am.” 

The time is very near! Come, Lord Jesus, and make your home in our hearts.

Amen.