Greetings Highly Favored One!: On Not Being "Nice" for Christmas

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the 4th Sunday of Advent, December 20, 2020 by the Very Reverend Tyler Doherty, Dean & Rector.

Why did God choose to become incarnate in the person of Jesus? What’s the purpose of the incarnation? With all the pageantry surrounding the Christmas season, it’s easy for the essentials of the Christian story to fade behind a flurry of gift buying and tree decoration. Remember those lines from 2 Peter, “by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, that through these you may escape from the corruption that is in the world because of passion, and become partakers of the divine nature” (1:4). The mission of Jesus is to open a way for human beings, all human beings (gay, straight, black, white, male, female, rich or poor), to share in the life of God. We’re startled when we hear a Father of the Church like Athanasius say something like, “God became human so that human beings might become God.” It sounds a little heretical to our modern ears. Isn’t it enough to be nice? To be good? To go to church on Sundays, put our fiver in the plate and drop canned soup off at the food bank?

Stanley Hauerwas, perhaps the preeminent ethicist of the twentieth century and voted by Time magazine as America’s leading theologian (also an Episcopalian by the way!), tells the story of attending his small-town Texas Sunday School where the curriculum consisted of the teacher telling the children, “Jesus was nice and he wants you to be nice, too.” Nothing wrong with being nice, I suppose. Just as there is nothing wrong with attending church, putting money in the plate, and dropping food off at the pantry. All good things in my book. The trouble comes when we undersell the grand destiny for which we are made, when we forget the cosmic sweep of the Christian story, when we forget who and whose we are and the depths we called to explore and experience. “Being nice” in that context  is half a loaf. It’s like being a 747 and spending our lives taxiing on the runway. Being a partaker of divine nature is why we are here. “The Glory of God is the human being fully alive,” as Irenaeus says. Union and communion with God is what we are made for, our purpose on this earth, the banquet of divine love to which we are invited if we choose to accept it. What will we do with this precious, unique, and unrepeatable human life? How will we use our short span of days?

Advent, deeply understood and deeply lived, poses this existential question. It challenges us to examine our lives--our living and our giving--for how well they match our professed values. What, truly, is at the center of our lives? One look at our world and it’s easy to see that radical welcome,  neighbor love, and solidarity with the least of these isn’t what’s at the center of our national life. Fear, exclusion, economic inequality, scapegoating, environmental degradation, and racial violence are the order of the day. Our world resembles not God’s dream for humanity and creation, but a human-created nightmare.

It’s into that nightmare, however, that God--again and again--intrudes, interrupts, and invites us to something new. In our Gospel for today, this sacred interruption takes the form of the Angel Gabriel who breaks into business as usual to invite Mary into co-operation with God’s dream, participation in the creation of a new kind of reality--the reign of God. Lest we forget, Mary’s times were no less fraught than our own. A little Jewish teenage girl living under the occupying Imperial Roman army had few prospects. She didn’t figure in the calculus of who was in and who was out. She was a person of no account, a faceless number in Herod’s census roll. And yet. And yet it is precisely to Mary that the Angel Gabriel appears. It is Mary who in God’s eyes is the “highly favored one.” The world tells her she doesn’t matter, that she’s too young, too poor, too inexperienced, too Jewish,  yet to God this little adolescent girl is more precious than gold, than much fine gold. Here’s my question: Do we know the same is also true of us? Can we hear the advent of the Angel Gabriel interrupting the stale, old story of “not enough” and heralding that Good News, “Greetings highly favored one!” That’s the seed of blessing, the oil of anointing that lies at the heart of each moment if we but have eyes to see and ears to hear. You are enough. You are loved. You have been brought into the very heart of God. You are home.

Fear is probably always the natural human reaction to any sacred interruption, to any annunciation, to any invitation to co-operate with Grace in the ushering in of the reign of God, the kindom of God where we recognize and live from the reality that we are one body in Christ bearing each others burdens--rejoicing with the joyful, weeping with the sorrowful, members of one another. We die to that separate individual sense of “me” and “mine” and wake up to discover our unity with one another, with all of creation,  and with God. But the familiar holds a powerful pull for us. It’s what we know. It’s what we’re used to and the means of understanding the world and ourselves to which we are most accustomed. It takes no small amount of courage to let that old way of seeing and being in the world fall away, but as Gabriel says, we need not be afraid. God desires, as it says in 2 Samuel “To make us a house.” God wants to build us up individually and collectively into a house of living stones, a living, breathing community of persons with Christ, the beautiful one seated on the throne. Christ the beautiful one washing our feet and blessing us. Christ the beautiful one exclaiming to each of us without exception, “Greetings highly favored one!” so that we might go out as a sent people as Christ’s hands and feet in the world, good tidings on our lips. 

It’s a breath-takingly grand vision, admittedly,  but how much more captivating, and enthralling than box-ticking, moralistic platitudes, and being “nice”! The Christian life is an adventure in the Spirit and who we are has yet to be revealed. But with Mary, for the adventure to begin, for our lives to come fully alive, for Christ to be born in the manger of our hearts requires us to utter our “yes” to God, to consent to God’s presence and action in our lives. God does the heavy lifting: at the empty tomb, the women and the disciples discover the stone already rolled away. The hard work has been done, our salvation won. Christ has already made his home in us. The gift, by virtue of our creation, has always already been given. The question is whether we can make our home in the dwelling place he has prepared. All that’s required is our consent, our “yes,” all that’s required is the gentle effort to unwrap the gift of Christ’s life living itself in and through us. All that is required of us is that we cooperate with Grace like Mary heeded Gabriel’s invitation and stepped wholeheartedly into God’s Dream for the world. 

You’ve probably seen icons of the Annunciation where Mary is depicted as holding a spool of red thread. She’s traditionally shown as busy at her loom when the Angel Gabriel appears. And yet she has the wherewithal, the presence, the attention, and the flexibility to notice that something extraordinary is happening. She is able to drop what she’s doing, she allows her plans of how things should be to be interrupted for this strange new thing. She sets her work aside in favor of the work God is going to do in her. “Let it be with me according to your word.”  

The simple truth is that Annunciations litter our lives. Each moment, in fact, is an invitation to the banquet of divine love, a call to embark on the adventure of the Spirit, an opportunity to come fully and abundantly alive in God. The poet Denise Levertov puts it this way: “Aren’t there annunciations/of one sort or another/in most lives?... often/those moments/ when roads of light and storm/open from darkness in a man or woman,/are turned away from/in dread, in a wave of weakness, in despair/and with relief./Ordinary lives continue./God does not smite them./But the gates close, the pathway vanishes.”

The astounding thing, however, is that new gates open again and again and again. If we miss one invitation, yes, that option, that course, that possibility might be foreclosed upon. But that doesn’t mean that God is done with us! By no means! The God who draws fruitfulness from a barren womb (Elizabeth) and who brings forth the Savior of the World from a nameless, faceless little Palestian peasant, who fashions for himself a people out of domination from under Pharaoh’s thumb is never done with us! New life on the other side of apparent dead ends is what God promises us and God is always faithful to God’s promises. He reaches out in endless ordinary annunciations--humdrum Gabriels in the guise of a phone call, a get well soon card, a listening ear, a crow’s caw that seems to shatter the icy predawn stillness and brings us back to ourselves. 

In those daily, ordinary annunciations we come to our senses, we become suddenly present to the Presence that is always present to us in the depths of the heart if we can but put down the spool and with our entire mind and heart and soul and strength whisper our “yes!” Christ awaits each of us in the manger of the heart. Our vocation is to uncover him, to unwrap those swaddling bands and set him free in our lives. That’s God’s dream for each of us. That’s God’s dream for the world. That’s why God became incarnate in the person of Jesus.  “Greetings highly favored one!” How will we respond?