Luke 1:26 - 38
In the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. The angel went to her and said, “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.”
Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. But the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary; you have found favor with God. You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever; his kingdom will never end.”
“How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?”
The angel answered, “The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God. Even Elizabeth your relative is going to have a child in her old age, and she who was said to be unable to conceive is in her sixth month. For no word from God will ever fail.”
“I am the Lord’s servant,” Mary answered. “May it be to me according to your word.” Then the angel left her.
This passage draws me toward Mary in a couple of ways. For one, she is one who is graced, who is favored, not because of what she has done, but because of who God is.
That's how grace and favor tend to work, much to our dismay. So much of modern life is built upon what we deserve and what we earn that the notion of grace and favor are totally outside our understanding. Western Christians have a difficult struggle with authentic grace, because it completely eliminates anything that I do to merit or become worthy.
Real grace doesn't preach well in the Church, neither does it sell well, nor does it keep the "faithful" in line. It is too unpredictable, too loose . . . too much initiated from God's side.
But mostly today I'm drawn to verse 31, to the simple statement of Gabriel to Mary: "You will conceive and give birth to a son."
That is the promise of spiritual conception, not only for Mary but for every one of us. In fact, you could probably image the spiritual life as the ongoing process of conceiving and then giving birth to God's life within each one of us. At a very basic, foundational level, that's what life is about. God's life, God's work, God's indwelling is conceived within us . . . and then our lives become about how that life, work and indwelling are birthed in our own life-worlds.
How is God embodied within you and me?
How are our lives expressions of incarnation, as Christ dwells within us?
In the twentieth century, Thomas Merton found some old Advent sermons preached by Bernard of Clairvaux in the 12th century. Merton ran with Bernard's idea that there are three Advents of importance.
The first was the Advent of Christ into human history. This is the past event we remember and celebrate at Christmas.
The third Advent is the coming of Christ at the end of the age. This Advent is still in the future.
It is the second Advent that may be most crucial, according to Bernard and Merton, and it is also the Advent to which we give least attention. This middle Advent is the birth or coming of Christ into our lives and into our world at every moment. Christ is continually coming, constantly being conceived and birthed in our world. We may or may not see and participate in those conceptions and births, but nonetheless they are real and they are all around us.
Perhaps the most compelling invitation for us today would be to hear the invitation to conceive and give birth to Christ in our own life-worlds, to live into the reality of this current-day Advent as a time of God's breaking in, no less than God broke in centuries ago in Bethlehem, and no less than God will break into human history at some time in to future.
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