Hear the word of the Lord from Luke 1:
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 Jacob’s descendants 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 your word to me be fulfilled.” Then the angel left her. (Luke 1:26-28)
The story of salvation reaches a culminating point right here—with the moving of God into the world in the person of Jesus Christ. At Christmas we remember: the babe in the womb, “incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary” as the Creed declares—this one, the one called “Son of God”, has come to take up space in our world. In Christ, God has drawn staggeringly near.
It is appropriate that this story should culminate in just this way, since—so it appears—this moving-in was what God wanted from the very first. The Almighty, we are told, walked with Adam and Eve in the Garden, ate supper with Abram at Mamre, sojourned with Israel in the wilderness, dwelt in cloud and fire with his people in the tabernacle, and promised that on the far side of exile, a day would come in which he would live and walk among Jacob’s kids—he their God; they his people, sharers of a single life. The Christmas story draws all those threads together and says, “Here He is: God-among-us, as us; one of our race, born of our flesh and blood.” Every good thing God wants to do hangs on this—the Incarnation. “God with us,” says Karl Barth, “is the center of the biblical story; everything else is circumference” (CD IV/1).
And so we fall down in adoration before the babe—this small, frail, veiled, God-in-flesh who was and is and ever shall be moving into our world with the mystery and magnitude of his presence.
The direction of this story—God to man, and not man to God—is spiritually crucial. From time immemorial we have sought—through penance, prayer, and pilgrimage—to find our way to God. The religious impulse is strong in our race, passed down from generation to generation.
The gospel grabs that impulse, turns it around, and says, “Ahh, but things are better than you ever dreamed: God has found his way to you. You are invited to believe it; indeed, to trust it with your whole life.”
Joy to the world.
And yet… even the most devout among us find it difficult.
Several years back I had a chance to visit the Holy Land with some friends. We spent a great deal of time in and around Jerusalem—a fascinating place, for many reasons: the history, to be sure; but perhaps more than that, the intensity of religious fervor that congeals around the sacred sites. It’s awe-inspiring at a minimum, often overwhelming.
I was particularly interested to visit the places of Jesus’ birth, death, and burial. The Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem; the place thought to be Golgotha, where Jesus was crucified; and of course the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where he was buried. Supplicants everywhere—many bowing low in reverence at the sites, bending the knee and kissing the dirt where the God-Man walked in mortal frame, where he died, where he was buried and raised…
…or were those the places? For of course it is only thought that those things happened just there. There are other legends, other testimonies. That Mary’s boy was born at a different location just outside Bethlehem; that what is thought to be Golgotha is a matter more of conjecture than established fact; that Pilate’s victim was laid to rest in a garden tomb outside the city.
That very fact struck me as theologically significant. Had God thought it important that we know exactly where these things happened, surely he is capable and more than capable to have seen to it that the sites were beyond dispute. But he did not. And suddenly the angels’ words to the women at the tomb came rushing at me: “Why do you look for the living among the dead. He is not here…” (Luke 24:5).
The women came—as humanity always comes—seeking the Holy One. As it happened, the Holy One was out seeking them. Thenceforth the resurrection accounts are accounts not of seeking but of being-sought, not of finding but of being-found, not of discovery, but of being-discovered. And therefore the gift that Christianity gives to the world is not yet another human means of clambering up to the divine, but of surrendering to the pursuit of the biblical God. As the poet W.H. Auden put it, “And because of His visitation, we may no longer desire God as if He were lacking: our redemption is no longer a question of pursuit but of surrender to Him who is always and everywhere present” (For the Time Being).
II
Knowing this changes everything.
When I was in high school someone put in my hands a copy of Brother Lawrence’ Practice of the Presence of God. I was just beginning to experiment with a life of spiritual devotion, and I instantly fell in love with the book—with Lawrence and his warm relationship with God, with his advice for “practicing the Presence”, and for the witness of his life. A humble man, simple; full of faith and of the Holy Spirit. “There is no sweeter manner of living in the world than continuous communion with God,” he wrote. I wanted that; wanted to be like him.
So I set to work “practicing the Presence”, as Lawrence recommended. Often it was good, and I would feel as though I had made contact with God, climbed up into the divine lap. But in my darker moments I felt simply crushed by it, especially when my efforts seemed to yield so little in the way of results—those times when prayer and devotion landed me exactly nowhere; when God, for all my efforts, seemed distant. Clearly something was broken with my “practice.” If I just redouble my efforts… I thought. My relationship with God began to be strangely one-sided—as if I was pursuing a God whose Presence whimsically flit in and out of my experience, taunting me with grace, or worse, was ever receding from me.
What I had not noticed—and would not notice until much later—was that Lawrence’ notion of “practicing the Presence” was grounded in a prior reality: that God is already-always the one who practices our presence. He says as much. “[God] is always with you,” writes Lawrence, and therefore, “Think of Him often; adore Him ceaselessly; live and die with Him. That is the only real business of a Christian in the world.”
Christianity tells us: we do not go off in search of God. Biblical faith is not a religious or spiritual quest. Rather, biblical faith is surrender, learning to keep company with Jesus who is the God who is always searching for us, always keeping company with us. As the Psalmist remarked, even if during the night he lapses out of a conscious practiced awareness of God, yet it is nevertheless the case that “when I awake, I am still with you” (Ps. 139:18).
Christmas tells us: God practices our presence.
III
So far, so good. But there’s more.
What can’t be missed about the Christmas story is that it is not enough simply to affirm that God is moving into our world—true as that may be—but that he is moving in bodily. Mary is not given a new and better awareness of the deity. She is not told that now, at last, a new and more intense mystical encounter with the divine substance is available to all.
No, the stakes are much higher than all that. She is told rather that in her belly, knit of her flesh, fashioned of her tissue, developing over the normal course of gestation, with mortal blood running in his veins and bathed in the warm waters of her womb, God would form—in a human, of a human, as a human; that this “Holy One” would be a human child born to a definite woman in a definite place and at a definite time.
“The Word became flesh and blood,” Eugene Peterson writes in his translation of the opening chapter of John, “and moved into the neighborhood” (John 1:14, The Message). This is what we affirm at Christmas. This is what we mean by “Immanuel.” Not a mystical experience, but that it is as this very one, born of Mary, crucified by Pilate, raised in the Spirit with wounds in his hands and feet and side that God has come to dwell with us, to deliver and forgive and heal and save.
What is more (and if the foregoing were all there was, it would certainly be astonishing enough) the New Testament goes on to claim that this movement of incarnation continues to the present day. The church, after all, is called the “body” of Christ the Incarnate Lord, incorporated into his bodily existence via baptism (1 Cor. 12), and Paul seemed to think that the journey of the Christian life was something like the following: “My dear children, for whom I am in the pains of childbirth until Christ is formed in you…” (Gal. 4:19). Doubtless what happened to Mary is unrepeatable—and Paul would have affirmed the same—and yet there is a crucial New Testament sense in which it does repeat itself across the generations. Christ takes shape in us, in our very bodies. By enfleshing Christ in us, the God who moved once keeps moving into the world, bringing light and healing to it.
IV
There is a drawing by a Cistercian Sister of Our Lady of the Mississippi Abbey in Dubuque, Iowa, Grace Remington, entitled “Mary Consoles Eve.” In it, the two women who bookend the redemption story face one another: Eve on one side, with her head bowed in shame, clutching the forbidden fruit, extending her hand towards Mary’s womb, the serpent wrapped around her legs; Mary on the other, with her tender countenance and pity in her eyes, one hand resting on her womb, another stretched out in blessing to Eve, with the head of the serpent crushed under foot.
I find the image not only beautiful and moving but theologically compelling, impelling even. For there is something of a mandate in it. After all, the church has always held that the two women are representative. Two “humanities” meet each other in them: Eve and her children, entangled in sin, bowed low by shame are blessed and helped by Mary and her Child, the Son of God, and—via baptism—all those sons and daughters of God who follow in his train, in whom his own Sonship is continually realized—and that for the good of the world. These are the saints, the holy ones who also are called “sons” (and daughters) of God, through whom the reign of God’s humble love is made manifest, who sit with Jesus on David’s throne in justice and righteousness and pity. “Light and life to all he brings; risen with healing in his wings” (Hark the Herald).
And us, too. It is breathtaking when you see it up close.
This past summer I went to Africa with a group from our church. On one of the days we worked with a mobile medical clinic in a remote village outside Namayemba, Uganda. Villagers came—some from great distances—to receive medical care. I worked the receiving line. “Tell me your illness,” I would say, through a translator. And they would tell me—and often show me—what needed to be treated. Some maladies were routine, run-of-the-mill. Others required serious intervention—as for instance when one man lifted up his pant leg to show me an open eight-inch heavily infected wound on his leg. I nearly gagged.
Truth is, I struggle with these things. The sights. The smells. Lord Almighty, the smells. And the feeling of fear that surged within me, powerful as a tidal wave, that somehow by being exposed to all this dirt and disease, my own wellbeing was under threat. It took all my will to stay composed, to stay put, in the presence of all that raw humanity.
Not so with most of the rest of my team, who flung themselves into the situation wholeheartedly, touching these dirty and diseased bodies, pulling them close, showing them love. They would have stayed all day and all night, and into the next day. Their love seemed to know no limit, no barrier. It humbled and astounded me.
“As for the saints who are in the land, they are the glorious ones in whom is all my delight” (Ps. 16:3).
What is it about the saints that awakens our delight? What is it about Teresa and Martin and Henri and Rosa? What is it about Anthony and Macrina and Thomas and Julian? About Dorothy and Desmond, Gregory and Hildegaard and Dietrich?
What is it about the family I heard about recently who forgave the man who murdered their son and watched the man come to faith? Or about some other folks I know who have spent the last several years taking a Syrian Muslim refugee family into their lives, and are now watching them slowly but surely come to desire Jesus?
What is it about these Christians, these saints, these glorious ones?
The New Testament is unambiguous: it is Christ—Christ formed in them by the power of the Holy Spirit for the good of the world—the hope of glory (Col. 1:27). That’s what it is about them. God keeps getting God’s way with these people, shaping God’s own incarnate life in them.
He has promised to do this till the end of time.
And we have it in good authority: “no word from God will ever fail” (Luke 1:37).
V
Yes. God will make himself present to the world through human lives—through human lives and in no other way. That is the gambit. He will move in bodily, or not at all. And he has determined to do it through you, friend—through you and I. Only one thing is required:
That we say yes. “I am the Lord’s servant,” says Mary. “May your word to me be fulfilled” (Luke 1:38). Or as the old translations put it: “Let it be to me as you have said.” In so doing, she becomes Theotokos—the God-bearer.
Let it be…
Christian spirituality is not climbing up to the divine, or muscling our way to holiness. Christian spirituality, I am coming to see, is letting God have God’s way with us. “Let it be…” is not only Mary’s assent to the angel’s good news; it is the paradigmatic statement of discipleship for all time. “You have made clear your intentions, God; now do as you said. Make manifest your life in me.” This is what we all must say.
The assent is crucial. God will do this, yes; but he will not do it without Mary’s permission. Nor will he do it without ours. We must let him in. “Let every heart prepare him room,” as the old Christmas tune Joy to the World puts it.
The poet Denise Levertov has captured this brilliantly:
…we are told of meek obedience. No one mentions
courage.The engendering Spirit
did not enter her without consent.
God waited.She was free
to accept or to refuse, choice
integral to humanness.
And indeed it is. Every good thing God wishes to do in us is laid at our feet, offered by the Spirit who engenders the God-life in us. The choice is ours: to become the bearers of God, theotokoi, or to drift into shadow. How long will God wait? We do not know. Levertov again:
Aren’t there annunciations
of one sort or another
in most lives?
Some unwillingly
undertake great destinies,
enact them in sullen pride,
uncomprehending.
More 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. (“Annunciation”)
Indeed.
I need to admit: I feel a tension reading this bit of Levertov. On the one hand, “the gates close, the pathway vanishes.” There is something to that. “When the fullness of time had come” is how the Scripture talks about Mary’s encounter. The moment was right—prepared before all ages, and across the aeons. Would she say yes, or turn away in dread or weakness or despair? Real things, we Christians say, hang on human choices. Always. The moral weight of our history is not an illusion. Things could have been otherwise.
And yet, on the other hand, Levertov reminds us, “God waited” for Mary. Surely he waits for us, too. And isn’t that the point of our annual return to the wonder of Christmas? That even if we miss the moment (doubtless we miss it again and again and again; we none of us are fully sanctified; none fully responsive to the divine will; not yet anyhow), God in his mercy dials up new moments for us, leads us to new ever new annunciations held and made manifest in the eternality of the one Annunciation given to the Virgin. Every year—no, every moment—we can come back, we can stand before the angel Gabriel and say yes to the engendering Spirit, and watch Christ be formed new and anew in us, knit of our very own flesh, incarnate in our very own ligament and skin and bone. So says Paul:
As God’s co-workers we urge you not to receive God’s grace in vain. For he says,
“In the time of my favor I heard you,
and in the day of salvation I helped you.”I tell you, now is the time of God’s favor, now is the day of salvation. (2 Cor. 6:1-2)
In the tender compassion of our God, every “now” is the time of his favor; every moment an Annunciation. And in our yes, our consent to the good will of God, we too can take our place with Mary and the Apostles and all the saints down through history whose lives carry and make manifest the Jesus whose presence goes with us always, even to the end of the age.
Amen.
Merry Christmas.
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