Favored

Scriptures:  2 Samuel 7:1-17, Romans 16:25-27, Luke 1:26-55

Favored

You’ve probably seen the commercial at some point in your life…..a van drives up to the curb of a house, and out of the van come two people in dark blazers and khakis carrying balloons, roses, and a great big check for a whole lot of money to the lucky resident of the house.   Yes, it’s the Publishers Clearinghouse Sweepstakes Prize Patrol in action, driving around telling a number of very surprised people that they are lucky sweepstakes winners!  And people react in all kinds of ways – they laugh, they cry, they hug.  One thing they never seem to do, though, is refuse the sweepstakes winnings.

Today’s reading from Luke’s Gospel also features a prize patrol of sorts, in the form of the angel Gabriel, a messenger from God.  And in the first chapter of Luke’s gospel – of which we only read a portion – Gabriel’s been busy.   It is said that the Publisher’s Clearinghouse prize patrol will find you wherever you are, at home, at work – I read online that one check was even delivered to someone  who’d been admitted to the hospital earlier that day.  In our Gospel reading, the angel Gabriel, God’s prize patrol, found an aged priest named Zechariah, while he was in the most sacred part of the Temple, the Holy of Holies, offering the incense – something that was a once-in-a-lifetime privilege among the priesthood.  At this once-in-a-lifetime moment of standing before the Lord and offering incense, the angel Gabriel brings news of an even greater blessing, an infinitely greater privilege, when he said to Zechariah, “Do not be afraid”, and then informed the aged Zechariah that he and his elderly and long-barren wife Elizabeth were about to become the proud parents of a bouncing baby boy –and we later learn that the boy will grow up to be John the Baptist, of whom we’ve heard so much in our gospel readings from the previous two weeks.  Folks who get that once-in-a-lifetime visit from the prize patrol react in unpredictable ways, and Zechariah’s reaction wasn’t quite what Gabriel was looking for.   Zechariah couldn’t quite wrap his mind around what the angel Gabriel was saying, and so his power of speech was taken from him until John was born.

Six months later, the angel Gabriel, God’s prize patrol, pull up in front of the home of a virgin named Mary.  He doesn’t pull out a giant check, but Gabriel says to Mary, “Greetings, favored one, the Lord is with you.”  Mary isn’t quite sure where Gabriel is going with this – “ok, Gabriel, thanks for sharing, but could you say a little more?”…..when Gabriel tells her, as she told Zechariah, “Do not be afraid”, and tells Mary that, though she’s a virgin, she likewise is about to become the proud mother of a bouncing baby boy.  Like Zechariah, Mary had trouble wrapping her mind around the angel’s words – but the angel reassures her, saying, “nothing is impossible with God.”  And Mary responds, “Here I am, the servant of the Lord, let it be with me according to your word.”

When someone wins the Publisher’s Clearinghouse Sweepstakes, expectations are fairly simple – the winner will live, if not happily ever after, at least comfortably for a while.  If they win a really big jackpot, they may be able to retire early.  At the very least, the expectation is that life will become easier, at least for a while.

How about when Gabriel, God’s messenger, God’s prize patrol comes with good news?  Far from becoming simpler, life becomes more complicated.  We hear nothing about Zechariah and Elizabeth after John is born – presumably, since they were already quite elderly, they died while John was quite young.   But John was rewarded, not with prosperity, but with controversy, and eventually with martyrdom.  Similarly, Mary’s life became, at least in the short run, harder rather than easier.  In order to comply with a Roman census, Mary was forced to travel, while pregnant and approaching delivery, some 90 miles (on foot or donkey) from Nazareth up in the north to Bethlehem down in the south, a few miles outside Jerusalem; at the end of her long, uncomfortable journey, there was no place to stay, no room in the inn, so she ended up giving birth in Jesus in the manger, in a barn, amid the barnyard smells of the animals, laying the newborn baby in the trough which normally contained the slop for the animals to eat.

What does it mean to be favored by God? It surely doesn’t mean an easy, uncomplicated life.  Rather, it means being willing to be a servant of the Lord, willing to cooperate with God, willing to be privileged to have a role in God’s work of bringing salvation to a world that doesn’t necessarily want to be saved or even know it needs to be saved.  To be favored by God is to have a small part in changing the world.  Somehow, Mary seems to know this.  Hear again Mary’s words of praise to God:

‘My soul magnifies the Lord,
   and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour,
for he has looked with favour on the lowliness of his servant.
   Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
for the Mighty One has done great things for me,
   and holy is his name.
His mercy is for those who fear him
   from generation to generation.
He has shown strength with his arm;
   he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
   and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
   and sent the rich away empty.
He has helped his servant Israel,
   in remembrance of his mercy,
according to the promise he made to our ancestors,
   to Abraham and to his descendants for ever.’

“Brought down the powerful from their thrones…..sent the rich away empty……” – Mary knows that the news she proclaims is good news for the poor, but disruptive news for those in power.  And those in power don’t like disruption.  After giving birth to Jesus, Mary and Joseph will be on the run to Egypt, running away from Herod, who feels so threatened that he’s willing to kill, willing to kill children, in order to stay in power.

As people of faith, God is calling each of us, calling our congregation, not to be comfortable, not to be respectable, but to be faithful, regardless of the cost.  Remember that at the center of the Christmas story is a homeless unwed mother named Mary. We know that Mary was pregnant by the power of the Holy Spirit, but her neighbors surely didn’t, and questions from the neighbors about the identity of Jesus’ father were for Mary a part of the cost of being faithful.   God’s good news came into the world, not through those in power such as Herod, or those considered respectable, such as the temple religious hierarchy, but through that homeless unwed mother.   For Herod, for Caiaphas, for Annas, there was no room for Jesus.  It took Mary, that homeless unwed mother for whom there was no room in the inn, to make room for Jesus, to make room for our salvation.

I’d like to close by reading portions of the Roman Catholic Trappist monk Thomas Merton’s  Christmas meditation, “The time of the end is the time of no room.”

“We live in the time of no room, which is the time of the end.  The time when everyone is obsessed with lack of time, lack of space, with saving time, conquering space, projecting into time and space the anguish produced within them by the technological furies of size, volume, quantity, speed, number, price power and acceleration..

The primordial blessing, “increase and multiply,” has suddenly become a hemorrhage of terror.  We are numbered in billions, and massed together, marshalled, numbered, marched here and there, taxed, drilled, armed, worked to the point of insensibility, dazed by information, drugged by entertainment, surfeited with everything, nauseated with the human race and with ourselves, nauseated with life….

Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for Him at all, Christ has come uninvited.  But because He cannot be at home in it, because He is out of place in it, and yet He must be in it, His place is with those others for whom there is no room.  His place is with those who do not belong, who are rejected by power because they are regarded as weak, those who are discredited, who are denied the status of persons, tortured, exterminated. With those for whom there is no room, Christ is present in this world.  He is mysteriously present in those for whom there seems to be nothing but the world at its worst….”

           

May there be room in our lives, and room at Emanuel Church, for the poor, for the homeless, for the refugee – room not only in our hearts, but in our homes, at our tables, and in this building.  For the baby Jesus was all of these, and to welcome them is to welcome him.  May we at Emanuel Church be among those who can truly sing, and mean it, “There is room in my heart, Lord Jesus” – in my heart, in my home, at my table, at my church - 
“there is room in my heart for thee.”  Amen.