Sermon for December 18, 2011

If you travel to Nazareth and go to the Old City, you will find yourself walking down a street called The Pilgrim’s Route. It meanders through the market and becomes Annunciation Road. At one end of this route through the Old City is the beautiful, art-filled Roman Catholic Basilica of the Annunciation. At the other end is the elegantly simple Orthodox Christian site called Mary’s Well. These are the two locations in Nazareth identified by two historic churches as the place where Mary had her encounter with Gabriel. In between these two sites, along the way of this wonderful road which connects the basilica and the well, are monasteries, churches, convents and a sprinkling of restaurants. There is also a small cave with a bright-eyed evangelist standing outside its entrance.

If you walk by this cave, it’s likely you will be accosted by this evangelist’s friendliness. “Come in, come in, I want to show you something!” he will gush. Soon you will be swept down underneath the streets of present day Nazareth to examine some connected cave areas which, he will tell you, Mary and Joseph and their little boy Jesus likely lived. It really is possible that he’s correct! But whether or not he is literally correct about where Jesus lived as a boy, I promise you won’t forget the story the host to these subterranean Nazareth caves will tell you. It is the story of Mary and her annunciation, the reaction of Joseph, and the home to which they returned when they came home with their new baby. When Vickie and Paul and I were in Nazareth, we heard this enthusiastic Nazarene tell his exciting story twice, because we visited the cave twice. Both times that he told the story to us of Mary’s pregnancy and Jesus’ birth, the words burst out of him as if late breaking news.

Never have I seen a more joyful evangelist. Forget anything you have heard or experienced about tourist traps in the Holy Land, and guides who just want to make a buck by showing you where (they claim) Biblical figures lived or miraculous things happened. At least as far as Nazareth is concerned, the man you will meet outside that cave complex (just possibly the childhood home of Jesus!) won’t ask for a thing … except for your willingness to let him tell that beautiful story again. If you get the chance to meet him, I advise you to let him tell you his story!

Here in Hillsboro, we also had a beautiful telling of the story of Mary’s annunciation … her experience of learning she would bear a son, and then becoming pregnant through the intervention of the Holy Spirit. As was true at churches all over the world, three weeks ago our congregation had a telling of the Christmas story which involved dressing children up in costumes. Once again we asked the children to bring alive for us the beauty, the mystery, and the wonder of Christmas. (We sometimes think we do this in order to teach them the story, but really, we do it because we want to hear it again!) The Christmas tableau which the kids created in the entryway to this sanctuary back on the first Sunday afternoon of Advent was as beautiful a scene as ever has been assembled to show the holy family, the angels, the animals, the shepherds, and the wise men (or, as they are called in a delightful Christmas video I was sent via email … ‘the three amigos.’)

But prior to that enchanting display on the first Sunday of Advent, Lynnette Trabosh and her team of Christian Education Board members and Sunday School teachers had to have a casting call. They needed all the parts filled by willing children. Most of all, they needed a Mary and a Joseph. As Lynnette tells the story, this year it was quickly accomplished that we found our Joseph. Jimmy Alexander stepped right up for the role. And a dignified, loving Joseph he proved to be.

However, when Lynnette asked the kids, “Who wants to be Mary?” there was a long silence. Some pondering was going on in the hearts of the girls … just as the Bible tells us took place within Mary, as she thought about the message Gabriel had delivered. Finally, Emma Haydamack spoke into the silence. “I’ll be Mary,” she quietly offered, “if no one else wants to be.” And just so, she assumed that role. Emma’s Mary was intelligent, beautiful and thoughtful as she shouldered the responsibility of showing us the mother of Jesus.

In retelling the annunciation story today from the pages of the Bible, you may have been surprised with the shortened version of the scripture lesson. Perhaps you thought it was a mistake in our planning when Larry didn’t continue reading the entire passage which tells how Mary ended up saying yes to God’s messenger. In verses 26 through the first half of verse 34, Mary is told she has been “favored” with an unplanned, seemingly “illegitimate” pregnancy. I imagine it might have felt a bit frustrating to some of you, NOT to hear the end of the story of Mary and Gabriel … kind of like hearing the beginning of a passage of music which builds toward, but never reaches its harmonic resolution.

But we all know how the story ends, right? Mary reminds Gabriel that she is not married yet. Getting pregnant seems impossible. But Gabriel tells her the Holy Spirit will make it happen. Gabriel says her son will be the Son of God. Finally, Mary answers as we (veterans of so many Christmas pageants) always know she will: “ … Behold I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.” (Luke 1:38)

Stephanie Saldana’s book, The Bread of Angels, tells the story of a year she spent in Syria, engaged in learning Arabic and receiving spiritual direction from Father Paolo of the ancient monastery of Mar Musa al-Habashi. This monastery had fallen into ruins in the desert until, years ago, Father Paolo found the old, abandoned trail which led to what was left of it. Father Paolo slowly restored the simple buildings, and drew around him a spiritual community dedicated to prayer, silence and hospitality. In addition to these three traditional aspects of Christian monastic practice, the Mar Musa al-Habashi monastery also has the added vocation of dedicating the lives of its members to dialogue with Islam, and to the millions of Muslims in whose midst the monastery exists.

This particular focus for the monastery where Stephanie Saldana spent her year explains, perhaps, how it happened that her Arabic lessons were given in the form of learning the Quran from a female Sheika: one who has memorized every word. Saldana was especially interested in learning about Mary, esteemed mother of Jesus, as Mary’s story is told in the Quran. The story has some of the same features as the one we know, but it also has significant differences. It was Saldana’s long process of pondering both stories which led her to write the words Larry has read as our Witness of the Spirit lesson for today. As Saldana encountered both stories of Mary, she entered into that dialogue between story and hearer which, according to Saldana, permits both the story and the listener to change each other.

In the Quran, Mary takes the upsetting news of her pregnancy out, all alone, into the harsh desert. She falls in fatigue and hunger and fear. It is out there in the desert, all alone, that the Mary of the Quran finally hears the quiet reassurance, “Be not afraid.” This is not an immediate reassurance (as it seems to be in Luke), but rather the delayed product of her pondering and her prayer.

This is what Stephanie Saldana writes about her meditation upon this different story of Mary, the mother of Jesus: “For me, the Virgin Mary of the Quran does not replace the Annunciation story of Mary from the Gospels, but rather narrates the voyage with Mary’s own heart. There is, after all, nothing easy about saying yes to an angel. It changes everything.”

Saldana continues, “The Quran tells us … Mary was so frightened and lonely that she left everything behind to walk in the desert until she collapsed, wanting to die.” Saldana writes about herself, “That is the story I have lived. … it is what had been missing from the story I have known until now – the recognition of falling down …” (205)

Now you know why the New Testament reading we have heard today about the annunciation of Mary ends not with the resolution, but rather with her question. “How can this be … ?” It is a question which, perhaps, has been in our hearts at times, and perhaps is in our hearts today: “How can this be … ?” How can I make it through a ‘joyful’ season when my heart is aching with grief and loneliness? How can I make the most of every day I have to live when I live every day with physical pain? How can I affirm that, “with God, nothing is impossible,” when I have been looking so long for work and still can’t find a job? Or when I have done everything right but now face financial crisis? How can I join Mary in saying, “Let it be according to God’s will,” when so many situations in the world are clearly playing out in ways which oppose God’s will for peace and reconciliation and wholeness for the human family and the planet earth?

This year at Christmas, many of us enter the final week of waiting for the birth of Jesus with many things UNresolved in our hearts, our minds, our lives, our families. For some of us (as for Stephanie Saldana), it might be a blessing to know the story where Mary, the mother of Jesus, wandered all alone out into the desert of her predicament. It helps us, sometimes, to acknowledge that in genuine stories we don’t know for sure how things will turn out, much less that they all turn out with a happy ending.

In fact, this suspenseful, hope-filled part of the story is sometimes the onepart we can actually hold on to. But this part of the story … the middle part, which can feel empty and exhausted and thirsty and even despairing … this is the part of the story that, sometimes, no one remembers or chooses to tell.

The story of Mary, both in the New Testament and in the Quran, tells us this: the mother of Jesus was an intelligent, brave and questioning soul. She entered into dialogue with a messenger from God. She asked her questions and she waited for answers. Mary lived in a village called Nazareth. Today, people still worship and still remember her in several different spots within that town … honoring her experience, praising her encounter with divine impossibilities, and sometimes sensing her spirit to remind us God may, at times, ask fearful things of us. But God never abandons us when we respond as honestly as we are able.

Thanks be to God. Let the church say, Amen.