Advent 3 Sermon - In the Irrational Season

Sermon by Jamie Howison on Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11 and Luke 1:26-38.

Here we are on the Third Sunday of Advent, in the midst of what can only be described as strange and difficult times. So many things have been upended over the past nine months, and now even those more hopeful and relatively open days of summer seem all but a memory. Perhaps nothing makes us more aware of the strangeness of the times than this walk toward Christmas; a Christmas that will be—no, must be—unlike anything we could have anticipated last year at this time.

I know so many people who are doing their best not to let it all weigh them down with disappointment. Lights and decorations are up in their homes, perhaps earlier than in past years, and online orders have been placed for gifts. Plans are being set for how a Christmas feast might be shared, with some talking about delivering cooked meals to the doors of family and friends, and then maybe rushing home to share it all together on Zoom. There’s actually a bit of delightful creativity coursing around as in that way.

And yet… for so many it will be a hard day that will fold into a hard season in which the best thing we might be able to do is to hunker down and wait; wait for the springtime, wait for the vaccine to be distributed, wait for the virus to ebb in its spread, wait at least for a day when we can visit and gather and garden and just “be” outside in the sunlight.

It isn’t always easy to wait, and certainly not when you have no idea as to how long it will all take. Will things actually ease up by the spring, or is that hoped-for springtime as much a metaphor as an actual horizon?

The prophet Isaiah knew a thing or two about waiting, which is why we so often read from those writings in Advent. We read tonight from one of the later chapters in the book, and those words reflect both the experience of exile in Babylon—a crushing experience for God’s people—and the beginning of return. They’d waited for decades there in captivity, with no sure horizon as to when they might be set free… if at all. Yet this voice kept singing over them saying essentially, “God has not forsaken us… the day is coming when we will be free… beyond that the day of an utterly peaceable kingdom will dawn… swords into ploughshares.” And in tonight’s text, the promise of good news to the oppressed, the binding up of broken hearts, liberty to the captives, release to the prisoners, comfort all who mourn, the proclamation of the coming year of the Lord’s favour.

They did taste bits of those things, as they were freed from captivity and allowed to go home and rebuild their devastated city and its temple; foretastes, perhaps, of something more eternal.

At the beginning of his adult ministry, Jesus plainly and clearly identified himself with these very words from Isaiah, saying that in him it was all being fulfilled. It was hard statement for his fellow Nazarenes to hear—they heard it as prideful boasting or perhaps as the ravings of a mad man—and so they rejected him.

At some level, who can blame them? It was an audacious claim he was making: I am the stem of Jesse, I am the key of David, I am the Desire of the nations, I am Immanuel. You? That’s unfathomable.

They too were living in difficult times, a nation subjugated by the Roman Empire, living under its iron rule in a precarious political arrangement that could be toppled at the whim of the Emperor or his local governor. Yes, there were those rumblings of a zealous uprising, but in their hearts the people knew how unlikely that was to succeed. Difficult days.

So what might Mary have made of the words delivered to her from Gabriel?

You will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. He will reign over the house of Jacob for ever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.

Then again, her question is one far more likely to come to the mind of a young woman—a teenager, in fact—living an unexceptional life in an unexceptional place, betrothed but not yet married: “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” I mean I know at least a few things of how babies come to be, and none of that has happened yet… Joseph is still establishing himself and building the dowry.

“The Holy Spirit will come upon you,” Gabriel answers, “the power of the Most High will overshadow you.” Is that any easier to believe? To accept?

I imagine that in the space between Gabriel’s words and young Mary’s reply, all of creation held its breath… and then “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”

This reply is bold, and in its own way as audacious as anything Jesus ever said about himself, but then again so is the very fact that she is presented with this moment of answering. The coming of the One upon whose life all things hinge somehow needs the assent—the “let it be with me”—of a teenaged Galilean peasant girl? Strangely it does seem to be the way that God works; that the greatest of things are often done by the most unlikely of people. I’ve cited Madeline L’Engle’s little poem “After the Annunciation” in years past, but it bears reading again because it catches the lovely wildness of this moment:

This is the irrational season

when love blooms bright and wild.

Had Mary been filled with reason

there’d have been no room for the child.

—Madeleine L’Engle, “After the Annunciation”

Now this particular irrational season is one in which we are challenged to light candles against the darkened skies, find ways to embrace when we can’t be in the same spaces, sing out with courage in our own homes, and feast as a proclamation of how things should be and—in time—will be again. Oh, and to be attentive to those moments when we might feel the Spirit nudging us to do something kind, something generous, something good, something right for someone else right now, in this season, in this irrational time… and to say, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; may it be so… I will do that very thing.”

This is also a night where we are going to celebrate another kind of feast, and one which brings an ancient story up so close it as if it were present to us in the moment, and one which proclaims to us how things should be. We are going to break eucharistic bread together, the five of us here in this church space, and all of you at home in your own spaces… which are also sacred spaces, because the Spirit of God is not limited by stone walls and stained glass. I hope those of you who are participating in the live stream have some bread at hand, placed on whatever table sits before you. I should say that for the time being Bishop Geoff Woodcroft has requested that the use of wine in these services be suspended, in keeping with the protocols issued for those parishes which did resume some in-person communion gatherings prior to the current Code Red restrictions We will have a very little bit of wine in the cup set out here, which is part of the telling of the full story. But be assured, whether or not there is wine on your table, breaking bread together in this way is still fully a communion. That sentence we say when we break the bread here—This is the Body of Christ: behold what you are, become what you receive—is a powerful proclamation of that truth. And those of us who are here will all receive our bread at the conclusion of the liturgy, when we can safely distance, remove our masks for a moment, and receive that bread. Yet even with that delay, we are one with you, for we all are grains of wheat in the one Body of Christ.

And so it is that we feast in this, the irrational season.