Sermon for: Advent IV B _ Dec 21, 2008
St. Benedict’s, Los Osos, CA
[The Rev] Brian McHugh
This, then, is the fullness of time: When the Son of Man is begotten in us.”
These are the words of the 13th C. mystic known as Meister Eckhart (1260-1328). He expands and illuminates for us, in this season of Hope and Longing, the message and the Mystery of the Annunciation that is our Gospel reading this morning, on this last Sunday of Advent, by the simple use of the word “us”.
Advent has been full of longing and hope: for God’s rule, for the Kingdom of Peace and Justice, for the Messiah of God, for renewal of our lives through repentance and God’s mercy and love. And for the strengthening of that great Mystery we call Hope. I have an icon of Harvey Milk (show icon), the Gay San Francisco Supervisor who was murdered in 1978. The words that accompany it are Harvey’s: “The important thing is not that we can live on hope alone, but that life is not worth living without it.” What did he mean? I think Harvey’s meaning is pointed to by Meister Eckhart seven centuries earlier.
Hope is not a desire for the impossible, but for the possible. So, we humans need to see results nowe and then, need to see possibilities coming to fruition. Harvey Milk is acknowledged as the first openly Gay man elected to public office. For those who understood his election as a fulfillment of a hope for justice and for understanding, both Straight and Gay, Hope came alive and real.
The story we call the Annunciation is a brilliant jewel about the Hope for God’s loving, just, merciful, kind presence in human life. I read once that every woman in ancient Israel longed to be the mother of the one who would represent God, to be the mother of the Messiah. The archangel Gabriel tells Mary that she will bear God’s Son. Her name means bitter, and bitterness will remain in Mary's life; but the bitterness will be tempered with a deeper joy that she said Yes to God, Yes to bringing God into the World. Our celebration of the Incarnation four days hence will be the fulfillment of that Hope.
But Meister Eckhart reminds us, teaches us, the deeper meaning of the Hope for God - and the deeper, universal meaning of Jesus’ birth to Mary through the action of God’s Holy Spirit - by that little word “us”. "This, then, is the fullness of time: When the Son of Man is begotten in us.” Listen to what he says before this sentence: “We are all meant to be mothers of God. What good is it to me if this eternal birth of the divine Son takes place unceasingly, but does not take place within myself? And, what good is it to me if Mary is full of grace if I am not also full of grace? What good is it to me for the Creator to give birth to his Son if I do not also give birth to him in my time and my culture?
St. Bernard, abbot of Clairvaux (1090-1153) in the 12th C, beautifully captures the importance of Mary saying Yes to God. He is addressing Her directly: This is what the whole earth waits for, prostrate at your feet. It is right in doing so, for on your word depends comfort for the wretched, ransom for the captive, freedom for the condemned, indeed salvation for all the children of Adam, the whole of your race. Answer quickly, O Virgin. Reply in haste to the angel, or rather through the angel to the Lord. Answer with a word, receive the word of God. Speak your own word, conceive the divine word. Breathe a passing word, embrace the eternal word.
The Annunciation, and Mary’s “Yes”, and the resulting dwelling of God in human flesh, is the pattern for the full glory of our lives, and a pattern for our calling and ministries for God in the World. The “Yes” is critical, because the God we know does not force Himself on any of us against our will. God seeks a home in us, with us. In the reading from Samuel, God reminds King David that He does not want to live in a “cedar house”. Rather, God will live among His people, bring them safety and abundance and a home, through a descendant of David, whose throne will last forever.
This last Sunday of Advent reminds us that we are all “mothers of God”, destined to bring Christ into the world; reminds us that this is what all our religious life is training us to be. Scripture reminds us that we who have said “Yes” to God through our baptismal vows are all sisters and brothers of Christ.
The founder of the Catholic Worker movement, Dorothy Day, beautifully expresses the Mystery of the Annunciation to Mary and of the “motherhood” of Mary as it describes our lives: Christ is always with us, always asking for room in our hearts. But now it is with the voice of our contemporaries that he speak; with the eyes of store clerks, factory workers, and children that he gazes; with the hands of office workers, slum dwellers, and suburban housewives that he gives. It is with the feet of ….. tramps that he walks, and with the heart of anyone in need that he longs for shelter. And giving shelter or food to anyone who asks for it, or needs it, is giving it to Christ. . This is how God is present in the World – through the “us” of whom Meister Eckhart spoke.
Dorothy wisely reminds us not to be too hard on ourselves as we try to give birth to God in the World: “It would be foolish to pretend that it is always easy to remember this. If everyone were holy and handsome, with “alter Christus” shining in neon lighting from them, it would be easy to see Christ in everyone. If Mary had appeared in Bethlehem clothed, as St. John says, with the sun, a crown of twelve stars on her heard, and the moon under her feet, then people would have fought to make room for her. But that was not God’s way for her, nor is it Christ’s way for himself, now when he is disguised under every type of humanity that treads the earth.”[1]
Here at the end of Advent, and looking forward to the Eternal Word that will leap down from God’s royal throne, we hope for our love to grow for God and all Creation. It is always about Love, as my colleague Suzanne Guthrie says in her book "Grace’s Window”: Love waits behind the silence of prayer for my yes to a deepening capacity to love. Every love informs a greater love. Every lesser love is a forerunner of the great Love, sensed but never seen, to whom Mary once said yes.[2]
In Advent, we have been drawing courage to say “Yes” to God’s desire to live in us and be present in the World through us. We never give up Hope that this is possible! As Harvey Milk said, “Life is not worth living without it”. And God’s Spirit never rests, both to strengthen Hope, and to show us results in our lives and in our World.
These are hard times for Hope. Everything seems collapsing around us. But Hope is the Art of the Possible. And – with the appropriate theological investigation – I do believe at some basic level that “With God all things are possible”. I need to learn again not to look for the “bad” but to look for the “good”. There is much of it, even if we have to look down the long road or at the broad picture. “Taking the long view” is a hard lesson for me, but I’m trying.
The Anglican poet John Donne (1572-1631) wrote these words about the Annunciation and Mary’s Yes:
Salvation to all that will is nigh ;
That All, which always is all everywhere …..
Lo ! faithful Virgin, yields Himself to lie
In prison, in thy womb ; and though He there
Can take no sin, nor thou give, yet He'll wear,
Taken from thence, flesh, which death's force may try.
Ere by the spheres time was created thou
Wast in His mind, who is thy Son, and Brother ;
Whom thou conceivest, conceived ; yea, thou art now
Thy Maker's maker, and thy Father's mother,
Thou hast light in dark, and shutt'st in little room
Immensity, cloister'd in thy dear womb.
Like Mary, we are all “in Christ’s mind”, all our Maker’s “maker” and our Father’s “mother”. God is “cloister’d” in our hearts. So let us, in the words of the Christmas carol, sing out together with Hope: “O holy Child of Bethlehem / Descend to us, we pray / Cast out our sin and enter in / Be born to us today / We hear the Christmas angels / The great glad tidings tell / O come to us, abide with us / Our Lord Emmanuel .
[1] From Dorothy Day: Selected Writings, edited by Robert Ellsberg (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1992).
[2] (The Rev.) Suzanne Guthrie, Grace’s Window, pg. 17
