Little Annunciations

Little Annunciations

Mtr. Erika Takacs

Imagine, for a moment, that I were to ask you to picture the Annunciation, to hold in your mind an image of the meeting between Mary and her angel. And then imagine, for a moment, that we could project those images onto the walls of the church. Pop, pop, pop – little Annunciations all over the walls. If we could do that, I would guess that we might see that our images have some things in common – all of our Marys might be wearing blue, perhaps, or all of our angels might have great fluffy wings. I would guess, too, that we might see in our projections certain echoes of great art – the gentle grace of Mary with crossed arms and bowed head from the great Annunciation of Fra Angelico; Gabriel’s flashy rainbow wings from Van Eyck’s masterpiece; or the brilliant line of angelic light that illuminates a tired, or sheepish, or scared Mary huddling in the corner in the Annunciation of Henry Ossawa Tanner.

But now, imagine for a moment, that I were to ask you to picture the moment in this story that comes right at the very, very end. No, not the “Let it be” moment – after that. After the bright greeting, after Mary’s perplexed pondering, after the angel’s announcing and Mary’s questioning and the angel’s explaining and Mary’s assenting, right there at the very end, the moment when we hear, “Then the angel departed from her.” What if I were to ask you to picture that moment – the moment when the angel left? What would those images look like projected along the walls? As far as I can tell, there is little great art to help us here, no frescos entitled After the Annunciation, no triptychs devoted to depicting Mary sitting alone in a room with angel feathers floating down upon her head.

“Then the angel departed from her.” What did Mary do then? Did she shake her head, rub her eyes, press her hand to her heart? Did she jump up and peer around the corner just to see if maybe the angel were still there? Did she sit, still for a moment, place her hands on her still-flat stomach and wonder what it would feel like to be – how had the angel put it? – overshadowed by the power of the Most High? Did she stand up, brush off her cloak, and get back to weaving or walking or churning or cheesemaking or whatever it was she was doing before her world had spun up and out of her control? Did she laugh? Did she cry? Did she bow down and worship?

We, of course, can have no idea. There is no way for us to know what Mary did in that moment right after the angel departed from her. Scripture leaves this a blank. The annunciation is over, the message has been conveyed. Mary says yes, and so the angel departs from her. His business is done. There are no further instructions, no more details, no timelines, no explanations. There is no specificity about the coming of the Holy Spirit, no Lucan equivalent of the Dickensian “You will be visited by three ghosts, one at the stroke of one, and one at the stroke of two and the third, more mercurial will appear in his own good time.” There is no angelic strategy session on how to deal with the whisperings and sideways glances of nosy neighbors, no pre-partum planning with instructions about how to let out her robes or what herbs are good for morning sickness or what to do for swollen feet or a sore back. No, the angel just does his announcing and leaves. The annunciation is this great, holy, mysterious, enormous moment, but then it is over. The angel leaves, and the silence of his absence must have been absolutely deafening. If we take any time at all to imagine what that moment after must have looked like, to imagine what that moment alone must have felt like, we could easily be left wondering if Gabriel left too soon. Why did he leave her so unprepared for what she was about to face? Why didn’t he leave her with a guidebook, a plan, a mentor, a midwife, something, anything, to help her, this young, young girl, to bear up under this burden she had just faithfully and righteously accepted?

But look carefully at what the angel said before he left. Tucked inside his great Annunciation are these words, “And now, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren. For nothing is impossible with God.” Ah-hah! Here is a second announcement, a little baby annunciation nestled inside the big one. You, Mary, are going to bear a child, and look! – your cousin Elizabeth is going to bear her own. And with this second, little annunciation, the angel gives the girl Mary something wonderful. He gives her the gift of a next step. No, he doesn’t explain every detail of what is going to happen to her. No, he doesn’t give her any practical advice for how to be ready for any of this. But he does give her, in this little annunciation, an idea of what to do next. Elizabeth is pregnant too, he says – six months along, too, so hurry up, go and see her.

And this is, of course, exactly what Mary does. In the very next verse, she goes right away “in great haste” to see her cousin Elizabeth, to sit with her, and learn from her, to watch her and share with her and confide in her and be held by her and finally to witness the miraculous birth of son and the miraculous opening of her husband’s mouth, and the fulfillment of God’s promises to them all. And in these beautiful moments of the Visitation, Mary grew in faith and in strength and in surety about her own miracle, about her own “Let it be,” her own future, her own song, and her soul magnified the Lord, and her spirit rejoiced in God her savior.

In our lives, we will have moments of Great Annunciations and Little Annunciations. We will all, I hope, have moments when we hear the bells ring and the angels sing, when the path that God has laid before us is as well-lit as an airplane runway, when we know and feel that God is showing us something of great significance. In these moments, we will feel the solemn weight of God’s great announcement.  Do this. Go here. Serve her. Leave this behind, pick this up, follow this path. But, I hope, we will also have lots and lots of little annunciations – dozens of them, hundreds of them – little tiny signs that we just might miss if we aren’t looking closely enough. These little annunciations might be casual words spoken by a friend that seemed meaningless at the time but that return again and again to us in our dreams, or an unexpected meeting with someone on the street who tells us just what we need to hear just when we need to hear it. These little annunciations might be symbols or signs or images that pop out at us in the middle of the day, in the middle of nowhere, or coincidences or accidents or serendipities that ultimately are proven far from coincidental or accidental or serendipitous.  

Our God is a God of big signs and little ones, of grand annunciations and little, everyday announcements. God longs to reveal himself to us in both of these ways. No, perhaps not all of himself; perhaps he will not reveal to us the full plan with every single contingency or answer every single question we have. But he will always give us enough. He will always give us one more little step. The Lord himself will give us one more little sign, one more little annunciations, pop, pop, pop, all along the surface of our lives, showing us not only the way, but that even when the angels depart from us, we do not walk that way alone.

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

25 March 2014, The Feast of the Annunciation

Saint Mark's, Philadelphia

The Third Sunday in Lent

When Romeo first meets Juliet, he is an outsider in the home of the Capulets, who are of course the mortal enemies of his own family, the Montagues.  He has crashed the Capulet party for no particularly good reason, and as fate would have it, he has developed an instant crush on Old Capulet’s daughter, Juliet.  Star-struck, he approaches her, takes her hand, and speaks an elegant speech:

If I profane with my unworthiest hand

This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this:

My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand

To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.

It isn’t just the smoothest opening line any wooer ever spoke.  It is in fact the opening stanza of a perfect sonnet.  Romeo and Juliet compose together, on the spot, just spontaneously, a sonnet about how Romeo is a pilgrim and Juliet is a saint’s statue and Romeo wants to, well, show his piety, by kissing her although they’ve just met.

Here’s how the whole thing goes:

Romeo:           If I profane with my unworthiest hand

This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this:

My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand

To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss

            Juliet:              Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,

Which mannerly devotion shows in this;

For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch,

And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss.

Romeo:           Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?

Juliet:              Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.

            Romeo:           O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do;

They pray--grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.

Juliet:              Saints do not move, though grant for prayers' sake.

Romeo:           Then move not, while my prayer's effect I take.

                                                                                                (1.5.93-106)

Then they kiss: perfection.  Romeo is just daring enough to capture Juliet’s attention, and Juliet manages to be a wonderfully correct, slightly unavailable saint while nevertheless breaking the rules of polite behavior just enough to get to kiss a cute boy at a party.  Composing a sonnet together without even trying, at their first meeting, they are the epitome of fashionable adolescent behavior in Verona.  They are the teenage elect.

Sometimes, when lovers meet, it’s obvious that they were meant to be. 

In the twenty-fourth chapter of the book of Genesis, when Abraham decides that it is time for his son Isaac to marry, he sends a servant away to the city of Nahor, to find Isaac a wife who isn’t a Canaanite.  The servant waits by a well, praying to God that the woman he asks for a drink of water will be the one God has chosen for Isaac to marry.  And before he finishes the prayer, lo, the beautiful virgin Rebekah, of just the right family, appears and gives him water.  She even gives water to his camels, which I guess is in its own way as elegant a show of perfection as composing a sonnet.  It is meant to be, between Rebekah and Isaac, and the promise of God to Abraham lives on for another generation.

Again, in the twenty-ninth chapter of Genesis, when Isaac decides that it is time for his son Jacob to marry, it is imperative that he not marry one of the daughters of the Canaanites.  So Isaac sends Jacob away to Paddan-Aram, to find a woman from Rebekah’s family.  Journeying east, Jacob waits by a well and just happens to meet there some men from Rebekah’s family.  Even as they speak, the lovely Rachel approaches.  Jacob gives water to the sheep Rachel is tending, kisses Rachel, and weeps.  It was just meant to be, between Jacob and Rachel, and though the family story is awfully complicated by this point, the promise of God to Abraham lives on through Isaac and Jacob, through Rebekah and Rachel, and on down through their descendants.

Moses, in his day, waiting by a well in the land of Midian, helps the seven daughters of the local priest to water their flocks and ends up married to Zipporah.  Like the sonnet spoken by Romeo and Juliet, these spontaneous exchanges at foreign wells mark our biblical heroes and heroines as fore-ordained.   No matter what desert they journey through, we come to understand, the people of God will find the water.  The water will come to them.  They will remain God’s people.  The promises will come to pass.

The Samaritan woman who encounters Jesus by Jacob’s well in John’s Gospel this morning seems to be the inheritor of an inferior promise.  Yes, Jacob gave this well to her ancestors, and the Samaritan people had understood themselves to be in communion with God, worshipping God on a special mountain.  But apparently their tradition pales by comparison with the promises of God to the people of Israel, and they are second rate, so much so that it’s surprising that Jesus would even venture through Samaritan land.  It is completely unexpected, then, that he would wait by a well and ask a Samaritan woman for a drink.  In fact his disciples can’t fathom why he would even be talking to a woman in the first place, though they keep that unpleasant little opinion to themselves. 

But Jesus thirsts for something that this second-class woman can give him, and no less deftly than Romeo, he prompts her to share with him an unexpected intimacy.  And she, no less responsive than Juliet, quickly finds herself in a passionate exchange with a stranger.  He somehow knows all about her, knows that star-crossed lovers’ meetings have worn thin for her, that after five marriages a nuptial promise starts to feel like a very weak indicator of God’s providential care.  Who knows what those five marriages have been about: whether she has been abandoned or passed along, or unfaithful, or widowed.  All we can say for sure is that she is ready for something deeper.  She is almost majestic in her openness to the approach of Jesus.  She acknowledges the facts of her life without defensiveness, and offers up her version of religious understanding without clinging to a truth that isn’t working.  When Jesus tells her that it doesn’t exactly matter what mountain she worships on, she willingly lets go of what she thinks she knows.  And she eagerly receives the living waters that Jesus offers, dropping the jar she has used day in and day out for the tedious journey to an ancestral well. 

The words she speaks in response to Jesus are certainly not worthy of Shakespeare, but they are in their own way perfection: “He cannot be the Messiah, can he?”

All our lives, many of us wait for the perfect sign of God’s presence among us.  We cling to promises and relationships and daily routines, hoping against all evidence that they will slake our thirst for the living water.  We feel sure that when we have that living water we will be holy and certain, elegant in our faith, perfect insiders with God.  And all this time, while we wait for the perfect encounter, God is with us in our cynicism, in our doubt, in our failed promises and our misunderstanding.  There may be dreamy encounters with God when all the words are right, but God isn’t holding out for perfection and neither should we.

Jesus thirsts for connection with us in our failings.  That is why Jesus journeys in a strange land: in search of us, with our uncertain sense of providence, with our quiet misgivings.  The living waters flow through those places too.  And our responses at those moments--“This isn’t God I’m encountering, is it?”—are quite enough for God to use.  That Samaritan woman became a prophet among her people, just by letting Jesus come close to her misgivings. 

Don’t wait.  You may not feel the urgent thirst that Jesus feels, but Jesus thirsts for you to encounter him.  And all around you are people who thirst for transformation.  When you acknowledge the weary imperfections of your own relationship with God, the water flows through you.  And your own tentative acceptance opens doors for everyone you meet.

This Lent is not primarily a time for us to feel right with God.  It is primarily a time for us to acknowledge the truth of our relationship with God, and to become in that honesty, vessels of God’s grace for a world that is truly—really—parched.  Dry as a bone. God needs no more from us, no perfect sonnet of rapturous acquiescence.  At this time of year, more than ever, God’s truth is perfection enough.

Thanks be to God.

Preached by Mother Nora Johnson

Lent III, 23 March 2014

Saint Mark's, Philadelphia

A Good Conversation

You may listen to Mother Takacs's sermon here.

Welcome, my friends, to the Gospel of John. For many weeks now, we have been faithfully working our way through the Gospel of Matthew, and we will get back there eventually. But starting today, and for the next three Sundays, we will be deeply immersed in John. And when I say deeply, I mean deeply. The lessons the Lenten lectionary offers us this year stories with a particular heft, a particular gravitas. In fact, they are stories with so much complexity and length that to call them “stories” is to probably sell them short. They’re more like episodes, mini-series. Some of these Gospels will focus on what John calls “signs” – healings, miracles – some will focus on Jesus’ discourse that follows and explains these signs, and some will focus not so much on a sign as on a dialogue, on a conversation between Jesus and someone and how that conversation changes that someone’s life.

Today’s Gospel from the third chapter of John is obviously an example of this last kind of episode. It is entirely focused on a conversation, on the encounter between Jesus and the sneaky, snooping man named Nicodemus. The only thing that happens in this reading is that Jesus and Nicodemus talk to each other. No miracles, no journeys, no healings; no calling of disciples or turning water into wine or kicking over tables in the temple. These things have already taken place, though, and Nicodemus has obviously heard about them. They are, apparently, the reason he’s come to check Jesus out. He’s heard about these signs, and he is drawn to see Jesus with his own eyes, and, as we quickly see, to talk with him.

The trouble with this dialogue, though, is that, frankly, it is pretty unsatisfying. It’s not a very good conversation as conversations go. Sure, it has an attention-grabbing beginning. Night has fallen in Jerusalem, and Jesus and the disciples have just settled in for a long spring’s nap, when suddenly, out of the darkness, there is Nicodemus the Pharisee, creeping up to Jesus, looking over his shoulder, asking if Jesus has time for a chat. The scene is set for a showdown: Nicodemus, the leader of the Jews versus Jesus, the new upstart rabbi – a tête-à-tête of epic proportions, a midnight theological death match.

But very quickly it becomes apparent that this conversation is no strategic war of words. This not much of a verbal fencing match – there are no clever thrusts and witty parries and ah-hah! Touché! moments. I’m not even sure that Nicodemus can find his epée, actually. He starts with out and out flattery. Jesus, my man, here’s the deal: We know, my Pharisaic buddies and I, that you are a true rabbi. You’re obviously trending right now, you’ve got a whole bunch of people following you, we heard that story about Sarah and Josh’s wedding – very cool trick with the wine, by the way – and, well, let’s just say that we’re not entirely unsympathetic to your whole kicking-out-the-moneychangers schtick. And Nicodemus takes a breath to go on, but before he says one more word, Jesus is off. He shrugs off the schmoozing and completely changes the course and the scope of the conversation. And just like that, Nicodemus is completely out of his depth. It turns out that that first statement he makes is the brightest thing he says all night, his other two super sharp comments being, “So…you want me to crawl back in where?” and “Er…how can these things be?” Scintillating, right?

Now Jesus keeps talking; he keeps speaking truth, telling Nicodemus more and more about the kingdom of God and the Spirit and the Son of Man and God’s love and grace and gift. But this isn’t really much of a quality conversation. Jesus and Nicodemus keep talking past each other, speaking on different levels. Nicodemus keeps missing things and mis-hearing things and Jesus doesn’t seem particularly inclined to walk him back to step one. Our potentially dramatic scene has turned into something clunky and clumsy; our explosive theological showdown has wound up being somewhat of a dud. There’s no banter here, only bemusement. As dialogues go, this one is kind of a disappointment. It’s just not a very good conversation.

So…why is it here? Why does John take the time to show us this awkward encounter? Surely it is not to show us that Nicodemus is stupid. He isn’t, he’s a religious leader, perhaps even part of the Sanhedrin; he’s not a dimwit. And if John just wanted someone to set Jesus up for his answers by asking stupid questions, he could have just picked one of the disciples, right? And if he just wanted Jesus to make a speech, he could have had him just make a speech; Jesus does this all the time in John. No, there’s obviously something about the dialogue itself, about the encounter, about the process of question and answer, that interests John. Maybe he isn’t so interested in showing us the intricacies of a thrilling theological sparring match quite yet. (He’ll get there – just wait for Good Friday.) But he is interested in the act of dialogue itself; he is interested in showing how not to talk with Jesus, in revealing the kinds of temptations – three to be exact – that we ourselves might stumble across in our own encounters with Jesus.

The first of these temptations, the first hole that Nicodemus falls into, is not allowing Jesus to be teacher. Rabbi, Nicodemus calls Jesus, but then he doesn’t actually allow Jesus to teach. He doesn’t ask a question; he doesn’t invite a response. He is happy to call Jesus rabbi but not so happy to call himself a student. So, the question for us is this: when we approach Jesus, are we actually willing to be taught? We go to him for strength and for comfort, but do we actually go to him for instruction? Are we willing to be changed, to have his words of challenge actually seep into our souls so that we leave our conversations with him different than when we started?

The second hole Nicodemus falls into is about his own spiritual blindness. You have seen my signs, Jesus says to him, but in order to see the kingdom of God you must be born again from above. But Nicodemus can’t – or won’t – look there. His eyes will not open to the moving of the Spirit. So when Jesus starts talking about being reborn, all Nicodemus sees is the world around him, and so these words sound ridiculous. His sight is limited by his own stubbornness and cynicism; he sees only the world, imagines possibilities only within his own context, thinks about only those things that he can touch, see, sense, quantify and explain. So, the question for us is this: when we pray to Jesus, and he invites us into the realm of the Spirit, are we able to see it? Are we willing to look around us with the eyes of our heart opened? Can we live with, even embrace, the mysterious moving of that Spirit, the ruach, that blows where it wills and will blow right through us if we let it? Can we look to see God’s kingdom – God’s priorities in the world, God’s family in our neighbors, God’s beloved in ourselves?

 And finally, the third hole – Nicodemus’s third and final contribution to the conversation – “How can these things be?” In and of itself, this is not such a stupid question. Jesus, after all, is talking about things of great cosmic and spiritual scope – the kingdom of God, the movement of the Holy Spirit, the call to rebirth. How can this be, indeed? The problem is, Nicodemus doesn’t stick around long enough to find out the answer. Just as he asks this question, he fades away, melting back into the darkness. Jesus is still talking, his words pouring out through the page, past the Jerusalem night into our place and time, but Nicodemus is nowhere to be found. He does not respond to Jesus’ words of promise with a statement of faith like Jesus’ own mother did when she followed up her own, “How can this be?” with “Let it be unto me according to thy word.” And so the final question for us is this: when we enter into conversation with Jesus, do we have the tenacity to stay and watch his promise come to pass? Are we willing to stick it out, even when what we’re hearing is impossible to believe?

Because this is impossible to believe. It is impossible to believe that God so loved this world that he made that he sent his only Son, that God’s love for you and me isn’t just a feeling, or a hope, but an action, a gift, his Son, our salvation.

And so for all of his bumbling, Nicodemus is a critical character in this story, a kind of type for us. He bravely falls into these holes so that we might see to walk around them. He has a terrible conversation with Jesus so that you and I might have a good one. This Lent, Nicodemus invites you into a conversation of your own. Go to Jesus and ask him for a chat. Go to him in secret, in the dark if you need to. Listen with the ears of a student, open the eyes of your heart, and plant your feet in the holy ground at his feet and do not allow yourself to be moved. He has a story to tell you, and it makes for very good conversation.