Welcome to the CommonsCast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information.

Before Advent, we tackled this heady text from the New Testament, Revelation. I hope you were around for some of it. If you weren't, you can find all of those sermons on YouTube and our podcast. And during the Revelation series, we stretched our thinking to pull apart apocalyptic scenes as a way of understanding our world. And coming out of that series, we thought it might be good to get in touch with another part of our spirituality, a spirituality in Advent that puts us in touch with our feelings.

And honestly, that is a stretch for me. I have a pretty stable mood, but if I'm feeling anything that isn't, like, pretty good or content or happy, I mostly only know it as anger. I am good. I'm good. I'm good.

Or I'm angry. And finally, in my mid forties, I know that anger is covering feelings like sadness or hurt. And I am getting better at identifying more of my own emotions, but maybe don't ask me where I feel that in my body because that question makes me pretty angry. But I am working on it. I really am working on it.

So as we prepare for Christmas, we're on this advent journey together of nuanced feelings, trusting that the divine is at work in our emotive design. Feelings aren't facts, but they do give us important information about our needs. So we have talked about how God steps into Joseph's worry to urge him to make Mary's story his own. And we've talked about how God saddles up to Zechariah and Elizabeth's self consciousness in their old age to insist that their story is still unfolding. And today, we'll trace Mary's ups and downs and this feeling of dazzlement as she is swept up into the story of a special Christmas baby.

But before we get in touch with all of those feelings, maybe even feel them in our bodies, let us pray together. Loving God, we take a moment to pay attention to the season that we are in. Advent, these winter weeks that hold darkness and waiting, but also this precipice of surprise. For those who are full of waiting and maybe holding some sadness today or longing, won't you come to us and abide in us? And we take a moment to pay attention to the relationships that make our lives what they are.

For the relationships that hold some restlessness or hurt and for the ones where we feel grateful and loved, will you come to us and bless the spaces between us? And we take a moment to pay attention to our bodies and to our breath, our inhale filling our chest, our bellies, our exhale bringing us a little more calm. In this season more than any other, we see that it is impossible to draw a line between spirit and flesh. And so as we breathe, we trust that you are near. May the beauty of the Lord be upon us all.

Amen. So far in the Advent series, we've reflected on Joseph's worry, Elizabeth and Zachariah's self consciousness, and today we make space for Mary's dazzlement. We'll be in Luke one and just a little bit of two, and we're gonna talk about a visited maiden, arguing with an angel, feeling dazzled, and what is in the heart. And at the start of the Gospel of Luke, we get these intertwining stories of John the Baptist's birth to an old priestly couple and Jesus's birth to a young woman pledged to be married to a man named Joseph. And I love this intertwining, by the way.

The story of Jesus can't be told apart from interconnected relationships. Jesus doesn't come out of nowhere. He comes from somewhere. So listen to the web of relationships as Mary's story gets underway in Luke one twenty six. In the sixth month of Elizabeth's pregnancy, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth to a town in Galilee, to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David.

The virgin's name was Mary. The angel went to her and said, greetings, you who are highly favored. The Lord is with you. So in this web, you've got, of course, this pregnant relative. I like to think of Elizabeth as an auntie, and being an auntie is a really important thing in my life, so I think of her like that.

We don't actually know her designation. And we've also got this divine messenger, a town of residence, a loyal fiancee, and all of the descendants of David. It's kind of dizzying. But here's a question. Don't you think it's curious that we don't meet Mary, the mother of Jesus, until verse 27 in the first chapter of Luke?

You'd think a story like hers would be the opening scene, like the curtains draw back, and there sits a woman on a plainly made bed. She's all alone except for this pillar of divine light that speaks to her as a messenger of God. Mark's gospel skips Jesus' infancy altogether. And John does the same but makes Jesus' entrance cosmic. And Luke starts his gospel in chapter one verse one with an elaborate introduction that takes up four verses.

And then Luke kinda goes off roading a little with the story of this priestly elderly couple. He has a point though. Luke is saying to his readers, remember stories like this? Stories of barren women and try hard men. Remember Abraham and Sarah, the patriarch and the parents of the Jewish people.

Well, this is kinda like that story, but wait for it. Wait for it. And then some 25 verses later, we get to Mary. Now, if you grew up with a venerated portrait of Mary like I did, you bring that bias to the text. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.

But when we meet Mary in Luke's gospel, she's special, but she's like not that special. She has a part to play, but it's not the only part. The fact is we get fewer details about Mary than we get about Elizabeth and Zechariah and even Joseph across the gospels. Mary is a basic girl from a basic town in Palestine. So let her ordinariness say something to you this season about God's preference for the plain and the simple and the unsuspecting.

In many of our translations, we read the Greek noun, Parthenos is virgin, but it's a word even more basic than that. The more prominent aspect of Parthenos is that it indicates a marriageable maiden. Of course, it would have been assumed that Mary didn't have sex before consummating the marriage. Even later in the chapter, we'll hear Mary say to the angel, how can I have a baby? I haven't known a man.

Wink. Wink. The point is that Luke is turning this Hebrew trope on its head. The scriptures were full of women like Elizabeth, older, barren, and desperate. But here, Luke says, absolutely.

Don't be mistaken. This baby story connects to the ancient stories. But now, through a young woman who hasn't even tried to get pregnant yet, this new story is gonna be something different. It is outside the box, not exactly what you were waiting for. Something to respect about this gospel is that Luke has a broader audience in mind.

Yes. It's a very Jewish story, but it's also bigger. Luke has this way of code switching from a Hebrew understanding of where blessed babies come from, always God, to a Greco Roman understanding of where blessed babies come from, the gods. In a typical Greco Roman myth, a god will disguise himself as a mortal in order to have sex with a maiden, and then ta da, you get a divine man like Heracles or Augustus. And while we never get the deep details of Jesus' conception, that stays a mystery.

Luke speaks to everyone in his audience, Jewish and Gentile. He says, no matter which way you shake it, the story of our Messiah, hero, Jesus, starts as the story of a baby with so much divine blessing that two thousand years from now, they'll still be talking about this one baby. So how does Mary feel about the encounter? Well, she certainly never feels just one thing, and we witness some of those feelings as she externally processes what it might mean with an angel. You know, as you do.

Luke one twenty nine. Mary was greatly troubled at Gabriel's words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. But the angel said to her, do not be afraid, Mary. You have found favor with God. You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus.

How can this be? Mary asked the angel, since I am a virgin. And the angel answered, the holy spirit will come on you and the power of the most high will overshadow you so the holy one to be born will be called the son of God. I am the Lord's servant, Mary answered. May your word to me be fulfilled.

Then the angel left her. Now, you know the story, and I know the story, but every once in a while, something different stands out to me. In fact, it's kind of been bugging me this year. We're often like, Yay, Mary. What a lady.

Blessed is the fruit of your womb. As if it isn't the biggest disruption to a life that was unfolding predictably. Mary had learned the Jewish prayers. She's set up with a good Jewish husband. She's at her parents' place making herself useful while she waits to take that next step in becoming a woman, and then she is pushed off of her predictable path by an angel with some sort of divine plan.

And the thing that bugs me, the thing I keep thinking about, is that Mary didn't ask for this. I don't think she asked for any of this. Of course, we don't know all of her private prayers or her dreams for family or even if she liked Joseph all that much. So what do we make of this? Let's go through this disruption with her step by step.

First, the compliment. Mary has been found with divine favor. In an ancient Mediterranean culture, favor is something given by a patron to a client. The subtext is always, I'll do this thing for you, but you will return the honor to me. You don't get something for nothing.

Only the economy of God trades in different favors. God prefers to pick people, prefers to pick people who don't have that much to offer. I'll do this thing with you and with me. We'll do this thing together. And that's where the second part of the argument steers us.

Mary's like, what are you talking about, angel? And she hears the reply, the spirit will overshadow you. And while this contention takes us awfully close to the schemes of gods and Greek myths, that is not the context here. Luke shapes the Genesis story of Jesus to be marked by a spirit who doesn't trick, doesn't seduce, but who protects and empowers. This is the spirit who broods over chaotic waters in creation.

This is a spirit who leads slaves to freedom and rests in desert places, who later in the story will descend on Jesus and anoint everything he says and does with beauty and mercy. Eventually, Mary has heard enough and she consents to this co creative plan for her life. Left alone, I imagine her lying awake on that plain bed. She's like blinking into the dark. She's putting her sharp mind to use, But she thinks about how her once predictable path has taken on a story of her people.

And as her eyelids get heavy, she whispers to herself, tomorrow, Tomorrow, I'll go see Elizabeth and we're gonna do this together. And as she falls asleep, something like determination spreads from her head to her toes. So here's my question for us today. Because there is something of Mary's story in all of our stories. What do we do when we are given a gift we didn't ask for?

A plan we didn't even wanna make? A strange new twist of fate? A disruption to our self determined destiny? What do we do when the life we are living isn't the life we imagined for ourselves? Where the timing of what's happening feels so unlucky or we just don't have what we really want.

I've always loved the wisdom that sees Mary as this role model for the church and for all Christians. And so we see in Mary a transformation, a decision to accept a change of course, an attentiveness to just how dynamic life can be. Mary goes from troubled to being a troubadour for God's wild ways at work in the world. So when Mary bursts through the front door of Elizabeth and Zachariah's house, she calls out, auntie, it's me, Mary. I am here.

And then Elizabeth hears Mary's greeting. And when she hears it, she feels the baby somersault in her own womb. And filled with the spirit, Elizabeth declares that Mary is blessed, and the life within her is blessed. And Mary responds with a song. A song can be divided into two parts here, but we're just gonna look at the first part today.

Mary said or she sang, my soul glorifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my savior for God has been mindful of the humble state of this servant. From now on all generations will call me blessed for the mighty one has done great things for me. Holy is God's name. God's mercy extends to those who fear God from generation to generation. And the song that Mary sings, it isn't exactly an original.

It contains a bunch of Hebrew ideas about God's promises to deliver God's people. And it's believed by scholars that Mary's song, the Magnificat, circulated through earliest Christian communities before Luke plopped it right here in the gospel. It's a hymn of the people, and it's personal. Take this word soul. The Greek word psuche means one's inner life.

Mary says she's like lit up inside. Her spirit rejoices. God adores adores the humble. And there's also this verb glorify. And the Greek word is megaluno, and it means to grow and to expand.

And the scholar Barbara Reed says that Mary's song is not a lovely little lullaby here. It is a vision of God's power and protection at work to bring about a different future. In other words, we don't get where we need to go by playing it the same way all the time. We don't develop resiliency or selflessness or thoughts about a kinder city by sticking to predictable paths. Yes, you can start there, but then expand.

Like the universe we inhabit, we are meant to expand. We expand when we welcome gifts we didn't ask for. And we expand when we imagine that our questions, our feelings, our apprehensions are given a divine audience, maybe by an angel or a family member or a friend. We expand when we burst into each other's lives and say, I am here. So let's live the mystery of God together.

You don't have all the answers? Neither do I. Maybe that's actually the fun part. I like to imagine that the party with Mary at Elizabeth and Zachariah's house, it goes late into the night. Behind closed doors, they dance and they sing and they stare up at the ceiling in wonder.

Their stories are forever intertwined. After so much waiting, God is, in Mary's words, lifting up the lowly and filling the hungry with good things. And as public as this story is for us now, I want us to remember how private it was then. Because there is something about Christmas that begins in private. Angels show up in isolated places.

The songs in the story, they aren't given a great audience. And there's this solitude of a tiny verse near the end of the infancy narrative that has a way of haunting us still. After Jesus is born away from the crowd and shepherds and angels make a scene hardly anyone is there to notice, we read Luke two nineteen. But Mary treasured up all these things and she pondered them in her heart. Tucked into the definition of this word, treasure is the act of preservation.

Sarah Rudin translates the verse like this, Mary kept all these things safe in her memory, considering in her heart what they might mean. And there's this theory that so much of what happens in the Christmas story actually takes place in what some scholars call a hidden transcript. And what this means is that people who struggle under the foot of oppression find transgressive ways to resist harsh power. They tell jokes in secret at the expense of a king. They make art that subverts a politics of exploitation.

They assert their dazzling dignity even with the threat of death. Behind closed doors, in shepherds' fields, in dim rooms where animals dwell, a secret, a secret arrives. As a baby, how hilarious. And a mother sees both the innocence and the danger that marks their lives forever. And history has done great and terrible things with this secret ever since.

But every year, we get to try again to contemplate the mystery of a God who fills out the form of our humanity. And so as we close, have a very simple exercise for you mid Advent. Check-in with your heart. Have you made space for mystery? Can you stay open to a story that you can't predict?

Does your body have what it needs so that you can notice delight in your life and actually hold on to it for a moment. These moments of awe and mystery stored in Mary's heart, they will sustain her as her son grows and her husband dies and the state is agitated by the teachings of Jesus, Mary will dig deep and know on most days anyways that the God of the universe dwells in real places and times and wombs and sons and daughters. So what dazzles you these days? Go ahead and make a list of that on your phone. Stay quiet enough to notice and store some of it in your heart.

Your life will move faster and faster and there will be times that are harder and harder. But you can have a heart full of wonder and that's not nothing. Maybe it is everything. Let us pray. Loving God, we take a moment to think back, maybe even just on our morning, maybe our weekend, our December.

Just in this moment, we look for moments of our own private personal dazzlement. Where did we laugh? Where did we see something that caught our attention maybe just outside our own window? When did we feel loved and share love? Help us to develop these pathways of wonder in our minds and to store them in our hearts, our bodies, and to trust God that you are near.

As we prepare for Christmas, help us to hold onto something of Mary's story here that we do have what we need to experience life as it actually unfolds. For anyone today who feels a little extra lost or sad or alone, we pray. Spirit of the living God, present with us now. Enter the places of our hurt and our longing and heal us of all that harms us. Amen.