Saying Yes

I remember a few years back talking with an immigrant to the United States who came to Rochester from New York City. He knew no one up here, didn’t speak the language well and was not sure where he was going to stay.  But he had heard God tell him in a dream to come to Upstate, and so he did!

Have you ever said “yes” to an opportunity that you really didn’t know how it would turn out?  Maybe it was a job or a relationship. Maybe an experimental medical procedure or maybe you did something that seemed risky at the time.

The gospel today celebrates the “Feast of the Annunciation” when the angel Gabriel visited Mary and invited her to be the bearer of Jesus. And she said, “yes.” It is, in so many ways, quite a remarkable story.  Sadly throughout much of church history, the focus of the story was on Mary’s virginity and piousness as the reflection of her holiness versus a focus on her holiness coming from undertaking such a bold and uncharted journey.

When I think about what the Annunciation might offer to us today, there are quite a few lessons that I take away.

First, God chooses a teenager of no special standing who lives in a town of no special significance. She’s just going through her life doing all the everyday things that she did when God shows up in her life.

If we ever wanted a reading that helps us to take the spiritual insights, wisdom and experience of young people seriously, this is it! It reminds me that God is speaking to all of us – young, old and in between – and that these invitations do not require theological degrees, formal training or special status of any kind. They require us to take our inner lives seriously, however, so that we can hear the invitations and imaginations from God. And these invitations happen in the midst of all the other stuff that’s happening in our lives.

Secondly, Mary talks back to God and bit and asks some fundamental questions. She knows that she has not been with anyone sexually and might have been thinking, “Uh, Gabriel, do you know how this stuff works? Don’t you angels study biology?”

Of course what is impossible for us is possible for God, and Mary leans in to a mystery that she cannot fully understand.  What is more, Mary had to have known that her saying, “yes” would mean risk.  She must have known that people would talk behind her back or distance themselves from her. She must have known that she would not be believed.  She must have known that her fiancé might not accept this and could turn her in to the authorities. And she said yes anyway!

So she not only believed, as sassy theologian Nadia Bolz-Weber says, that “the illegitimate son of a peasant girl would have a throne and a kingdom” but she also believed that she would be held by God through this process. Now I can’t say how much she believbed it, but it had to be enough to say “yes” to a process that troubled her, that she did not understand and that might make her doubt just how “favored” she was.

And this is where I think we find a lot that Mary can help us with today.

Nadia Bolz-Weber says about Mary, “I think Mary deserves our devotion because in her we see what casting our lot with and being blessed by the God of Israel really looks like. Namely that being blessed means seeing God in the world and trusting that God is at work even in things we can’t see, or understand, or imagine […]She got something I really struggle to understand: that getting a blessing is not the same as getting a present. She said yes not based on the expectation of things being awesome for her but based on the expectation that God can create something out of nothing. And the thing is: we just never know simply based on how our life feels if it is filled with blessing or not.

To be a people marked by the faith of Mary is to be a people, who say Ok, I don’t understand what’s going on and I know that my life isn’t going to end up looking like one I would choose out of a catalogue but I trust that God is at work in all of it. Blessedness is being used for God’s purpose more than it’s getting what I want or things being easy.”[1]

Whatever you may be going through these days, may you feel yourself blessed somehow – even if what is in your life does not feel like a “present.”  May we all keep saying, “yes” to God and trust that even if our lives do not look like the ones that we planned, that God is somehow in the mix.

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[1] https://www.patheos.com/blogs/nadiabolzweber/2011/12/sermon-on-mary/