Advent 4 (Annunciation): The Blessed Virgin’s Yes
TRANSCRIPTION
For those of you who have come in, later Deacon Grace is a dear friend to our church. Five years ago, probably about this time when we were getting started, we were still meeting in a conference room in Fairfax County Park. Deacon Grace was with us learning as she was doing her schoolwork about what it was like to play at the church in a pandemic.
We're really grateful that you endured that year with us. She preached her first sermon with us, and so she is now a deacon and married to Colin, who is also a deacon. We're grateful to have both of you here this morning.
I'm really excited. Let me pray for you. Heavenly Father, I thank you for Deacon Grace, the ways that you've called her.
Thank you that she's here with us. As we think about the Annunciation this morning, would you bless her and fill her with your spirit. Lord, may we hear from you this morning.
In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. Yes, as Father Morgan said, I have loved getting to be a friend of Corpus Christi.
And it's so good to see you all this morning. And I just want to thank you all for seeing me this morning. You have seen me through being a very excited college student and seminarian.
Chip and Peg, you got to see me through discernment. And now it is just so fun to get to be here as a deacon. So thank you all for always welcoming me back in different ways.
And now would you all pray with me. Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us. Amen.
This past year, I got to spend the week between Christmas and New Year's at Mepkin Abbey, a monastery in South Carolina. Mepkin is home to about two dozen Catholic monks who open their home to those seeking set-aside time for retreat and prayer and rest. Guests are invited seven times a day to join the brothers in the Liturgy of the Hours, beginning at four o'clock in the morning and going until eight o'clock at night.
At the end of the day, just before their service of Compline, before bed, the day's prayers finish with the brothers bidding all those who are gathered to turn toward a statue of the Virgin Mary. Her arms spread and welcome, the smile on her face as the lights are turned down. All are invited to sing the Salve Regina, an ancient prayer, and for them somewhat of a bedtime lullaby, which, since I heard it for the first time, often makes its way into my mind.
They sang, Hail Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy, our life, our sweetness, and our hope. To thee we cry, poor banished children of Eve. To thee we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.
Turn then, most gracious advocate, thine eyes of mercy towards us. And after this exile, help us to see Jesus, the blessed fruit of thy womb. O clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary.
The song of these brothers and of other Catholics around the world is appropriate for today, as we have reached our final Sunday in Advent. We began our first week with the call to stay awake and watch for the Lord. Moving toward the flame of our second candle, bringing the light and the promise of a kingdom that is not of this world, where violence will be no more, and a little child will be crowned as king.
Hearing again last week on our third Sunday, the call to rejoice in the midst of the dark chaos of this world, and beholding the altar covered in rose-colored cloths. And today, hearing twice, the Virgin shall conceive and shall bear a son, and they shall call him Emmanuel. This particular Sunday at Advent's end is traditionally devoted to the Annunciation, remembering the Blessed Virgin Mary's resounding yes to hear the will of God and do it.
Mary, as heard in this devotional lullaby and in our scriptures, helps us to see Jesus. In her yes, as she proclaimed, behold, I am the servant of the Lord. Let it be to me according to your will.
Saint Mary's role in salvation's story was a role unlike any other. Chosen to be the mother of God, saying yes to receiving God in Christ in her very being, and going before all those who would come after her who would also receive God in Christ, beginning the family of the church. As Saint Augustine writes, she gave milk to our bread.
In our Protestant context, Mary's role can be difficult to discuss, as it is often passed over or put to the side. Yet this Sunday in Advent is an invitation to not pass Mary over, to look to her as she is told of in scripture and in the tradition of the church, and to enhance our devotion to Jesus through her devotion to him, and to echo her resounding yes. The yes that came from the lips of she who is blessed among women, the first to receive the Holy Spirit within her, the one whom Jesus chose to be closest to first, and in many ways, who is the first disciple, the mother of the firstborn of a large family, in whose yes the church echoes her own resounding yes.
In our scriptures today, Saint Mary's yes is not the only yes that we hear. We cannot forget the yes of Saint Joseph, son of David, spouse of Mary, who echoes Mary's yes in his own, leading the train of all who would come after Mary to say yes to God. Today in our gospel reading, we find Joseph asleep, perhaps sleeping fitfully, after receiving the news that the woman he was engaged to was expecting a baby that was not his, and turning the unlikely story she told him of a visit from an angel over in his mind.
In his dreams, Joseph too receives an angel's visit, carrying the command of the Lord on his wings, as he says, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for what has been conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins. This child, the angel says, is the fulfillment of centuries-long waiting for God to come to be with his people and to bring their salvation.
Today, the day of salvation has arrived, held in the home of Mary's womb. And Joseph, we hear very simply, wakes from sleep and does what the angel of the Lord commanded him, taking Mary as his wife and calling the child's name Jesus. These yeses of blessed Mary, mother of God, and Saint Joseph herself, a preteen girl and a man in his early twenties, or by some traditions, a widower, those chosen among women and men to be the mother and the guardian of the Christ, who received the one whom all the world had been waiting for, were yeses to God and yeses for the sake of all who would belong to him through Christ, helping us to see Jesus and to say our own resounding yes.
Yet, these yeses were not easy ones to say, for as both said yes to God and Christ, both also were saying yes to public shame, to gossip and ridicule, to an inexplicable and improbable situation of a virgin conceiving and bearing a son, saying yes to lives that would be marked forever by receiving Christ as their own. Ultimately, they said yes to being associated with Jesus. They said yes to a life of destitution, fleeing a violent king and seeking safety in a country far from their home, and living life as refugees.
They said yes to the promised Messiah, born on a straw-covered stable floor, whose childhood was spent not in the soft clothing of king's houses, but among the wood and the nails of a carpenter's shop, who grew up to be a poor man with no place to lay his head, who came to his own and whose own did not receive him, whose words were both gentle enough to calm the raging of the seas and hard enough to refine the hearts and the hands of his hearers as precious metals tried in the fire. Who came to save his people from their sins and who said that anyone who does the will of God is his mother or sister or brother. Our own yeses to God are not easy yeses to say, for we too say yes to the inexplicable and the improbable, that the virgin did conceive and is born a son.
We say yes to lives marked forever by receiving Christ as our own, to love and to serve him with all that we are, to bring ourselves before him in daily prayer, to affirm our faith of he who came down from heaven, was incarnate from the Holy Spirit, and was born of the Virgin Mary. We say yes to the discomfort of opening ourselves before Christ in the confession of our sins, shoulder to shoulder with one another on Sunday mornings, in the quiet of our own homes, or in the hearing of a priest, to seek to be those who, as the psalmist says, who have clean hands and a pure heart. We say yes to receiving the challenge of the scriptures, to seeking Jesus and seeing him as he is, not what we wish he might be.
Trusting in his words, both gentle and hard, and allowing ourselves to be refined as precious metals in the furnace, that we too may be numbered among those who do the will of God, be made members of his family. With Blessed Mary and Saint Joseph, we too say yes to association with Jesus, he who is the king of glory, whose earthly throne was in the depths of dust, heeding his call to embrace those who, like him, are hungry and thirsty, whose need is very visible, who are strangers longing to be welcomed, and who, like him, have no place to lay their head. We say yes to seeking his face in theirs, standing with and for the least of these, as we stand with and for him.
Yet, above all else, our yeses to God are yeses to the life that really is life. They are yeses to the Christ who came that we may have life and have it in full measure, who is the light of the world, whom the darkness cannot overcome, to whom, in Saint Paul's words, we are called to belong to, and through whom we have received grace, who is the son promised so long ago through the prophet's lips, whose name is called Emmanuel, our God with us, who desires nothing but the love and devotion and resounding yes, of those whom he has loved and devoted himself to and has already said a resounding yes to. In just a moment, we will be invited to the altar to receive God in Christ in the Eucharist, the pledge of his yes to us, receiving him again into our very bodies as Mary received him into her womb and being given the chance again with our outstretched hands to say our yes back to him.
And as we go forth from this place, sustained by his sacrament to love and serve the Lord, awaiting the arrival of Christmas in this week to come, we will receive Christ again as we remember his birth, his yes to us as he came here to make his home. Amidst the gifts given, the strains and song of carols, the scent of pine and the candlelit faces, the loved ones visited or welcomed, the family and friends whom we grieve, and the faces that we are not able to see, we will be invited to say yes again to the one who said yes to us in his first coming, entrusting ourselves and all that this week stirs up in us into his loving care. And finally, as this season of Advent ends, anticipating Christ's second coming in extra measure, and as we have been reoriented to look together towards the day when he will come again to be with us, when we will see him face to face and we will stand before him with his arms of welcome and his eyes of mercy and his lips that have already said yes to us, we will be invited again to say yes to God.
May our answer now and then and always be a resounding yes.
Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.
