Enough

 

Merry Christmas! Christ is born!

Read This! Luke 2:1-20

This is cute: The Story of when Jesus Was Born

I love Nadia Bolz-Weber’s description of what it’s like being a pastor. I’ve probably quoted it a hundred times. She says, “So often in the church, being a pastor or a "spiritual leader" means being the example of  "godly living." A pastor is supposed to be the person who is really good at this Christianity stuff — the person others can look to as an example of righteousness. But as much as being the person who is the best Christian, who "follows Jesus" the most closely can feel a little seductive, it's simply never been who I am or who my parishioners need me to be. I'm not running after Jesus. Jesus is running my ass down. Yeah, I am a leader, but I'm leading them onto the street to get hit by the speeding bus of confession and absolution, sin and sainthood, death and resurrection — that is, the gospel of  Jesus Christ. I'm a leader, but only by saying, 'Oh, screw it. I'll go first.'" 

So here I am. I am going first. 

I am not enough.

Even on a good day, even on a good year, even when I’m full of Starbucks and protein and yoga and meditation, I’m still not enough.

I’m disorganized. I procrastinate. Sometimes, I get a little emotional. I lose my patience and then I get sarcastic with my kids. The left front tire on my Honda is a little low, so instead of just taking it to the gas station to fill it up, I’ve been borrowing Dan’s car. I didn’t set out little treats for the Amazon delivery workers who are making Christmas happen for us this year. I rely too much on Amazon delivery workers, and not on local businesses, to make Christmas happen this year. 

But this year. This year, you all have deserved better. You need someone who is camera ready. Someone who can edit and lay music over videos and somehow link the powerpoint to the live stream. You need someone who can create community when we can’t be present in community. You need an exuberant extroverted personality to magnetically draw new people in. You need new programs, new things for people to do, new ways to invite people in. You need an entertainer. An event planner. A community organizer. A coordinator. You need a famous podcaster with a book deal or a YouTuber with a boom mike and tripod and one of those reflector cards that makes the lighting perfect. Maybe you need a lion tamer or a flying trapeze artist. You need someone who whitens her teeth.

This COVID business has done a number on our feelings of enough ness. 

We want to make up for all the things we’ve lost this year. And so, we try to be more. We try to do more. 

My son, Jonah, is devastated that we’re not visiting family this year for Christmas. And because he feels this way, I feel like I need to fix that feeling somehow. I need to do more in order to help him not feel this sadness and disappointment. So I’ve been Amazoning and Targetting and baking and decorating and cleaning and planning and grocery shopping and we even ate Chipotle on Tuesday night and got pizza delivered on Wednesday night, eating out TWO nights in a row, just to make up for the fact that we’re not going to Grandma and Grandpa’s this year. Maybe, if I do more, it’ll be enough. Maybe if I do more, it’ll make up for all the ways this year has let us down. 

I don’t know where that not enough voice comes from. But it’s an old voice. A voice that’s at least 2000 years old. 

Let me tell you a story.

Once upon a time there was a land, broad and wide, gorgeous and plentiful, where an emperor created a most powerful system of haves and have-nots, so much so, that 1% of the world’s population owned more than half of the world’s wealth.  This 1% controlled the land, the seas, and all of the resources the earth provided. And with this wealth, they began buy power. First, through rivers and rainforests, farmland and mountains. Through coal and oil, diamonds and corn. And then through credit default swaps and high frequency trading and social media sites. And as they amassed so much wealth, they needed people to retrieve it, to maintain it, to count it, and to offer themselves to it. And the people believed that if they worked hard enough, they, too, might become as powerful as they. 

And in those days, there came a decree from the emperor that every person should be counted, for they wanted to see what they would buy, how many taxes they’d have to pay, how many times they’d click on that link from the dying princess in Ethiopia who wants to give them all of her amassed wealth. And so all went to Facebook and Google and instagram and pinterest, and even the grandparents opened their old juno accounts and clicked.  And the ads came. Switch your cell phone plan and save. Update your insurance plan with our new low rates. We are calling you about your expired vehicle warranty. Win Christmas with this flashy electronic gadget. Free shipping on chinchilla lined black leather pants when you spend $100 on fingerless gloves and toe socks. 

And so they clicked. And they were counted. And they felt hollow and empty unless they clicked, like they didn’t count for much anymore. For the half a second it took to click, just as their pointer finger pressed down on the track pad, they felt like they were enough. And then poof, it was gone. Back to the doing and the buying and the list making and the comparing. They stopped reading books for fun. They forgot how to grill a really good steak. They felt awkward with eye contact. They couldn’t remember when to plant the tulips. They squinted under fluorescent lights and breathed stale conditioned air. They looked at all the pictures they clicked and they suddenly felt fat, and lazy, ugly and old. They began to think that the clicks were the only way that they could get any of it back.

And the emperors of power, maybe they thought they’d earned all their money, or maybe they kept their financial accounts in Switzerland or the Caribbean, maybe they thought they were the only ones who could really use the resources well, began to line the pockets of the civil servants with cash, with land, with sweatshops in India, with mediterranean cruises, with bought elections, with chinchilla lined leather pants.

But once, a long time ago, there was a young couple, getting ready for a baby, getting ready for a marriage, getting ready to start a life together, who travelled the eighty miles from Nazareth to Bethlehem, to be registered, to be counted. Mary left her Target nursery registry and her Honda Odyssey, her “What to Expect When You’re Expecting,” she left the safest mahogany crib with properly spaced bars and without bumpers or blankets or teddy bears so as to prevent SIDS. She left her pump and her comfortable pajamas and her lanolin cream all behind. They didn’t even upgrade their cell phone plan from the local to the regional coverage.

And so, nine months pregnant, poor Mary waddled through the desert, trying to do as she was told, trying to do what is expected of her by the powers, trying to please the emperor in her own small way, trying to be counted, trying to click all the right links, trying to meet expectations and get an A+ in this mother-of-god-thing, trying not to make Joseph stop every fifteen minutes so she could pee.

And in that tiny town, it is said that Mary gave birth to her child. Without the retracting hospital bed or the ice chips from a plastic pitcher. Without chocolate pudding or that apple juice in those tiny little cups. No lanacane spray. No warm shower or heart monitors. Without a doula or a push present. Without an iv or a petocin drip. Without an epidural. Without the surgical team on standby just in case. Without those cute little onesies she’d ordered from that Etsy shop. She didn’t have a car seat or a college savings account. She didn’t have Waldorf inspired toys or one of those black and white mobiles to hang above the baby to stimulate his brain activity. No parenting classes. No high school diploma or practical degree. Without a room or a bed or even a chair to rest. 

She did have a kind of basement barn, a lower level where folks would keep their animals and tools and lists of things that must be done before the end of the week or before the in-laws come or before the rainy season. With the sound of people stomping above her, dust from the rafters falling with each heavy step, she looked around. And saw what she had.

She had her two hands. And a lot of pain. And moans. And swaying. And blood. And this barn for the hired hands and the beasts of burden. She had sweat and tears and a terrified almost-husband. She had a promise from an angel that she now wonders was all just a first trimester morning sickness delusion. 

And so she did what she had to do. She crouched down in the straw and felt for his head. The soft fontanel and birth waters and blood. And she pushed again. And then she caught her baby. 

Alone and terrified and anonymous in a strange town, a tiny speck of dust amidst the swirling universes, she caught her baby. And she breathed. And she smelled his head. And she rubbed his back until she heard him cry. And then she put him against her chest and showed him his food and thought, this is enough. It’s enough. I don’t have a crib or a video monitor or even a proper blanket. I have a manger, a trough where the animals are fed, and some strips of cloth, and exhaustion. And it is enough. It is enough.

And it was a kind of quiet joy.

And then a bunch of straggling shepherds come and interrupt this quiet joy. And they’re pumped. They’re psyched. They are through the roof. An angel told them that they’d see a baby, wrapped in swaddling clothes and laying in a manger. And that was enough to get them to leave their watch and bring their sheep and check it out. And then they saw it. Holy crap. The angel was right. There it is! The baby. Just a baby. And it was enough.

And striving to do and be and click all the things for all the powers didn’t seem so important anymore. Comparing ourselves to magazine photos and other’s savings accounts and fancy cars and parents who keep up with their blogs and their exercise and their date nights, begins to fade away. All the pastors with their white teeth and their rock bands and their smoke machines suddenly looked a little tacky. A little overdone. 

God became flesh through a young girl in a basement barn covered in straw and droppings and the wet exhales of sheep and donkeys. And it was enough. 

The fleshy power of the incarnation started the avalanche that someday, someday, will cancel out all the oppressive structures and negative self talk, and sense of failure and self doubts. All the need to amass more stuff, more accolades, more zeroes on our paychecks.

All the small things. All the small, inconsequential, fleshy, grounding, boring things of this world, suddenly had the smell of a new born’s head, a stroke of incarnation, the hint of a God become human, the kind of power that principalities and corporations and governments and terrorist groups will never have. 

The power of the incarnation. The power of enough.

And with that enough, Mary is more powerful than Caesar Augustus and Octavius and Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and the whole Walmart corporation and even Jeff Bezos who has seen his wealth skyrocket even more in 2020 directly because of this pandemic. 

Mary became more powerful than all of them. More enough than all of them. Because she took what she had, which was so clearly not enough, and birthed God, who became not enough enough for it to be enough. The incarnation: God becoming not enough enough for it to be enough.

This incarnation became so powerful, in fact, that this fleshy, contracting, sweating, bloody birth began to pull a thread from the tangled sweater of corrupt power structures, so that with every cup of tea and quiet moment and trip to the park and sincere apology and trashy romance novel and potluck and smelly dog fart and mud pie and truce between enemies and up-cycle Etsy shop and roadside lemonade stand, there is enough. Enough for this moment. Enough for right now. Enough to participate in the destruction of the power systems. Enough to see God in all of it. Enough to count. Enough to build community. Even during a pandemic. Even while we sit at our own dining room tables. Even while all we have to connect us is technology. Even when clearly, our enough is not enough.

The incarnation of enough.

Jesus Christ. A tiny baby covered in amniotic fluid, landing with a gentle thump on a dirt floor covered in straw. Laid in a manger. In a barn. Below folks who are upstairs on the internet or switching the laundry or writing the dissertation or drinking the fifth or watching Wheel of Fortune, clicking, clicking, trying to count. Being counted. Trying to be enough. Not realizing that enough is so close, so near, so ready to be welcomed in to the world. 

It’s a quiet kind of joy that doesn’t seem so far away anymore. 

The power of the incarnation.

The power of the incarnation is the power to infuse every inch of our lives with the spirit of God. The power to upend every oppressive social and economic and political structure just by showing up, just by looking around, by refusing to buy what they are selling. By living in to the present moment, just as God has given to us, right here, right now. It is enough.

God came to us as enough. And that makes all of this, all of this heartache and brokenness and fear and loss of this year, enough. It’s enough.

Thanks be to God.

Here I Am: A Fourth Sunday in Advent

 *trigger warning - this sermon mentions miscarriage

Read this!! Luke 1:26-38

Jonah was two and a half, I think. I was in seminary. Dan was finishing up his dissertation. We were on food stamps and medical assistance. Dan’s parents were helping us out a lot. We had two giant dogs and one tiny house. Jonah had just started sleeping consistently through the night and we were just getting our feet back under us after the whirlwind of emergency c-section, two week NICU stay, postpartum depression and first time parenting.  We were absolutely not ready for another child. But there it was, two pink lines, one a little fainter than the other, announcing,”ready or not, here I am.” 

I mean, my fear was probably not quite warranted. But I do tend to have a flare for the dramatic and the tendency to panic in uncomfortable situations. I was in a pretty stable situation. I didn’t really need to be as scared as I was. The timing wasn’t perfect, that was for sure. But we’d be ok. We had friends. We had family. We had a place to live. I wasn’t facing accusations of adultery or a possible stoning. It just wasn’t what we had planned. And we didn’t feel ready. And this was going to make life even messier. But there really was no need to panic. And yet, still, I panicked.

That’s about as close as I can get to Mary’s situation. I was thirty-fourish, almost done with my third masters degree, “properly” married, not as financially stable as we would have liked, but definitely not destitute. So, really, not very close at all. 

Mary was a teenager living in the backwater town of Nazareth - a town of a couple hundred people, out in the stix, far from Jerusalem and the center of the Jewish world. She’s engaged to be married to Joseph, who was probably about ten years older than she was. That’s all we really know about her. Luke doesn’t tell us what she has done to earn God’s favor. And, as scholar Amy-Jill Levine says, maybe that’s a good thing. Because we don’t have a laundry list of all of the great things she has done, because we don’t have her righteousness written out in concrete specific tasks, being like Mary gets to be more of a way of being, rather than a list of doing. 

In our reading today, we get a glimpse of Mary’s being. An Angel comes to her, interrupts whatever it is she’s doing - I always pictured her mopping the floor, because that’s what “good girls” always do - and the angel says, “Hi! You’ve been especially and specifically chosen by God! And God is with you.” And Mary is terrified. I know the translations have her being “surprised” and “perplexed” and even “troubled,” but the Greek here is clear; she is terrified. 

So what is at the heart of Mary’s being? Fear. Sheer and utter terror.

And the angel responds, “Don’t be afraid!” As if that ever works. As if anyone has ever changed their mind simply because someone said, “Don’t worry!” Or “Don’t be afraid!” Or “Just calm down!”

And so, as if to calm her nerves even more, the angel says, “Don’t worry! You’re going to become pregnant with the Son of God.”

I’d really like to put this angel through some sensitivity training.

And, interestingly, unlike Zechariah, she is not rebuked for her questioning. She needs a little more information. At the heart of Mary’s being is fear. and a question.

“Uh… How can this be since I’m still a virgin?” 

Is it doubt? Is it absolute disbelief? Does she just need the mechanics explained to her a little more clearly? 

And the angel says, “Oh, that’s easy. The Holy Spirit will take you over, you’ll become miraculously pregnant, and everyone will call the kid the Son of God.”

And before home pregnancy tests and blood draws. Before ultrasounds and hormone levels. Before any of that, when all she could do was listen to her body and trust, she says, “Ok. I’m in. Let’s do this.” 

And so, finally, at the heart of Mary’s being, amidst the fear and the questions, is consent, acceptance, an entering in.

“Here I Am” she says. Literally, “behold” or “see me.” “I’m here.” I’ll show up for this, whatever “this” turns out to be.

Back when I was faced with an unexpected pregnancy, it took me about a month to get where Mary got in about two seconds. It took me a month to go from terror, to questions, to “ok, let’s do this.” 

And with that “yes,” with that “here I Am,” with that acceptance of risk - all the risk of being an unwed pregnant girl in First Century Palestine, where pregnancy was dangerous, and childbirth life threatening even in the most comfortable of circumstances, let alone for a young girl with no official husband —Mary shows up, Mary consents. Maybe she’s naive and doesn’t know the terrifying risks involved, maybe she’s completely unsuspecting of the heartache that will befall her as the Mother of God. Maybe she has every idea of how ridiculously dangerous this prospect is. Maybe she’s somewhere in between. But whatever the case, in the unknown, she consents. 

I’d finally gotten to acceptance, to embracing this new life and all the messiness it would entail, all the inconvenience it brought, and I’d finally tamped down my fear and stopped asking frantic questions when I showed up for my second OB appointment, about twelve weeks or so into the pregnancy. And as I settled in to the reality of what is, as I entered in and showed up and said, “Ok, here I am, let’s do this,” the doctor squirted that cold jelly on my abdomen and took his doppler and hopped it around my belly. I heard the familiar slow whoosh whoosh of my own body. The doctor made a joke about how sometimes these babies like to hide from him. And then he leaned in. He grew concerned. I waited alone in that paper gown while he called for the nurse and the portable ultrasound machine. He couldn’t find a heartbeat because there was none, just a round clump of cells where we thought the beginnings of new life would be. One in four pregnancies end up like this, after all, even today, with all of our technology and health care and advanced medicine and hygiene and good nutrition. It’s just a thing that happens. We don’t talk about it much. But it really is so common.

I guess what I want to say is that in that moment, when Gabriel is explaining to Mary what was going to happen, while she was adjusting to seeing this celestial being and regulating her own heartbeat and taking a deep breath and calculating all the possibilities, Mary took the risk, she put her heart on the line, she said yes, she showed up, “Here I Am” she said. 

AND so did God. 

I mean, sure, we could assume that as soon as God becomes incarnate, the magic goes with God into the division of cells, the implanting into the uterine lining, the healthy formation of the placenta. But I don’t think that’s how it worked. As soon as God decided to join humanity, as soon as Mary said yes, they both entered in to a precarious relationship that all of us enter in to when we say yes to life, when we decide to show up, when we say, “here I am.” 

Here I am. Even when there are no guarantees. 

Here I am. Even when life is dangerous and unknown and uncertain.

Here I am. Even when we know this isn’t going to end well. 

Here I am. 

“Here I am” means taking the risk. “Here I am” means hoping that everything will turn out ok. “Here I am” means stepping in to the unknown where a whole host of things could go wrong. The cells might not divide. The heart might not develop. The zygote might not find just the right spot to plant itself into the uterine lining. The placenta might not nourish. The baby might not turn. The mother might develop preeclampsia. The umbilical cord might be wound too tight. The hips might not open. The baby might get stuck or swallow the meconium or the bleeding might not stop. The car might crash. The cancer might come. The virus might take over. The heart might get broken. The mistake might be made. The relationship might fall apart.

“Here I am” means standing up to all those “mights” and “maybes” and “could be’s” and saying, “Ok, I’m here for it, I’m invested in it, I’m present for it, no matter what happens.” 

Both Mary and God take the risk of presence. 

Mary’s yes, and God’s yes, invite a terrible litany of possibilities. 

Mary’s yes, and God’s yes, welcome vulnerability, welcome life, life in its horrifying precariousness. 

Maybe it’s some kind of heresy or un-orthodoxy to say that God entered fully in to the unknown, into the unpredictable, into the danger that is life from the absolute very beginning. That God was and still is vulnerable all the way to the cellular level. Maybe God entered in to this whole humanity business with a guarantee about how all of this would end up. Maybe every moment of Jesus’s life was ordained from the beginning of time. Maybe God knew about all the heartache and the failure that Jesus would experience and still entered in anyway. I mean, there is something really important about that perspective, about God’s choice to still say “yes” when God knows exactly what God is getting in to. 

But I think there’s also something to this idea that maybe even God didn’t have any guarantees. Maybe God stepped in to the unknown. Maybe God was also scared and unsure but said yes to it anyway. God showed up. God entered in. God became present and vulnerable and succumbed to the frailty of life, right from the very beginning, right as those very first cells started to form. 

God is the Great I AM. And so, God says, “Here I Am.” God says “Yes. Ok. Let’s do this.”

And because of God’s first yes, Mary, child of God, favored one created from the dust of the ground that God created, can also respond, “Here I am.” “Yes. Ok. Let’s do this.”

Because God’s yes enables Mary’s yes.

God’s yes makes our yeses possible.

God’s choice to become vulnerable empowers us to be vulnerable. 

And when we are vulnerable, amazing things could happen. 

When we are vulnerable, things become possible.

Children are born.

Relationships are formed.

Forgiveness becomes real.

Wounds are healed.

Resurrection happens.

Love is forged.

Mary could have said “No”

God could have said “No”

But they didn’t. With all that could go wrong, with the horrifying risk ahead of them, they both entered in, and with those two yeses, God became flesh, God came and lived among us.

Here I am. Even if it means heartbreak. Here I am. Even if it all doesn’t turn out ok. Here I am. Because I know that if I don’t show up then I’ll miss it.  I’ll miss the heartache and the brokenness and the sorrow, and I’ll also miss that third day, when that vulnerability comes back to us in the fear and the terror and the hope and the miracle of the resurrected Jesus. When that vulnerability that comes back to us in the seeds that die and the miracle of new life and in heartbreak and forgiveness and trying again and stubborn resiliency. 

Here I am, for this pregnancy I wasn’t expecting, for this timing that wasn’t right. And Here I am, for the sorrow that comes when you show up and take the risk and finally accept and things just don’t pan out. And here I am, for the next time, the next risk, the next pregnancy that maybe might turn out ok, that maybe might turn in to a precocious, caring, creative and extremely silly boy named Levi.

The Annunciation is about two yeses. And about ours.

Here I Am, says Mary.

Here I Am, says God.

Here I am.

Here we are.

Thanks be to God.

Theotokos Telescopes

 Read this! It's amazing! Luke 1:39-56

So, long before I realized how much math was involved, long before I believed the myth that math was just something I couldn’t do, something that wasn’t my “gift,” long before I was panicking about my Physics grade, I wanted to be an astronomer. My older sister had a teacher who was really into stargazing, and once in awhile, she’d gather up her students, and their younger siblings, apparently, and we’d go out into the school parking lot late at night and point mediocre telescopes into the sky. There were often clouds. There was a ton of light pollution. But sometimes, we’d get to see the ring of Saturn, or the great red storm on Jupiter. We’d count the craters on the moon, and name that fuzzy ball of light out there “Pluto.” Once in awhile, the lucky ones would spot the flash of a shooting star. We could just barely make out the cloudy line of the Milky Way. It was a magical time. We were up late. It was chilly. I was hanging out with the “big” kids way past my bedtime. We spoke to each other in whispers as we took turns gazing through the eye piece. I remember I needed a stool to reach it, or maybe it was my dad who bent his knee so I could climb up and peer through the lens to see the mystery it held. I felt a sense of shame rush through me every time I accidentally nudged the counterweight, shaking the view out of focus. But what an amazing experience, to be able to see, in clear view, what was really behind those balls of white light hanging precariously in the sky. Suddenly, what was unattainable, what was far away and unreachable, was brought close up, was made clear, a mystery was revealed. Things lightyears away were brought into focus. It made me feel very small. But it was this strange kind of good kind of small. And I wanted to spend my life feeling this strange kind of good kind of small.

Astronomers call this sense of awe, this feeling that comes over us as we encounter the vastness of the universe and the very smallness of our existence, “galaxy brain.” According to an article in The Atlantic, galaxy brain is this experience of realizing just how very inconsequential our lives are compared to the “long view,” these “glimpses of places that are so far beyond ourselves.” And Psychologists say that this “galaxy brain” is actually pretty good for us. It’s a “diminished sense of self.” It’s this feeling of smallness or insignificance compared to this thing that is so incredibly larger than ourselves. It’s a recalibration of what really matters in life. It puts our relatively small worries and concerns and problems into perspective. The article says that “Alarming as that may sound, research has shown that the sensation can be a good thing: A shot of awe can boost feelings of connectedness with other people.” So it’s totally counterintuitive. Taking a look at things that are impossibly far away from us, contemplating things that are inaccessibly huge, thinking about things that are so outside of ourselves, can bring us back, back to ourselves. And to each other. This is an experience that many astronauts have when they go up into space. They call it the “overview effect.” It’s this kind of “mental shift that many astronauts have experienced after seeing Earth as it truly is, a gleaming blue planet suspended in dark nothingness, precious and precarious.” Carl Sagan called Earth “the pale blue dot.” When the spacecraft, Voyager 1, was reaching the outer limits of the solar system, the spacecraft turned around and took one last picture of Earth from 6 billion miles away. And in this image, amidst the light rays from the sun, is a tiny dot, a pale spot of light, only 0.12 pixels in size. And that, is our Earth. That’s us. That’s everyone we’ve ever known. That’s everyone we’ve ever loved. That blue dot contains the course of human history, all the tragedies and the suffering, all the powerful and the powerless, all the billionaires on their yachts and all the kids living in tin shacks and digging in landfills for scraps, all the Big Macs and overpriced lattes, all the credit card debt, all the plagues and pandemics, all of it, right there, condensed onto this pale blue dot, suspended precariously in the ever-expanding dark of the universe. Sagan says, “every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” He says, “Our posturing, our imagined self importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.” 

And yet. Here we are. We are a part of this light.

By looking out into the vast endlessness, things are put into perspective. By seeing the big, we are reconnected to the small. Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell, reflecting on his vision of the Earth from his moon landing in 1971, said, “You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it.” Coming to some small understanding of what’s out there can bring us to an understanding of what’s in here — in us, in the same dust and energy and matter that formed our very beings, in that hidden place, deep in our mother’s wombs. It’s into the same infinitely vast and also infinitely particular that we go in our reading today.

In one small peasant girl, in one small town, in a Judean countryside two thousand years ago, we encounter the realization that it’s all connected. The ever expanding universe is found in the tiniest multiplication of cells. What is big can be found in the small. What is powerful is found in the lowly. Mary becomes the theotokos, the God-bearer, the insignificant nobody from an insignificant town, who is called to carry the universe inside her, as it starts in a tiny cell, and she says yes.  She says ok. She is terrified and overwhelmed and trembling and still, she says yes. She has a moment where she sees, truly sees, the bigness, the vastness, the overwhelming existence beyond herself, and she says yes to it. She invites it in. She makes herself present for it. She steps in to the awe and wonder of the incomprehensible and says “Ok, Sure. Let it be so.” I’m here for it. Amen. Let’s do this. 

And so, she sings.

She sings “My soul magnifies the Lord.”

And a whole bunch of other amazing things. 

She sings about how great God is and how lowly she is but how God has lifted up the lowly so that means she’s great now, too. She sings about how big and vast and bold and wide and unending God is and how God has scattered all those who think they’re the ones who are great and big and bold and powerful. God has brought down the mighty from their thrones. They’re just dust in the vastness of the universe. And the lowly, the dusty, the flecks, the small and the insignificant have been raised up. The hungry are filled. The rich are sent away empty handed. She plants herself firmly in the history of her people. She announces that she is small, she is lowly, a mere slave, and she is the hinge upon which all of history will be changed. She’s just dust. But really important dust. She’s just a girl on a tiny pale blue dot. And that means everything.

And so she sings My soul magnifies the Lord.

Listen again to the radicalness of this first line. 

My soul magnifies the Lord.

Mary’s soul magnifies God.

Magnify. The Greek is Megalunei - to enlarge, lengthen, increase, to magnify, to extol. From mega - to make great, to increase.

Mary’s soul magnifies the Lord.  

Like a telescope, or a microscope, or a jeweler’s loupe, or even those cloudy scratched up plastic magnifying glasses you found at the bottom of your cereal box, Mary’s soul brings us closer to what could not be seen by the naked eye.

Mary becomes our telescope. A telescope usually works through a series of mirrors that gather, bend, and refract light. Telescopes are simply light collectors. And Mary becomes a light collector. She is that thing through which we get an up close and personal view of who God is, of where God is, of what God does and what God looks like. She holds the Christ Child, the one who will travel light years and multiple dimensions and through galaxies and from beyond the universe in order to show us that God has been here all along. When we look through Mary, when we listen to this song, God is magnified. It truly is a Magnificat. 

And because Mary is our telescope, that means we can be telescopes, too. Or microscopes. Or maybe just a magnifying glass. Or that cloudy plastic thing we found at the bottom of our Lucky Charms. We can be a people who magnify God. We can bring others closer to God just by their looking through us. It’s a bold and crazy claim. But this is how God has chosen to be seen and felt and heard in this world. Through the incarnation we can now know that all the world is a telescope, even us. God can be seen in the blades of grass and the grains of sand and the shipping boxes and the clutter in our basements and in the cold cups of coffee forgotten in the microwave. God can be seen in the dust on our bookshelves that will one day become the dust that forms a star that will gather a solar system and make up part of a galaxy. Mary is that lowly servant girl who is the first to get it. She’s the first to see it. God is magnified through her. And because of that, God is magnified through us. Because she said yes. Because she chose to carry God inside of her, and then give him to the world. Because Mary’s soul magnifies the Lord, our souls can too.

This doesn’t make Mary a demigod. This doesn’t make her any more holy than we are. Rather, through her human, frail, lowly “yes,” we are shown how we can give our own human, frail, lowly yeses. She shows us how. You step in. You show up. You enter into the darkness. You wait. You collect the light.  You give your whole self. You’re scared senseless. And then you say, let it be, Amen.  And that’s it. You become a telescope. People can look through you and see God, magnified. 

We’re no Hubble telescope of course. We’re no Voyager 1 or major observatory. Some of us are just those scratched up cloudy magnifying glasses covered in breakfast cereal dust. But somehow, no matter how muddled or cracked or foggy our lens gets, no matter how wobbly our tripod, we, too, get to be people who carry a vision of God within ourselves. We, too, get to be people who help others see God a little more clearly. 

Thirty years ago, the Hubble Space Telescope was launched into space. Five years later, astronomers were chomping at the bit to get a chance to point it in some specific direction. They were all vying for a chance to use this amazing new technology in order to learn more about their pet projects, to answer some of their particular questions. How are galaxies formed? What does a dying star look like? What impact does a comet have when it crashes into a planet? Where are the black holes? But Bob Williams didn’t have a specific plan or a specific question to answer. He was the director of the Hubble institution, and he could use the telescope to look at whatever he wanted. And, according to The Atlantic, “he decided to point it at nothing in particular.” His colleagues told him that this was a terrible idea. A waste of resources. But he insisted. He had a hunch that there was something out there. And for ten days the Hubble telescope took picture after picture in this random direction. They pointed the telescope into the dark, into an expanse of seeming nothingness, for ten days — a really long, expensive time for such a piece of fancy technology. And through all those mountains of data, through pointing at a random point in space, they found over 3,000 galaxies floating in the darkness. 3,000 fuzzy specks of light made up of billions of fuzzy specks of light, which are made up of the same dust that we will all return to someday. He just pointed into the dark. Into out there. 

See, it doesn’t matter were we point our telescopes. It doesn’t really matter where we point ourselves. Point yourself into the seeming darkness. And wait. The light will come. You are a telescope. You are meant to gather the light. And there is light. 3,000 galaxies of light. Nothing is a waste of resources, nothing is a waste of time, nothing is truly dark when we set our sights on God — God who is beyond us, and God who is inside of us. God is out there, somewhere. And God who is right here. And we can be a part of making that piece of God more visible to others. We, too, can be theotokos. We, too, can be light bearers. 

Our souls magnify the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

Good Is Where God Is.

 Mark 1:1-8

The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God?

Wait. What?

I think you’ve got the wrong guy.

You mean that guy who got himself killed by the Romans for being a threat to the empire?

What are you talking about, “The Good News?” 

He was jobless. A vagabond. He hung out with sinners and prostitutes and tax collectors. He wandered around critiquing our way of life. Good News? What the heck are you talking about, “Good News?” 

What a weird way to start the story.

Mark’s Gospel was the first to be written. It’s our earliest account of the events of Jesus’s life. 

Listen to the beginning of the Gospel of Mark with first century ears. Ears of those who have seen and heard the crucifixion of Jesus. Ears of those who are intimately connected to what happened on Calvary that dark Friday afternoon, ears of those who are living in the middle of, or just after, a war with the Romans. The Temple has been torn down. Resources are scarce. The world is in turmoil. There’s chaos and rioting in the streets. And Mark wants to sit us all down for a little bedtime story to soothe our hearts and ease our minds.

They would respond just as uncomfortably to these words,

 “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, Son of God” as we might react to say, “The Good News of Breonna Taylor, daughter of God” or “The Good News of the loved ones who couldn’t say goodbye to their parents dying of COVID,” or “The Good News of the country divided by politics, false information and hate.”

The good news? Is Mark crazy? This guy Jesus ended up getting himself crucified! He was killed by the Roman guards for sedition, and now his followers are caught in the middle of a war against that same state and Mark wants them to believe that this is good news? 

And it sounds so pollyannaish - so trite and easy - or maybe just simply wrong, to proclaim “the good news” of any of these people, who have struggled and suffered so long. 

Where is this good news?  This Gospel doesn’t really even have the happy ending that the other Gospels do. There’s no riding off into the sunset, no happily ever after.

The Gospel of Mark begins in the wilderness. And it ends in mystery. The Gospel of Mark doesn’t give us clear answers or a feel good ending. The first version of Mark’s Gospel ends in fleeing and terror and amazement. We get an empty tomb. And a vague promise that they’ll see Jesus again. That’s it. That’s the end. 

Later on, some scribes added on some new endings to help resolve some of that tension that we’re left with. But even those endings don’t have us leaving the movie theater with a satisfied resolution and the feeling that we got our money’s worth.

Even the longer, latest, ending in Mark is filled with mystery and disbelief. Jesus appears to Mary Magdalene but no one believes her. Then he changes form and appears to two others, who also don’t believe him. Then when Jesus finally does appear to the rest of the disciples, he reads them the riot act for not believing that he was back. And then he just gets sucked up into heaven. Annnnnd scene. The end. 

The longest ending to the Gospel of Mark leaves us where we started. A bunch of people wandering around saying that this news is good news. But there’s no early breakfast on the beach with Jesus. There’s no touching of his hands and side. No walk to Emmaus with our hearts burning inside of our chests. It’s a wild, mysterious ending. 

According to the Gospel of Mark, Jesus’s story is good news, not because of any happy ending, or light at the end of the tunnel, or grand moral insight that comes at the end of the story, but simply because Mark says so. Mark says that the life, death and mysterious resurrection of this wandering vagabond and his band of dusty, scraggly men is good news. And we have to take his word for it. 

I think this is because Mark has the eyes to see what we might not. Mark can see the presence of God even in the hard things, in the hard times, in the loneliness and the desperation. “Watch and wait,” Mark says. God is near. 

I have a hard time when I go through a hard thing and then someone tells me that "God put me through it for a reason." Or when people say "God needed another angel." Or, "God caused this bad thing to happen so that we could learn a lesson." "God has a plan." "God is in control." "We need the rain in order to appreciate the sun." "We need these trials in order to refine us, to sanctify us." Or, "If we didn’t live in a world of sin we wouldn’t get to experience God’s forgiveness." In the moment of our greatest pain, all that sounds a lot like bullshit. I mean, maybe these things are true. Maybe these folks are right. And for sure, these people are trying to comfort me with the best of intentions.

But. 

It discredits the hard thing. It kinda suggests that God wants bad things to happen to us. It tries to tie a nice bow around the really hard, impossible, horrible struggle, so that it doesn’t feel awful or hard or horrible anymore. It makes me feel like I’m not allowed to be sad or angry or repentant about the hard thing anymore, because look what good came out of it! 

But when bad stuff happens, it still hurts. It leaves a scar. We are forever changed. When bad stuff happens, we may heal, but we will forever walk with a limp.

And this is what Mark is doing. “Here,” he says. “Here is a big ol’ scar. Here is a painful thing. John dies. Jesus dies. Here is struggle and fear and poverty and what looks like the bad guys winning, again." “But,” he says, “this is good news. This is good news, not because everything gets fixed. Not because the villain gets his just desserts at the end. This is good news because I am proclaiming it to be so. This is good news because I want you to see what I see. I see God here.”

Maybe that’s just Mark’s nice little bow. Maybe that’s just Mark’s own pollyannaish perspective. But I don’t know, somehow, it feels different. 

It feels different because he tells the truth. He doesn’t spare us the hard stuff. He’s not trying to ease his own discomfort by giving false comfort to us. It feels different because instead of using the bad thing as a tool or an object lesson in order to get us to the good thing, Mark lifts up the bad thing and tells us to wait. To wait and to watch. God’s there. Just wait. You’ll see. That’s it. 

Listen to this hard story. It will break your heart. But wait and watch. It’s still a good story. It’s still good news. Simply because that’s where God is found.

Enter in, Mark says. Come in. Come in. Enter in to this hard story. Because even though it’s hard, even though we’re kinda unsure about the ending, even though there’s a lot of irredeemable pain, it’s still good. It’s still so good.

This is good news because this is just the beginning. 

The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. God’s not done showing up. The hard stuff isn’t over. But neither is God’s presence.

The Gospel of Mark is just the beginning. It’s just the start. And Jesus’s life and death and mysterious appearances afterwards are just the beginning of Jesus’s story. There will be at least three more gospels to keep the story going.

Mark starts with the story of a strange man in strange clothes eating strange food wandering around a strange wilderness. Mark starts the story with John the Baptist who will not have a happy ending himself. John the Baptist, who gets all kinds of people to flock to him in the desert so that he can tell them the “good news”: they’re sinners, they need to confess their sins and be baptized. He has gathered crowds and crowds of people around him, so that he can tell them that he is not the one they’ve been looking for. He’s not the answer. Someone else is coming. 

According to the Gospel of Mark, the good news is brought to us by a wandering vagabond who lives on locusts and honey and dresses in camels hair. This bringer of “good news” tells us that we’re all sinners, we need to repent, and he’s not the guy we’re waiting for - we have to wait a little longer. Good news, right?

This is the good news: Jesus is going to come, and he’s going to love us and heal us and teach us and be God incarnate for us and then we humans are going to kill him. Then we’re going to be left in uncertainty and fear. Maybe we’ll get a couple of visions. We’ll be left with a whole lot of work to do. 

Mark is here to tell us the story of the good news of Jesus Christ, Son of God, not because it fixes anything or rights all the wrongs or gives us a happy ending, but so that we can get to work. So that we can see God at work. Even in the hard things. Even in the endings that don’t turn out exactly as we wish. Even in the things we don’t understand. Even when there’s no resurrection yet. Even when the scars are still there and the war wounds still ache every time it rains.

And this is the Gospel of Mark. This is the good news. 

Mark is calling us to see and feel and proclaim and know the good news as it comes to us in the dark. As it comes to us out of the wilderness. As it comes to us in the hard stories of our own lives. God is there. In the hard stuff. In the wilderness and in the dark. In the crucifixions and the heartache and the mystery and the confusion and the fear. God is there. That’s the good news. The good news is that we get to enter in to where God is. We get to be where God is. Even if it’s hard. God is there. Our job is to be where God is. To go where God goes. See what God sees. And God sees resurrection even in the hardest stuff. God brings about resurrection even in the confusion and the fear and the anxiety and the death and the unknown. God shows God’s self in the life and death and strange resurrection of a peasant man from first century Galilee. God shows God’s self in the hard stories, in the brokenness, even in the sad endings. 

God is in the cancer ward at the Children’s Hospital. God is in the divorce lawyer’s office. God is on the battlefield and in the refugee camps and on death row and in the crack houses. God is sleeping under the bridges and sitting in the emergency rooms. God is with the stillborns and the support groups and in the therapist offices and the psychiatric hospitals. None of that is good. It’s all horrible. And God is there. And that is good. That is the good news of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, Son of God.

The first audience of Mark’s Gospel were folks living in uncertainty and turmoil and disruption. And Mark comes in and says, “Let me tell you a story about a man who found God, who brought God into all this uncertainty and turmoil and disruption. It’s not an easy story, but it’s good.” 

This Advent, let’s look for God in the dark. Let’s look for God in the wilderness. Let’s look for God even in the hard things. God is there. 

This is the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

Thanks be to God.