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.