Hints and Guesses
A Sermon by The Rev. Shearon Sykes Williams on The Third Sunday of Advent, December 11, 2022.
My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord,
my spirit rejoices in God my Savior;
for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant.
From this day all generations will call me blessed:
the Almighty has done great things for me, and holy is his Name. Luke 1: 46-55
Today is the Third Sunday of Advent. Three of the four candles on the wreath are lit and our hearts sing with expectation. Times of great expectation are exhilarating but they are also a little scary. They take us out on the edge, that place between the known and the unknown, where our feet are firmly rooted in the present but our hearts and hands are extended toward the future, waiting to be filled.
That place between the known and the unknown is where God does the most with us. It brings us into a greater awareness of our dependence upon God and our need to trust. Mary, the mother of Jesus, knew a lot about radical trust. She was a human being, just like every other human being, and yet she was called to bring God into the world. Christian tradition has long recognized Mary’s importance as a model of faithfulness. The Magnificat, which we said together in place of the psalm today, comes from the Gospel of Luke. It can also be sung and has hundreds of musical settings. It is central to Christian tradition. The Magnificat speaks of the wonder of what God is doing through Mary and when we sing it, we become aware of how we are called to be present to the mystery of what God is doing through us. It speaks of a great paradox, the vocation that we all have to be humble, willing servants and through that, to claim the power and majesty of God, not our power, but the power of God working in and through us to accomplish God’s purposes in the world.
Mary was far more than a handmaiden of the Lord. She was a courageous prophet. She had the courage to say yes to God, not even fully knowing what she was agreeing to, and her yes changed the world forever. The words of the Magnificat speak to us so deeply because that is our deepest longing too, to take the risk to be a part of God’s subversive work, to bring down the powerful and lift up the lowly, and to do that in the gentlest of ways. Mary opened her heart and her hands to God without even knowing what she had signed up for. And after 9 months of waiting, when her son was laying in her arms, she knew she had been given an extraordinary gift, but it still wasn’t entirely clear what God was doing. But it was revealed over time. It took her entire lifetime. Sometimes we forget, that Mary didn’t understand the implications of the “yes” she gave God as a young girl until she was an old woman. It wasn’t until long after she had raised her son, this gift from God who puzzled her at every turn. Not until after he became an itinerant preacher wandering the country side and fulfilling the words of her prophecy, bringing down the powerful and lifting up the lowly and bringing the good news of God’s reign. Not until after she watched him die a horrible death and be raised from the dead and ascended into heaven. The pieces finally all came together when she was an old woman and she became one of the founders of the early Church, the new body of Christ, that would live forever.
When God gives us a mission, we do not get an app with directions. What we do get is an invitation to pay attention, to learn to recognize the divine nudges that we all get, every single one of us, and to follow those nudges step by step by step. T.S. Eliot, one of the greatest poets of the 20th century and a deeply faithful Christian said it best.
These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses;
And the rest is prayer, observance, discipline, Thought and action.
That’s what Mary had and that’s all any of us has. Hints and guesses, that God is speaking to us and the confirmation we get over time through life in the Church. What started out as a solitary announcement from an angel that she would bear God into the world, became an ever-widening connection with all of humankind. That announcement brought hints and guesses, puzzlement and wonder, terror and apprehension, joy and praise, but because of her willingness to act on those divine nudges, to pray, to struggle, to be observant, to think and to act, we are all here today.
The ancient icon called the Virgin of the Sign conveys the sense of the Magnificat very well. It that icon, Mary has her hands extended in orans, an ancient prayer posture, the same posture that priests use when we celebrate the Eucharist. And Christ is within her, in the very center of her being, with his hands raised in blessing. This is a powerful image of a human being bringing God into the world and a reminder that all Christians share that vocation with Mary. And it is a powerful image of our collective vocation as the Church to bring God into the world through our liturgy, through Word and Sacrament and carrying that experience with us into the world and filling it with good things.
There is a modern interpretation of this ancient icon on your bulletin cover today. It was created by Light of the World Lutheran Church. They had an artist in the congregation draw the outline of the traditional image and then members of all ages took Christmas ads from the newspaper to fill it in. If you look closely you can see the names of various retail chains. They created it over the course of the four weeks of Advent to remind them that as the world is telling us through ads and all kinds of messaging that we do not have enough and that we need more things, that God is telling us that we already have everything.
God has filled us with good things. Everything we need. And this Advent, this season of new beginnings, we look to the future with radical trust and great expectations.
My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord,
my spirit rejoices in God my Savior;
for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant.
From this day all generations will call me blessed:
the Almighty has done great things for me, and holy is his Name. Luke 1: 46-55