Sunday Sermon 12/21/14

Today's gospel is The Annunciation. It appears only in Luke, the physician. With the Resurrection, it is the lynchpin of Christianity.  As such it is the focus of artist and writers throughout history. 
It is a remarkable description, simple and understated, gravid as it were with potential and meaning. Mary somehow gives some humanity to this overwhelming violation of natural law. Anyone who makes Christianity an abstraction must be insensible to this scene.
Morton writes there is a single stream in Nazareth that supplies the town water and it has been so ever since the town was built; Mary must have drawn water from it.
It is said that Mary's house was transported by angels first to Croatia, then to Loreto, as if the miraculous nature of the Annunciation needs support. 

Here are two poems, one by Rilke where Gabriel is so overwhelmed he forgets his mission, the other by the British poet Elizabeth Jennings with a maternal, galactic acceptance.

Annunciation

The Angel speaks

You are not closer to God than we

We’re all from Him so far

Yet with such sweet wonder

Your hands blessed are.

So do they ripen, so they shimmer

from the sleeves as by no woman before.

I am the day, I am the dew,

But Thou,

Thou art the Tree.

I'm weary, for the way was long

Forgive me, I forgot

What He, who sits in gold array

as in the sun sent me to say,

You thoughtful one

(great space bewilders me)

You see: I am the beginning

But Thou,

Thou art the Tree.

Wide I spread the arc of my flight

I found myself so strange and far

And now your little house is drowned

in the folds of my great, bright dress.

And yet you’re alone as never before

You don’t see me at all

As if: I’m a breath of wind in the wood

But Thou

Thou art the Tree.

All the angels fear like this

Let one another go:

Never had we such desire

Uncertain yet so great

Perhaps that something happens soon

You only know in dreams

Hail, for thus my soul now sees:

You ready and so ripe.

You, Lady, are the great, high door

that soon shall open wide.

You, most beloved ear to my song

Now I feel: my word is lost

in you as in a wood.

So I came and I fulfilled

A thousand and one dreams

God looked at me; bedazzled me…

But Thou

Thou art the Tree.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

"The Annunciation"  

Nothing will ease the pain to come
Though now she sits in ecstasy
And lets it have its way with her.
The angel’s shadow in the room
Is lightly lifted as if he
Had never terrified her there.
The furniture again returns
To its old simple state. She can
Take comfort from the things she knows
Though in her heart new loving burns
Something she never gave to man
Or god before, and this god grows
Most like a man. She wonders how
To pray at all, what thanks to give
And whom to give them to. “Alone
To all men’s eyes I now must go”
She thinks, “And by myself must live
With a strange child that is my own.”
So from her ecstasy she moves
And turns to human things at last
(Announcing angels set aside).
It is a human child she loves
Though a god stirs beneath her breast
And great salvations grip her side.

--Elizabeth Jennings