Risking vulnerability

The challenge that this strange exchange poses is: What and who shatters our categories of acceptable mediators of Gods Are we willing to receive from whomever God chooses as a vehicle for revelation? Can we accept the gift in an old-school priest, a born-again enthusiast, a woman celebrant, an angry discontent?

Quite often the face of God we need most comes through the people we are most threatened or repulsed by. More often than not, they represent that which we most revile about and within ourselves. God's preferential option for that which is castigated stems not from a capricious need to assert sovereignty, but because God considers the reviled lovely to behold. Our only hope for salvation is to let go of our standards and accept that which God considers worthy, up to and including ourselves.

DECEMBER 22

Risking Shame

2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16; Luke 1:47-55; Romans 16:25-27, Luke 1:26-38

Consider just how much God places into fragile, human hands. The divine answer to torments past and present-to cruelty and addiction, to our seemingly endless capacity to abuse and manipulate-is a baby, whose soft flesh and smell might not have been, had not an unknown girl risked shame and found the courage to say yes.

Growing up, I was taught to consider Mary the luckiest of girls, and I'm not even Catholic. My Sunday school teachers told us (erroneously, it turns out) how Mary and her friends grew up wondering if they would be God's choice to give birth to the Messiah. We pictured them wondering aloud to each other "will it be me?"

We had no idea.

Mary risked so much in saying yes to God. Dire social consequences, to be sure: the end of her betrothal, the shame of her family, quite possibly death by stoning. I imagine these threats struck her immediately upon hearing the angel's announcement, and lodged in her stomach.

Add to that the prospect of bearing a child whose future was so entirely out of her hands. Her dreams and plans, her visions of motherhood, all threatened. Then there was the weight her baby would carry. So tiny, so fragile, born to carry the hopes and fears of all the years. How would he know? Would she be the one to tell the little guy, who wouldn't begin to control his bladder for another two, three years?

What calmed her fears, what eased her soul enough so that she would feel and hear the "yes" now rising from her belly? Surely not Gabriel's description of being overtaken by the power of the Most High. No, I imagine it was his report of Elizabeth, now miraculously with child, calling down the memory of Sarah and Hannah, that assured Mary she was not alone and sent her, running, to her elder relative and friend.

DECEMBER 29

Recognizing the Divine

Isaiah 61:10-62:3; Psalm 148; Galatians 4:4-7, Luke 2:22-40

When Mary "set out with haste" (Luke 1:39) to visit Elizabeth, it was her voice in greeting that caused the baby, John, to leap in Elizabeth's womb. Something beyond the ordinary had come to pass. Elizabeth, attuned to the strangeness of God's ways by her impossible pregnancy, had been given the bodily sense to recognize that the child kicking in her womb did so in praise of his maker's strange and wonderful ways.