Fourth Sunday of Advent

December 20, 2020

Pr. Craig Mueller

Interruption or Disruption?

Back before cable television, back before breaking news that is always breaking, back when there were three major networks and not much else, occasionally the show you were watching was interrupted. A message from the Emergency Broadcast System. This is only a test.

We interrupt this program to bring you this important message . . .

Interruption was a popular theme in medieval and Renaissance renderings of the annunciation. I’ve never noticed it before. In many of these paintings Mary is holding a book. What is that about? It could be trying to show that Mary is devout, a prayer book in hand. To us it might seem like she is ready to take up where she left off, as soon as the angel would just leave her alone! Let me get back to my book. Let me get back to normal. Let me return to my regularly scheduled program. Let me get back to my life!

Angel Gabriel announces to Mary—much to her surprise—that her teen-age life as she knew it was going to be interrupted by, of all things, God! You may remember that the word Jesus means “God saves.” Mary did a lot of pondering things in her heart, according to Luke. I wonder if she ever thought about naming her child “God interrupts.” So much for the way we thought our lives would turn out. So much for our best-laid plans. Look how artists render this annunciation, this interruption.

It’s been a year of interruptions. If last March, we heard: we interrupt this entire year, all the rest of 2020 until further notice. All your plans, every one of them. Stand by. This is the emergency . . . we weren’t prepared for.

Mary’s question, so tantalizing for us in 2020: how can this be? How can this be happening to us? Things don’t add up. Life doesn’t make sense. Let it be—being with what is—is always our greatest spiritual challenge.

After this divine interruption, Mary teeter-totters between perplexment and acceptance. Mary is usually held up for her consent, her acceptance of the divine will. Let it be. Let it be according to your word. In other words, yes. But I wonder—and maybe this says more about us than her—how much she struggled between “how can this be” and “let it be.”

Maybe an interruption is too meek a word. This annunciation was no mere interruption. It was a divine disruption! Everything Mary knew about her life fell away in an instant. A whole new future awaited her. And whole new future awaited the world. It would be bright with hope. But let’s not be naive, heavy with sorrow as well.

I wonder if we have even begun to take in the disruptions of this year. The anxiety. The sorrow. The loss. The uncertainty. Many times I have thought or said to someone: we don’t know anything anymore. Humbling words when we’re used to being in control. Those words get caught in our throats.

Yet: unknowing is the spiritual path. Letting go, the way to growth. Disruption, the road to transformation. Nothing is impossible with God. We’ve heard enough sermons to have head knowledge of this. But now that we’re living it, we’re not so sure.

So much to be perplexed about. It’s a slow move from Mary’s “how can this be” to “let it be.”

Maybe that’s why we’re at online church today, whether we grasp it or not. All those in years in church . . . we have been storing up spiritual reserves for an emergency like this, a disrupting year like no other. And now we have a kind of morning sickness, a sure sign that something new is coming to birth.

There’s a disruption in what Nathan tells David. God’s moving! God won’t be dwelling in a tent or tabernacle. You can’t build a house for God anymore. This year we know so well that God doesn’t merely live in churches. Worship happen online. Worship happens anywhere. Nathan tells David God will build a new house: a royal dynasty. From this line, will come a throne, a kingdom—and in through Luke’s words—One who will reign forever. God now dwells in the womb of an unwed teen-ager!

But hold on! Mary sings the ultimate disruption song, the Magnificat. Mary sings a radical, revolutionary song: of a God who comforts the lowly and topples empires, who brings down the rich and mighty and speaks truth to unbridled power. And in this holy disruption we join the Holy One in imagining a new world. As one author (Karoline Lewis) puts it: “we are suspended in that in-between space caused by pandemic and protest, by disbelief and dystopia, by resistance and revolution.” They called it the Great Depression in the 1930s. This could be called our Great Disruption.

Yet we heard the angel’s words someplace deep within us: nothing is impossible with God. Out of something unexpected and mysterious, out of disruptions to numerous to name, a new thing is coming to life. The mystery hidden for ages and now revealed, as Paul writes, the good news so much more than the barrage of breaking news across our cable news screen.

An angel out of nowhere is startling enough. But Mary is perplexed the Gabriel’s words: “Greetings, O Favored One. The Lord is with you.” In other words, hey there, hey you, God sees you. God favors you, lowly one, most surprising one. God is with you. Even though you can’t yet see it, God is inside you, bringing something to birth!

Poet Denise Levertov imagines the annunciation this way:

We know the scene: the room, variously furnished,
almost always a lectern, a book; always
the tall lily.

Arrived on solemn grandeur of great wings,
the angelic ambassador, standing or hovering,
whom she acknowledges, a guest.

But we are told of meek obedience. No one mentions
courage.

The engendering Spirit
did not enter her without consent.

God waited.

She was free
to accept or to refuse, choice
integral to humanness.

After a lengthy middle section, the poem concludes:

She did not cry, ‘I cannot. I am not worthy,’

Nor, ‘I have not the strength.’

She did not submit with gritted teeth,

raging, coerced.

Bravest of all humans,

consent illumined her.

The room filled with its light,

the lily glowed in it,

and the iridescent wings.

Consent,

courage unparalleled,

opened her utterly.

The disruption is an invitation. God waits. Will you consent? Will you be courageous? God sees you, favored child of God. This is not a test. In the disruption, even in the sadness, in the strangeness, there is breaking news, breaking good news. Nothing, nothing is impossible with God.