You are a blessing...

Luke 1: 26 – 38 & Isaiah 43: 1 – 7

December 1, 2024

Rev. Dr. Laura Norvell

 

I have felt the pace picking up for weeks now – Christmas music in the nail salon, Christmas decorations in stores the moment Halloween clearance sales ended. Just as the time changes and our evening commutes grow darker, somebody flips the switch on Christmas, it seems.

 

But what I need this time of year is “Advent” - a season of waiting for what God is doing. I need “Advent” as a season of anticipating and expecting the birth of hope in a sometimes hopeless world. I need “Advent” to help fully understand the big-ness of God’s dwelling among us, fully human and fully divine.

 

Throughout Advent (which is church-speak for the season of four weeks prior to Christmas eve) and Christmas this year (and by Christmas, again in church-speak, I mean the 12 days that end on Epiphany, January 6), we are going to focus on some basic life truths. We need these truths to get us through seasons of uncertainty or seasons of unrest. We need these truths to help us grow closer to one another and God. We need these truths to help us share the Good News that Jesus is the light that shines in the darkness and cannot be overcome.

 

These life truths come to us this season wrapped up in the warmth, the love, the resourcefulness, and the beauty of quilts. Quilts are pieced together from disparate scraps. Quilts come together to make something greater than the sum of their parts. Each scrap tells a story, comes with its own beauty and perhaps a different original purpose, and when those scraps are all stitched together, the story becomes an EPIC – much like the big story of God that we keep exploring week after week here at Faith, searching for our place, knowing that we have a place in the story.

 

Our work in the coming weeks is to live into the life truths that are illustrated in the stories of Elizabeth and Mary and Joseph and John and Ruth and Naomi and shepherds and angels and wise persons. We’ll see how those lives were connected, like pieces in a quilt. If we squint, we can probably see those stories and deep truths at work in our own lives. We can see how people and experiences come together to create a different “whole,” how our lives are stitched together with our neighbors but also stitched together with the prophets and the priests and the oppressed in first century Palestine.

 

We launch into this first week of Advent with what we typically think of as the beginning of the story of Jesus. The angel Gabriel appears to Mary, in Nazareth, a town in Galilee, greeting her as the favored one through whom God will seat a new king over the house of Jacob. 

 

The geographic detail about Mary being in Nazareth of Galilee is important here. Geography is almost always a clue in Luke’s gospel. Nazareth was also home of Ruth of the Hebrew scriptures. 

 

According Kelly Nikondeha, in her book The First Advent in Palestine, Jews in Galilee were considered “lesser” by their Jewish siblings in Judea. Further from the Temple and from priestly leadership, Galileans were considered lax in their faith practices. They were geographically separated from Jerusalem by Samaria and close to key Hellenistic settlements, which probably influenced commerce, politics and social norms. Their distinctive form of Aramaic was looked down upon by the Judeans. Galilee historically was a place of uprising, unrest and protest and people there were shaped by resistance movements. Perhaps today we would say that Galileans were the “country cousins” to their Jewish siblings to the south. 

 

With Gabriel’s announcement to a girl on the wrong side of Jewish cultural geography, Mary, probably just about 14, finds herself unwed but engaged, pregnant with a child that was not conceived with the man to whom she is engaged. And this somehow reflects “favor” according to Gabriel’s announcement.

 

If we were to read a little further in Luke’s gospel, Mary is greeted by her cousin Elizabeth with the words “blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb.” 

 

Blessing is a funny thing if we are drawing our understanding from the context of this part of the story. 

 

I mean - Mary hadn’t been praying for this “blessing.” And being unwed and pregnant is really going to complicate her social standing. But before she even speaks, her cousin Elizabeth proclaims that she is blessed! Mary is called blessed among other women – for the blessing she will bear to benefit many. How strange!

 

And Elizabeth, who has been praying for a very long time as she’s struggled with fertility, is FINALLY blessed as she has also conceived. Elizabeth’s blessing will situate her in a more acceptable place in a society that EXPECTS women to provide sons to their husbands.

 

Blessing is a funny thing. It seems that some blessings you pray for, others are bestowed.

It seems some blessings fit the world’s expectations and others might make life more complicated.

 

In the passage read from Isaiah, God is blessing the people of Israel (the people, the tribes, the descendants, not a specific place) – a blessing that hearkens all the back to the way Abram was blessed by God to bless all the people of the earth. 

 

The prophet has been describing a time of great hardship for the people.  But in chapter 43, he is beginning to describe how that time of hardship will end. Having come through hard things, and on the other side of the chaos, the people will be reminded of how they are special in God’s sight. Their blessedness will not keep them from hard things, but that blessing will be present with them in the hard thing and as they leave that season of hardship and head into the next things. 

 

There is an important echo in these texts – when Mary, recognizing the complicated position she is in,  asks, “How can this be?” the angel Gabriel says DO NOT BE AFRAID. Similarly the prophet share’s God’s assurance – do not fear, I am with you. When you pass through fire, you shall not be burned.

 

Beloved, this state of blessing is ours, too. 

God has created each one of us and knows us by name. God knows our flaws, our gifts, our graces. As the psalmist proclaims:

 

¹⁴ I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
    Wonderful are your works;
that I know very well.
¹⁵     My frame was not hidden from you,
when I was being made in secret,
    intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
¹⁶ Your eyes beheld my unformed substance.

In your book were written
    all the days that were formed for me,
    when none of them as yet existed.
(from Psalm 139, NRSVUE)

 

We receive this blessing for ourselves when we recognize that God calls us by name. God is with us when we do hard things. We are precious in the sight of God who creates us. 

 

We are not blessed just when something good happens. We are not blessed when we are doing the right thing. We are simply blessed. Because that is who God is and that is how God has breathed us into being.

 

I think it is hard for us to hear that. We read stories and scripture and say, oh, those people were special. Even when scripture – even when the Big Story of God goes out of its waytime and again to point out to us that NO, those people were just people, from hard places (sometimes the wrong places) doing hard things. Just like you and me. Those people were just people who were created by a loving God and who were deeply loved by God. And sometimes they messed up. And sometimes they did not. And God was there.

 

Why is it so hard for us to believe that we are blessed?

I have a little secret for us…

When we fail to recognize our own blessing, it makes it awfully hard for us to bless others. It makes it awfully hard to see the beloved blessedness in every other person we encounter. It makes it awfully easy for us to draw lines between us and them.

 

What if each of us has to recognize, receive and live into our blessing (fully) in order to really see the blessedness of others, in order to bless others so that through us the whole world is blessed. 

 

What if that is the way God works in the world?

Would we say no thanks God, that sounds too hard.

 

Your blessedness is not only for you, it is for the Kin-dom of God.

My blessedness is not only for me, it is for the Kin-dom of God.

 

What if when my blessing is stitched together with your blessing and your blessing and your blessing and their blessing, we end up wrapping the world in beautiful, comforting, rest-granting goodness, like the quilts that we wrap around ourselves when we are sick, tired, sleepy, newborn?

 

Imagine the beauty of all of our blessings, one connecting to another, the fabric of one complimenting the fabric of another, the stiches of love that hold it all together, the places where there is a tear or a fray that has been lovingly repaired by another’s blessing as a patch.

 

My prayer is that this week, you will receive your blessing and witness the blessing of others. My prayer is that your eyes are open and you are not afraid of how this blessing will shape your life or the Kin-dom of God.

May it be so.

Amen.