Preached at Holy Cross, Seend (Benefice Service)
Readings – Romans 16. 25-27; Luke 1. 26-38
“Then Mary said, ‘Let it be with me according to your word…’”
Advent is a season about patience and obedience. If, as we do this morning, we follow the Church’s calendar obediently, and keep the season patiently to the end, Advent reminds us that God is always breaking into the world in ways that are little noticed and often among people who are held to be of little account by the conventional standards of the day.
The Meeting of Mary and Elisabeth (1866) by Carl Bloch – hangs in the place for which it was painted, the King’s Oratory at Frederiksborg Castle.
This morning’s Gospel reading is about how God launched His great rescue plan for the human race thanks to the obedience of two ordinary women, who lived in rural communities, as members of a people under foreign occupation, at a time when women were held to be inferior and were excluded from public life.
Elizabeth, who kept faith patiently through years of barrenness, is given a child she could never have expected; Mary is given a child earlier than she could ever have imagined, in circumstances that will be difficult, but her obedience is such that she accepts.
Neither patience nor obedience are exactly fashionable virtues at the moment. Consumer culture mitigates against patience, while we too easily get obedience confused with acceptance of authoritarianism—they aren’t the same thing at all. Like people in every time and every nation, the presumptions of our culture leave us with much to learn and to unlearn about what God requires of us. That learning requires patience.
In our epistle reading, St Paul writes that in Jesus Christ, “the mystery that was kept secret for long ages…is now disclosed”. Why was the mystery kept for all these long ages? Why could God have not just given people some simple rules for living well together?
The answer is, of course, that God did precisely that in the Ten Commandments—but people found plenty of ways to wriggle round them, and when it suited, ignoring them entirely.
Perhaps the theory that human beings just needed some clear rules to live well needed to be destruction-tested before God could make His decisive move to save the human race from the consequences of sin. Perhaps people needed to try and fail to live up to a God-given set of rules before God could speak as He needed to, in the person of Jesus Christ, His very self incarnate as a human being. God showed patience with the human race as our mistakes over long centuries taught us to look for something more from God than just rules.
So, the patience that God demands from us is nothing He is unwilling to show to us Himself. That is the case, too, with the obedience that God demands from us. God respected the free will he gave to Mary and to all of humanity; he was obedient to His own design for human beings. Mary was free to say no to God’s request—she didn’t need to keep the baby. Instead, she says, “let it be with me according to your word.” Mary lives out her human nature in full harmony with that of the God which she, and all of us, were made in the image and likeness of.
When we are patient and obedient, as God is, we too share something of the nature of God Himself, and learn something of what means to be made in the image and likeness of God.
Patience and obedience also demand that we worship God Sunday by Sunday, as He commands, even if it doesn’t entirely chime with the calendar of the secular world. As we keep these final hours of Advent this Sunday, let us use them as a reminder to be patiently alert for God to move in the world, little noticed and little commented on, in the lives of ordinary people like us. Amen.
Spot on Father. There is a transcendent theme from the Garden forward of God testing his people, their weakness exposed and Him stepping in to the rescue.
Indeed: “But do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day. The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance.”