Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Ephrem Arcement
The feast of the Annunciation (transferred), April 9, 2024
Click here for an audio of the sermon
thirteenth. She was widowed, and she buried all of her children. Then, at the age of 40, in the small Umbrian town of Foligno not far from Assisi, just before the turn of the fourteenth century, her Annunciation occurred. Little is known about
the circumstances of the events. What is known is that this Franciscan tertiary named Angela began to receive revelations from God whose content draws a direct line to the original Annunciation of the maiden of Nazareth.
If the Feasts that we Christians celebrate are not just commemorations to be remembered but mysteries to be lived, then St. Angela of Foligno may be called the patron saint of the Annunciation. Through her divine revelations she received
what I would estimate as the heart of this particular sacred mystery we celebrate today. She recounts once such revelation thus:
Afterward [God] added: "I want to show you something of my power." Andimmediately the eyes of my soul were opened, and in a vision I beheld thefullness of God in which I beheld and comprehended the whole of creation,that is, what is on this side and what is beyond the sea, the abyss, the seaitself, and everything else. And in everything that I saw, I could perceivenothing except the presence of the power of God, and in a manner totallyindescribable. And my soul in an excess of wonder cried out: "The world ispregnant with God!" Wherefore I understood how small is the whole ofcreation — that is, what is on this side and what is beyond the sea, the abyss,the sea itself, and everything else — but the power of God fills it tooverflowing.
A few nights ago, as I was drifting off to sleep, my phone roused me with the vibrating sound of an incoming DM. It was a good friend of mine who was asking if I had ever experienced an existential crisis. I assured him that I had…but that it had been a while. He was, and likely still is, going through his own. What confounds him is the question of why we exist when we were not first consulted
about it, which would seem to deny our freedom. Does God have a right to create me without my permission? The implications of this question are immense, and I did my best to try to provide an adequate response based on the goodness and giftedness of being created at all; that to be is better than not to be; that to be is to be desired by the Infinite Love of the Creator; and that to know that we are God’s beloved gives our lives meaning and purpose and direction and assuages the dread of all the unanswered questions that may still remain.
But what my friend is experiencing is the experience that we all, at least on some level, have known: to be is to be entrapped, to be caught in circumstances where there seems to be no way out—where our lives seem…and dreadfully feel… determined toward an outcome that we would not have freely chosen for ourselves.
I think of Israel caught in an existential desert for forty years. I think of Moses and Jeremiah caught in roles they didn’t ask for and out of which they did everything they could to escape. I think of all the psalms of lamentation…and the Book of Lamentation itself…that express emotions of dread, despondency, and doom. Why exist if life is like this?
And I think of the young maiden, Mary, who found herself caught in her own existential crisis…coming face to face with the inexplicable and alldetermining will of God.
Life is full of existential crises we wish we could bypass and circumvent and of which we feel the Holy Spirit driving us right into. The mystery of the Annunciation is not just a mystery about the birth of a new born child and the joy that this child will bring. It’s also about the sword that will pierce the heart of the one who bears this child and about the scandal that this child will cause to many.
We do not know why a good God would allow such pain to happen to someone so innocent, whether that is Mary or Jesus…you or me. And we will likely never come up with an adequate answer. But God does not remain silent in the face of such existential crises. The good news is that God is not aloof to our crises, our suffering, or our feelings of powerlessness and dread. Our God is Immanuel, right here with us in the middle of our entrapment.
The grand narrative of the Hebrew Bible is this story of entrapment and freedom and the creative life that is generated from the tension between the two. Whether it was from Egypt of from Babylon, the people of God staked their lives on a promise of freedom but all too often only experienced entrapment. In the midst of one of these crises, the Syro-Ephraimite War, the context of today’s passage from Isaiah, God is begging the King of Judah to ask for a sign to reassure him that freedom is guaranteed—that there is no reason to fear the allied Israel and Syria from conquering them. The sign given is the son of a young woman whose name will be Immanuel.
In light of the cosmic events of Jesus Christ, Luke widens the scope of this Isaian prophecy and sees Mary, and the child in her womb, as its ultimate fulfillment. Jesus is God with us in a new, definitive way to assure freedom and hope and to cast out fear and dread once and for all. Of course, Luke knows how the story will end and here, already in his Infancy Narrative, we hear intimations of the story’s climax.
Ultimately, the Annunciation is a Feast of the Lord and is about God’s saving work accomplished in Christ. In fact, the Annunciation is the very beginning of God’s final saving work. Mary’s existential crisis is a type of programmatic prophecy pointing to its fulfillment at the end of the Gospel where Jesus will undergo his own existential crisis on the cross—where he will know first hand the pain of being in this world…the pain of being Immanuel…the pain of feeling the dread of abandonment, even by God, and the utter hell that life can sometimes unleash. Yet, even then, his faith remains to his dying breath as he releases his spirit to the one he feels abandoned him.
His “fiat,” his “Yes” to God, in the midst of such pain and doubt, like Mary’s foreshadowed over thirty years before, is the very act which leads to the breaking open of the new creation. The Resurrection of Jesus Christ is God’s ultimate answer to the Son of God’s existential crisis on the cross and becomes the answer to our own.
What does it mean, then, to not just celebrate the Annunciation but to live it? It means that we are like Mary, the archetype of all who are chosen to bear God into this world. We can balk at God and explain to God how unfair this choice may be. We know that bringing anything to birth demands great sacrifice and much suffering. Indeed, Mary’s name literally means “bitterness.” But her name can also mean “beloved.” And our lives contain both of these realities: bitterness and belovedness. The pain of life does not mean that God has forsaken us but that God is more intensely present to us. The pressure weighing down upon our shoulders that may seem to crush us is the very pressure fashioning our lives into the sparkling diamonds that nothing in this world will be able to obscure.
Brothers, our common call to the monastic way of life may, like Mary and so many others, feel at times like a summons to the impossible. In the face of the vocation and its demands, we may see only our very limited resources and ask, “how can this be?” But the genius of this vocation is found exactly there…where we come face to face with our own inner poverty and discover God’s all-sufficient
grace…that place where all things become possible.
Like Mary of Nazareth…and like Angela of Foligno…we are pregnant with God…and are called to birth God through gift of our lives to one another. And we’re also called to serve as midwives of this birthing in each other. It won’t always be fun and exciting and will at times be dreadfully burdensome. This is to be expected. But what God is doing in this place is using us to birth a quality of life…a way of being…which only our common struggle an birth: an irrevocable peace and joy that proclaims, “Alleluia, Christ is risen indeed! Behold him standing in our midst!”
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