Feast of the Annunciation - March 25, 2025

The Feast of The Annunciation, March 25, 2025

 

Isaiah 7:10-14

Hebrews 10:4-10

Luke 1:26-38

Click here for an audio of the sermon

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Aidan Owen, OHC
Sooner or later we must all surrender to an unknown God. 
Until this moment comes, most of us have a rather tame idea of God. We have an image—positive or negative or somewhere in between—based on our childhood experiences of family and church and the world. We are running from or toward or even just ignoring this God. Beautiful or horrible as these images may be for us, they remain flat, pasted on the page of some imagined reality that, ultimately, we can control and shape according to our fantasies and illusions.
If our faith is ever to mature, we eventually have to face the reality of this unknown God who comes to us, asking us to bear him into a life we cannot even imagine. We stand on the edge of an abyss—a darkness that cannot be plumbed, a relationship than cannot be fathomed, an invitation to a death that will lead to a life beyond anything we can conceive. The cloud parts, beckoning us inward to overshadow us, and we must step forward willingly into the real God.

Such is the stark reality of the Annunciation, dressed up as we often find it with lilies and silent poses of patient waiting. Mary, admittedly less flustered than I would be if an angel suddenly appeared to me, asks Gabriel a simple question: “How can this be?” To which the angel replies “The power of the Most High will overshadow you.”

It is a response ripe with symbolism and scriptural resonance. Mary’s body is the deep darkness at the beginning of creation over which the Holy Spirit hovers. She is Mount Sinai, bathed in cloud, as God conveys the Law to Moses or Mount Tabor bearing the enclouded glory of Jesus’ Transfiguration. Her womb—filled now with God’s Word becoming Flesh—is also the Cross heavy with the fruit of salvation and the Empty Tomb from which Jesus rises to new life.

In 2016 Good Friday fell, as it does occasionally, on March 25th, this Feast of the Annunciation. This won’t happen again until 2157, long after we’re all gone, God willing. This concurrence is not accidental. In patristic and medieval tradition, March 25th was thought to be the date of Jesus’ Crucifixion. Jesus was conceived and died on the same day, 33 years apart, a perfect circle joining life and death. Or, as John Donne puts it, today we see “The abridgement of Christ’s story, which makes one / Of the Angel’s Ave and Consummatum est.”

Many medieval images twine these two observances together, showing Mary as the fruitful vine that becomes the Cross of Christ flowering into new life. The Anglo-Saxon poem “The Dream of the Rood” links the two images with the tree in the Garden of Eden:

The fruit which gives life

Hangs, as we believe,

Upon the Virgin's breast,

And again upon the cross

Between two thieves.

Here, the child-bearing Virgin,

Here, the saving cross;

Both are mystic trees.

[The cross], the humble hyssop,

She, the noble cedar,

And both life-giving.

Her consent to birth and his to death finally made as one—the full circle of salvation written in the flesh of this day.

Mary could not have known, of course, where her “be it unto me according to thy word,” would take her and this life burgeoning inside her. I wonder if standing at the foot of the Cross, she heard the rustle of a wing and thought “Oh, this is the cost I agreed to all those years ago. Now, the bill is due.” I wonder if, hearing her son cry out, something inside her dropped, some long-held breath released in grief and recognition and—finally, all those years later—a surrender fully consummated.

God desires nothing less of us than everything we are or ever will be. In the first flush of infatuation, it’s easy enough to say yes, to give away our whole lives to this God who desires us and whom we desire. As the years draw on, though, the cost of our consent becomes clearer. And though we thought we knew what it meant to give our whole selves in love, we may come to see how little we understood in all our youthful bluster.

There comes a point—and likely a few such points throughout our lives—when, standing at the edge the abyss, we come face to cloudy face with this unknown and unknowable God who has been pursuing us our whole lives. We feel within the pit of ourselves the gravitational pull toward surrender. Like Mary, we consent to the overshadowing of all we are and all we have been. Through patience and, perhaps, longsuffering, we emerge from this dark baptism fully ourselves, maybe for the first time: God-bearers in a God-born world, holy Theotokoi—not from our own holiness but from the holiness of God forever infusing our bodies. This is what we were born for: to become the womb and the empty tomb, the fruitful vine and the flowering Cross. 

The emptiness that seemed to be our undoing becomes, through God’s great mercy, the very truest expression of our divine nature: the fullness of God’s love flowing through us into a hurting world.

I am convinced that this is the place of monasticism and of all authentic Christianity in our world today. We are called to bear witness (in the Greek, to become martyrs) to the love of a God who brings life out of death and whose final word is always love. In order to witness authentically to that love, we must step into the cloud of our own undoing, we must eventually choose to surrender to this unknown God who loves us into wholeness.

In 1920, Rilke wrote to a friend “The final thing is not self-subjugation / but silent loving from such centeredness / we feel round even rage and desolation / the finally enfolding tenderness.”

Surrender to the overshadowing of God’s power is not self-subjugation, but consent to transformation. It is an apotheosis, a full revelation of God’s power made manifest in our own humanity. It is an allowing of God’s life to stream from our very pores. It is the recognition, even the celebration, of that finally enfolding tenderness that never can or will desert us, whatever the rage and desolation.

My brothers and sisters, let the power of the Most High overshadow you. Surrender to this unknown God and be reborn as yourself. Step into your poverty that is also your glory. Let out your be it unto me and your consummatum est. Today is the day of our undoing and our full becoming.

Annunciation - April 9, 202

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Ephrem Arcement

The feast of the Annunciation (transferred), April 9, 2024

Isaiah 7:10-14

Hebrews 10:4-10

Luke 1:26-38

 Click here for an audio of the sermon

She was not young, nor was she a virgin. She was married with children. She was not poor but wealthy. She was not of the first century but of the

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." And

immediately the eyes of my soul were opened, and in a vision I beheld the

fullness 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 sea

itself, and everything else. And in everything that I saw, I could perceive

nothing except the presence of the power of God, and in a manner totally

indescribable. And my soul in an excess of wonder cried out: "The world is

pregnant with God!" Wherefore I understood how small is the whole of

creation — 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 to

overflowing.

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!”  

Feast of the Annunciation - March 25, 2023

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert Leo Sevensky, OHC

The Feast of The Annunciation, March 25, 2023

 

Isaiah 7:10-14

Hebrews 10:4-10

Luke 1:26-38

Click here for an audio of the sermon

 

I have never been to the Holy Land and quite honestly, I don't have a burning desire to go there. And please don't get me wrong. I have been deeply touched by the stories of those who have visited there and who have had their faith deepened and their lives changed. And if someone offered me an all-expense paid Holy Land trip, I would probably take them up on it. After all, I did go to Egypt in 1994 and was able to see the Holy Land in the distance from across the Red Sea, though like Moses of old, I did not get to enter it.

If I were to visit, there are a few locations that would have pride of place on my spiritual bucket list. The first, of course, would be the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem which is the traditional site of Golgotha (Mount Calvary) and the tomb of the Resurrection. I can imagine spending hours and hours there. I might also want to spend time on the Mount of Olives overlooking Jerusalem contemplating both our Lord’s triumphal entry into the city on that first Palm Sunday as well as his betrayal and arrest only a few days later.  And of course, the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.

But there is one other site on my imaginary itinerary, and that is the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth which commemorates the Annunciation and indeed claims to be the very place where the Angel Gabriel visited the Virgin Mary with the news, however shocking, that she would be the mother of the Savior. (This being the Holy Land, of course, there is another church nearby, an Orthodox Church, which claims to be the real site.)

From what I've read, the Church of the Annunciation is the largest church in the Middle East.  It was constructed in the 1950s and 1960s in an architectural style described as “Italian brutalist,” perhaps not unlike the church at St. John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, with its exposed concrete beams and unfinished surfaces. But that's not what I would be looking for. Because below this contemporary edifice is another older church dating from the 4th century. And even below that is a grotto dating perhaps from the 3rd century where the words of the Angel Gabriel’s greeting, “Hail Mary,” had been scratched into the wall.  And on the front of the altar at the center of that grotto are inscribed familiar words from the Prologue to St. John's Gospel, words that we pray here several times daily: The Word was made flesh…though there it is written in Latin: Verbum caro factum est.  If you look closely, however, you will see that a small word has been inserted into the phrase. It reads: Verbum caro hic factum est. “The Word was made flesh here.” And who knows? Maybe this is the spot where it all began. Where the Logos, the primal Word from the Father uttered from before time and eternity, was made flesh, here and not elsewhere.  Here: at a particular point in time, in a particular place, in a particular cultural setting and at the meeting point of diverse cultures, religions and civilizations, a place marked by a complicated history and a troubled political situation, one that was altogether messy.

Claims such as this that locate a transcendent mystery in more or less definite space and time and in concrete historical details permeate the Christian story. They constitute what scholars or theologians refer to as the ‘scandal of particularity’: Here, not there.  There is of course a universalizing tendency in our Christian tradition, offering a message of hope to people everywhere and of every age. That is its glory and its power. But at its root, at its conception (quite literally) it begins and unfolds in particular historical and tangible circumstances: then and there. This Jesus event, though marked by universal themes and a transfiguring message and a saving promise, is not just an abstract idea or a pious dream, but an actual historical happening, something that occurred in the give and take of everyday life. And in this case, it is in the everyday life of a young Middle Eastern woman named Miryam [Mary], engaged but as yet unmarried, and faced with an invitation to accept perhaps the most unplanned pregnancy in human history.

Here and now, at a particular time and place. Thus it was with Mary. And so it is with us as well. Our sitting down and our rising up, our faith, our salvation, our growth in grace, our struggles, our failures, our triumphs, our transformations, our divinization…none of this happens in the abstract but only in the concrete specificity of our own lives and times. As Tip O’Neill, the Speaker of the House of Representatives in the 1980’s, was fond of saying: “All politics is local.”  And so, I think, is grace.  

Invitations are extended to each of us by an angel—which is to say, by God—in a thousand different ways and at a thousand different moments.  The shape and content may vary wildly...perhaps there are as many invitations or annunciations as there are people who ever lived and then some. But at heart, it’s always the same invitation.  It is the invitation to surrender, or to put it another way, to abandon or release ourselves to God's will, to God's dream, and freely to cooperate in it and to work with it so that something new, something transformative, something holy--however modest and apparently insignificant--can take birth in us and in our world.  I wonder how many opportunities have been offered over the centuries, how many embraced, and how many have gone overlooked, unnoticed or refused?

The late 20th century poet Denise Levertov in her poem titled Annunciation considers this mystery.  I have quoted her here before. The poem begins with these words:

“We know the scene: 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.”

And God still waits.  

Levertov continues by asking:

“Aren't there annunciations of one sort or another in most lives? Some unwillingly undertake great destinies, enact them in sullen pride uncomprehending. More often those moments when roads of light and storm opened from darkness in a man or a woman, are turned away from in dread, in a wave of weakness, in despair and with relief. Ordinary lives continue. God does not smite them. But the gates close, the pathway vanishes.”

To become aware of and responsive to these annunciations, these invitations that come to us daily, is a Christian spiritual duty and a deeply human task. And like Mary, we can and often must ask the messenger some tough questions and seek solid confirmation and only then respond…and not always with a YES but sometimes with a well-grounded “Not Yet” or “Let me think about it” or “No, thank you.”  Only let us, as the poet urges us, not answer out of dread or weakness or despair, but out of an abounding trust in the love and mercy and providence of God.  

Mary’s honest, questioning dialog with the angel led to the Incarnation of Christ the Eternal Word. Our honest, questioning dialog with our own angelic annunciations can also lead, not to a new Incarnation of Christ in the literal sense but to its continuation or prolongation through history in us who constitute the Church, the very Body of Christ given, like our Lord’s body, for the very life of the world.  That is our calling, a calling rooted in the specificity and particularity of you and me in all our humanity with its strengths and weaknesses, its flaws and annoying and wonderful idiosyncrasies, and in the particular details of our biography. That is the way our God worked with Mary. I expect that’s how our God works with us.

“Verbum caro HIC factum est!  The Word was made flesh HERE” says the altar engraving in the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth.  And the Word continues to be made flesh in you and me, hic et nunc, here and now: in West Park, New York.  March 25, 2023.  Imagine that. Imagine.

Amen.

Annunciation - March 25, 2022

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Luc Thuku, OHC

Annunciation - March 25, 2022

Isaiah 7:10-14

Psalm 45

Hebrews 10:4-10

Luke 1:26-38

Click here for an audio version of this sermon

InIn his book This Monastic Moment, incidentally written to commemorate the arrival of our brothers at Volmoed, the Rev. John De Gruchy, in Chapter 4 entitled In This Time & Place, sub topic, Open to the world: Hidden in God, while quoting Bonhoffer has this to say…

‘this worldly’ interpretation of the Bible which was intergral to the church becoming open to the other was intended to make concepts such as repentance, faith, justification, rebirth and sanctification, accessible to secular people; he was not suggesting that these concepts be discarded any more than he was jettisoning scripture. Even so, there are terms that speak from ‘faith to faith’ - that is, they make sense within the life of the Church where the language of faith is understood. By analogy, there is no reason why cricket-lovers should ditch words like goooly, maiden-over, or leg-before, just because the uninitiated do not understand them.

They are code words essential to every lover of the game. The same would apply to doctrines like the Trinity, Virgin birth, etc,which should not be thrust on to the world in a take-it-or-leave-it manner but taught and celebrated in the life of the Church as mysteries of faith. In this way, prayer, worship, the sacraments, and the creed remain hidden at the heart of the church. That is why Bonhoeffer says that all Christian talk must arise out of prayer and be expressed by doing justice in the world. The church would then be known by its penultimate witness to the reign of God through its service to the world rather than by the disciplines and doctrines that sustain its life of faith, hope and love. And it is in that service to the world that the church shares in solidarity with people of other faiths and those of no faith at all.

I am, therefore, unfortunate enough to stand before you this morning to preach when we commemorate one of the major doctrines or mysteries of the Christian faith, that is the Incarnation, as we celebrate this feast of the Annunciation. Although it is crucial for us to understand how God came to be human, it is also confusing at times because rarely does God, the author of nature, contradict nature but usually works with nature to achieve God’s ends… but in this case he did. I will therefore disappoint some of us by not going into the depths of the mystery of the Incarnation. That I will leave to the realm of the terms that speak from ‘faith to faith’. Instead the Spirit leads me to speaks about the motivation behind the incarnation, which hopefully will qualify as a ‘this worldly’ interpretation.

Now, the motivation behind the incarnation was nothing but pure love! God loved us from the beginning and when we failed decided to come be born, live like us and redeem us like one of us. Our salvation became God’s project throughout the Old Testament times and the message of redemption became even more intense with the prophets especially Isaiah, the prophet of hope. In the passage we heard from the first reading this morning (Isaiah 7:10-14), Isaiah is preaching to King Ahaz of Jerusalem who was under an imminent threat of attack from Israel which had aligned itself with the ‘pagan’ kingdom of Aram. King Ahaz responded with unbelief to God and His prophet that God will deliver Judah. Isaiah asks Ahaz to ask God for a sign as proof but he refuses; not so much becuase he didn't want to tempt God(because he was an evil king), but because he was trying to align himself with the king of Assyria, another ‘pagan’ king for protection. This frustrates Isaiah and he tells Ahaz that despite his refusal, God is going to give a him a sign anyway! It is in this context that the promise of a savior is given a name for the very first time (the second time during the annunciation as we heard in the gospel passage)!…The young woman shall bear a son Immanuel. Although this did not happen in the time of king Ahaz, it at least assured him that Judah will have a future, a sign of the perpetuity of the nation.

We are celebrating this feast a few weeks before the Easter triduum, when we celebrate the mystery of Christ’s suffering and death and later resurrection. At times it impossible to not wonder whether these two mysteries we are celebrating within weeks of each other, one evoking sorrow and the other joy are conflicting. The truth, however, is that they compliment each other and are explicitly brought together in today’s second reading from the letter to the Hebrews. The writer of Hebrews put words in the mouth of Jesus… “see God, I have come to do your will” and in this statement both are shown as expressions of the perfect obedience Jesus gave to his father’s will.

The question however remains why all that was God’s will. Why should the eternal son of God lower himself so much to attaining our human nature with all its limitations? Why should he begin life dependent on his mother, then undergo the whole process of growing up which includes the discomforts and inconveniencies of life that we all go through, and worse in the household of a lowly laborer and not in the comforts of a palace? Why subject himself to tempatation, hostility, rejection and betrayal? Why at the conclusion of it all go willingly and knowingly to his passion, to suffer an unjust judgement, mockery, blows and spitting and the humiliation of being stripped naked, then agree to nails being drilled into his flesh and bones? Why hang on the cross for hours, have his heart torn open with a spear and eventually end up in a tomb? Why would a loving God will all that on anyone, least of all His beloved Son?

The answer to that can only be Mercy driven by Love. Jesus did that in order to raise us with him to God. It was the price for forgiveness, out-poured love, an assuarance that we have become sons and daughters, and heirs of divine glory. It means that we are not just adopted or co-opted. We are owned, we are bought at a price and the price was, and still is, the life and blood of God Himself!

The world however has not changed an inch despite this unwavering love. I am writing and preaching this sermon during an unnecessary war being fought in Europe out of pure aggression and “big boy” or bully mentality! Innocent children and adults who just want to live their daily lives have been uprooted from their homes and lost their livelihoods and will most likely be traumatized for the rest of their lives, that is, if they live to tell the story. This is coming from a nation that has a quasi state religion that lays claim to orthodoxy, and the largest at that, the Russian Orthodox church, whose patriarch is rumoured to be a friend of the ‘Russian big boy’ and I can't help wondering if he has tried to tell him what he is doing is wrong! Forget about the current war if you can and open any newspaper or television and what hits you on the face is a confirmation of the negative judgement found in Romans 1:29-30… “they are steeped in all sorts of injustice, rottenness, greed, and malice; full of envy, murder, wrangling, treachery and spite; libellers, slanderers, enemies of God; rude, arrogant and boastful; enterprising in evil, rebellious to parents, without prudence, honor love or pity”

So, are we doomed as a species and the rest of creation with us? Have we tested God’s patience and endurance to its limits? The answer to this is no because we have an example still stemming from the incarnation event. In Mary, God’s love found an answering love. The obedience of Jesus to his father found a corresponding willingness in the maiden who was to be his mother. His goodness and purity of intention, generosity, selflessness, perserverance and humility found their reflection in Mary.

Mary, however, was not your naive or ignorant every day girl. At least she was aware that for a woman to give birth, she must have been with a man. “How can this be since I am a virgin” …she asks in Luke 1:34. She did not get involved in the project blindly. She engages the angel in dialogue and sought clarity. She knew God as the creator and author of nature and hence her question is not so much an expression of doubt but a surprise and an amazement at the extent God can go to communicate his love for us and for creation. Spiritual masters tell us that God’s love is for us as individuals and that if there was only one person living on earth, Jesus would have still come to die for the redemption of that individual. For Mary alone who said yes, God the Son would still have undertaken the incarnation and accepted his sacrificial death for the sake of her alone. Mary however represents the church as the bride of Christ whose profession of love is explicit in the responsorial Psalm for today which we did not read. I would recommend you read this Psalm 45, during your personal spiritual reading or Lectio. It is a love song that would be helpful to situate in the context of the love of God and God’s people the church.

Despite our struggles and despite the sinfulness of the individual members of the church, she still remains Holy, all beautiful, all pure and united in baptism all of us become worthy recipients of God’s enduring love and mercy. We also receive grace in abundance and the Lord is with us. This enables us to respond to the obedience and love of Christ with an answering obedience of our own.

We should therefore pray hard and always so that we may in obedience and love come to know the will of God for us, and the portion of the Letter to the Hebrews that we read this morning tells us that… “God’s will is for us to be made holy, by the offering of his body, made once and for all by Jesus Christ”. Hebrews10:10.

William R. Newell, a Bible teacher and a Commentator on the Book of Romans summarizes our life with the Incarnate Son of God with the following hymn that he composed one day in 1895 on his way to teach a Bible class….

Years I spent in vanity and pride Caring not my Lord was crucified Knowing not it was for me He died On Calvary! Mercy there was great and grace was free Pardon there was multiplied to me There my burdened soul found liberty At Calvary! By God’s words at last my sin I learned Then I tremble at the law I’d spurned Till my guilty soul imploring turned To Calvary! O the Love that drew salvation’s plan O the grace that brought it down to man O the mighty gulf that God did span At Calvary! Mercy there was great and grace was free Pardon there was multiplied to me There my burdened soul found liberty At Calvary! Now I’ve giv’n to Jesus everything Now I glady have Him as my King Now my raptured soul can only sing Of Calvary! Mercy there was great and grace was free Pardon there was multiplied to me There my burdened soul found liberty At Calvary! (William R. Newell, pub.1895)

The feast of the Annunciation - March 25, 2021

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Aidan Owen, OHC

Feast of the Annunciation  - Thursday, March 25, 2021

Isaiah 7:10-14)

Hebrews 10:4-10

Luke 1:26-38

Click here for an audio version of this sermon

In the name of the One God, who is Lover, Beloved, and Love Overflowing.

In 1920, Rilke wrote a verse dedication to Frau Theodora van der Muhll:

The final thing is not self-subjugation

but silent loving from such centeredness

we feel round even rage and desolation

the finally enfolding tenderness.

We know the paintings so well they’re cliché. There she sits, usually surrounded by books with a lily in her hand and a feathered angel bending toward her. Sometimes she’s holding her breviary, sometimes demure, sometimes with fiery cast to her eyes. Thanks to biblical and historical scholarship, we know that Mary would have been a teenager and a poor villager. We know she had courage or was foolhardy—probably both—she was a teenager, after all. Tradition tells us that she was next to sinless, the archetypal saint, so empty of self that she could receive God’s fullness.

After centuries and centuries of interpretation and imagining the scene, it’s too easy to think of the Mary whom Gabriel greets as either a demure, faceless vessel, waiting to be filled, or the Cosmic Feminine Divine, Sophia incarnate, who knew inherently how to open herself to God’s indwelling. 

But if Jesus was fully human, then his mother certainly was, too. She was a real, historical person. She had hopes and fears. She loved and wept and twisted her hair in boredom. The demure, faceless vessel and the Cosmic Feminine Devine both rob of us of a foothold in this mysterious comingling of a human life with God’s life. 

Mary was girl who said yes to God, with whatever freedom was available to her. We know her decision produced a great number of trials. Teenage pregnancy out of wedlock; a precocious child to raise, always running off to the rabbis; watching the torture and death of her child; wrapping herself in the mystery of his rising, this one who was and was not the man she had raised.

But, of course, all those trials were to come later. For now, in this moment of Annunciation, the angel sings his ave. And Mary pours herself out as best she can. This greeting from the Holy One is the key that unlocks her heart, the sun that warms the rose of her soul, coaxing it into bloom. For now, she knows the rose’s sweetness, even as the thorns hint their sting under her thumb pads.

This pouring out of herself to God, this making herself empty and hollow was not, as Rilke points out, self-subjugation. The virtue of Mary’s response, Be it unto me according to your word, is not that she obliterated her humanity, but that, at least for the space of a breath, she allowed God to fill and surround that humanity. She became alight with herself, even as God overshadowed her.

Falling as this feast usually does in Lent, I cannot help but wonder how this experience followed Mary throughout her life. Did she hear the rustle of the angel’s wings as she stood at the foot of the Cross? As her son cried out his consummatum est, did she remember her own cry of astonishment and joy those thirty odd years before? Seeing the thorns wrapped around his brow, could she still smell the sweetness of her soul opening to God? As Jesus surrendered his Spirit, was she emptied of self once more, barren or fallow or hollowed out for God?

Every so often Good Friday and Annunciation fall on the same day, uniting into one the moment God’s Spirit took birth in Jesus and then left his body. The two poles of living and dying wrapped round each other, like the snake eating its tail.

Although this concurrence will not come again in our lifetime—the next time will be 2157—we are living in such a moment today. This year of pandemic, which has seemed an endless Lent in its way, will not resolve itself on Easter. Our joy will be tempered and quiet. The tomb may be empty, but so will most of our churches. Like those first disciples, like Mary, we will throw our alleluia out on the wind to echo in the heedless world.

It’s not only our churches that have been carved out. Our hearts have been, as well. Whether we wish to be or not, we have been hollowed, emptied of all our certainties and easy assurances. We are left wide open, waiting for God to fill us up, to be born and then reborn in and through us. What is the angel’s call to us, then?

Perhaps they are Rilke's greeting to Frau van der Muhll:

The final thing is not self-subjugation

but silent loving from such centeredness

we feel round even rage and desolation

the finally enfolding tenderness.

We don’t need to obliterate ourselves to be open to God. Like Mary we can gather round us all our courage or foolhardiness. We can speak our yes, however timorous or weary it may be today. We can trust, or even pretend to trust if that’s what we have available to us, that God will wrap us up in her finally enfolding tenderness.

The Feast of the Annunciation - Wednesday, March 26, 2020

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Bob Pierson, OHC
The Feast of the Annunciation - Wednesday, March 26, 2020

Isaiah 7:10-14
Hebrews 10:4-10
Luke 1:26-38

Click here for an audio version of this sermon.

No typescript is available for this sermon. An excerpt is below. Hear the full sermon at the link above.

What does this Feast of the Annunciation have to say to us in our current situation as we battle the Coronavirus? As I was praying about that, I recalled one of our catchphrases in 12-step recovery:

"Let go, and let God."

Here's Mary - a teenage girl - in a town called Nazareth, the middle of nowhere. And Luke tells us she was "perplexed" by the message of an angel. She had to wonder, "What's going to happen to me? Why me?"

She could have thought, "Fake news," and ignored the angel. But instead she said, "Here I am, the servant of the Lord. Let it be with me according to your word." She didn't try to control the situation, she didn't panic - she trusted. She "let go, and let God" take care of her.

Easier said than done, you might say. Yes. It's not easy to trust, to let go of controlling outcomes, to trust that God has a plan for us and is working to fulfill that plan.

That's not to say that we should just sit back and do nothing. We need to do our own part. But in the end we have no choice but to let God work in our lives - "Let it be with me according to your word."

The Feast of the Annunciation - Tuesday, March 26, 2019

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

The Rev. Matthew Wright, CRC
The Feast of the Annunciation - Tuesday, March 26, 2019

Isaiah 7:10-14
Hebrews 10:4-10
Luke 1:26-38

Click here for an audio version of the sermon.

“In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while the Spirit of God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, ‘Fiat, lux—Let there be light’…”

The angel said to Mary, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, [will sweep over you,] and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy…” Then Mary said, “Fiat mihi—Let it be with me according to your word.”

*     *     *     *

Fiat.  “Let it be done.”  Let there be; let it be.  Luke’s account of the Annunciation intentionally echoes, or responds to, the story of Creation; it becomes our account of the New Creation, or, maybe better, the ongoing Creation—it tells us that Creation is not finished, is still unfolding.

The same core elements are in each account: the Spirit moves over the face of the deep; the Spirit moves over the depths of Mary; and in both, the Fiat is spoken—“Let it be.”  But in the first account, it is God’s fiat, drawing forth Creation; in the second account, it is Creation’s fiat, drawing forth God.  In the first, Creation takes form in the womb of God; in the second, God takes form in the womb of creation, in the womb of Mary.

Theologian Sarah Jane Boss, in her wonderful 2003 book titled simply Mary, puts forward what she calls a “green Mariology”; she writes:

Mary […] stands at the Annunciation in the same relation to God as do the waters of creation at the beginning of the world.  It is as though the world’s redemption in Christ is in fact its re-creation, and that God accomplishes this re-creation by breathing and speaking afresh upon the world’s foundations, in the person of Mary […].  Mary is the dark water, Christ the fiery light.  And this work of creation and renewal is neverending…

 And so here she explicitly links our two creation stories, our two fiats, our two annunciations, as one—each a face of the neverending, ongoing, unfolding that is creation, that is the life of God.  But then she continues, and even more boldly asserts:

…insofar as the Blessed Virgin shares an identity with the deep from before the dawn of time, she too is mysteriously present in all things […].  If we start by imagining the cosmos as fabric whose thread and weave are ever changing, then Mary is in some sense the same as the entire assembly of the most minute, invisible particles of the fibers of which the world is spun and woven.

And so for Boss, Mary becomes the deep identity of the whole created order, the thread and weave of life itself.  In the beginning God says “Let there be” and calls forth from her womb Mary; Mary says “Let it be,” and calls forth from her womb God.

 And in the meeting of these two fiats is Christ; is the full and perfect union of the created and the Uncreated; is the goal and longing and center and heart of all that is.  God’s call, God’s longing; and Creation’s response, Creation’s longing.  And the two become one—one single longing, one fiat, one dance, coursing through all things.  And this is the goal of all our living, of every breath—Can we bring ourselves into alignment with that primordial fiat that gave birth to the worlds, and with Mary again speak “Let it be”—or rather, let that original, that only, fiat be spoken through us—and thereby give birth to God?  Little by little, every breath can become “Let it be”; every breath God’s birthing of us and our birthing of God.

 When Gabriel announces to Mary of Nazareth, Mary in that moment becomes the human face of all creation, the human face of that primordial Mary; the human face of the God-bearing dimension of existence.  And through her, the human face of creation, is born the human face of God.

*     *     *     *

In the 14th century, Meister Eckhart wrote of the Annunciation, “Gabriel addressed not her alone, but a great multitude: every good soul that desires God.”  That desire, that longing for God, is at the heart of every soul, and of all creation.  But we often seem to think that our longing is a sign of God’s absence, of our lack of God.  This is perhaps our greatest error—this is perhaps Original Sin.  Because that desire in our hearts—that we so often try to fulfill in small and limited and unsatisfying ways—it’s not our desire for God.  It’s God’s desire in us.  Not a sign of absence or lack, but the surest sign of presence, Divine Presence. 

In that original fiat, God poured God’s own longing into Creation, into primordial Mary, into us.  Our longing has always been God’s presence in us.  And in our individual fiats, we give God’s longing expression.  Can each of us, human faces of creation, let our whole being become “Let it be” and give birth to the human face of God?  This is our high calling—the potential that we so often fall short of.

*     *     *     *

In Gabriel’s opening words to Mary he says, in our rather flat New Revised Standard Version, “Greetings, favored one!”  This is, of course, in Latin, Ave, Gratia Plena—“Hail, Full of Grace!”  And the Greek word here is Kecharitōmĕnē, which is in perfect passive participle form, and so implies “has been, is, and will be.”  So Gabriel greets her not with a name (“Mary”), but with a title—“Full-of-Grace.”  And if Mary is the human face of creation, then this is the name of all Creation, of the primordial Mary who is the thread and weave of all that is: Full-of-Grace, Kecharitōmĕnē.  Again, Eckhart says, “What good would it do me for Mary to be full of grace if I were not also full of grace?”

 And he writes with a boldness that could only come from Meister Eckhart: “We are all an only son whom the Father has been eternally begetting out of the hidden darkness of eternal concealment, indwelling in the first beginning of the primal purity which is the plenitude of all purity.”  The Kecharitōmĕnē.  The primordial Mary.  She is that primal purity out of which God is eternally begetting, or, in Sarah Jane Boss’ words, “of which the world is spun and woven.”

 And so it is no mistake that most of our traditional depictions of the Annunciation show Mary spinning wool—a detail which comes to us from the Protoevangelium of James, where we learn that at the moment of the Annunciation, Our Lady was spinning purple wool, at the request of the Temple priests, to make a new veil for the Holy of Holies.  The Kecharitōmĕnē, spinning from her limitless Ocean of Grace, all the veils of Creation—weaving every world that ever has been or ever shall be.

*     *     *     *

 The Fiat makes one final appearance in Church tradition, recorded by St. Maximus the Confessor in his 6th century Life of the Virgin.  He tells us that shortly before Mary’s death, the angel Gabriel appeared to her a final time.  “Hail, Full-of-Grace,” he says once more.  Then he tells her, “Your son and Lord bids you: ‘It is time for my mother to come to me.’”  Maximus writes, “she responded to the angel with her original reply: ‘Behold, the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me now again according to your word.’”  The perfect bookend.  And so her whole life, her whole being, has become “Let it be.”

 So may it be with each of us, in God’s ongoing work of creation.  As God speaks us into being moment-by-moment, may we speak God into being also.

And so to all of you, “Hail, Kecharitōmĕnē!”

And may we each respond “Fiat!—Let it be!”



Amen.

The Feast of The Annunciation : April 10, 2018

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert James Magliula, OHC

The Annunciation- Tuesday, April 10, 2018

To hear the sermon in its fullness click here.

Br. Robert James Magliula, OHC 

Mary is the supreme example of what happens when God is at work by grace through human beings. God’s power from outside, and the indwelling Spirit within, together result in things being done which would have been unthinkable in any other way. 

In the twelve verses of today’s Gospel Mary is described as favored, perplexed, thoughtful, and afraid. She questions believes, and submits to her vocation---not with a single “yes”, but with many, as the implications of her call unfold over her lifetime.

The announcement of the enfleshment of God in Jesus which we celebrate today has been obscured and distorted over the centuries by a one-dimensional image of Mary fabricated by the Church. Much of Christianity has been negatively and uselessly trapped in guilt about being “flesh,” while the great messages of the Gospel—grace, healing, and justice—have largely gone unheeded. Obsessive guilt about our embodiment has led us to create a Mary not made of flesh.

We cannot return to a healthy view of our own bodies until we accept that God has forever made human flesh the privileged place of the divine encounter.  This Creator of ours is patiently determined to put matter and spirit together, as if the one was not complete without the other. The Lord of life seems to desire a perfect but free unification between body and spirit. So much so, in fact, that God appears to be willing to wait for the creatures to will and choose this unity themselves—or it remains unrealized. God never enforces or dominates, but only allures and seduces. God apparently loves freedom as much as incarnation. God knew that only humble vulnerability could be entrusted with spiritual power—and so God hid it like a treasure in the body of Jesus.

God desires us to learn wisdom and humility from our bodies, not to repress them out of fear. Jesus trusted God’s slow process of incarnation. The result was the resurrection and the realization of eternal union between body and spirit, human and divine. The reason we have trouble with the full incarnation in Jesus is probably because we have not been able to recognize and enjoy the incarnation in ourselves.

We must begin by trusting what God has done through Mary in Jesus. We must reclaim the incarnation as the beginning point of the Christian experience of God. We must return to the Hebrew respect for this world and for all the wisdom and goodness of the body. The embodied self is the only self we have ever known. Our bodies are God’s dwelling place, God’s temple. We need to recognize our physical responses. Repressing feelings and sensations relegates them to our unconscious shadow where they come out in unexpected and often painful ways.

Trust in God is not just faith to believe in spiritual ideas. It’s to have confidence in love itself. It’s to have confidence in reality itself. God is in it; God is revealed in everything. Most of us have been conditioned to say “no”. What Mary shows us is that faith is about learning to say “yes” to the moment right in front of us. Only after we say our “yes” do we recognize that God is here, in this person, in this event, in this time. God is in all things and is available everywhere. In that moment we become God’s full work of art. In that moment, love is stronger than death, and Christ is surely risen in us. Love and life become the same thing.

We tend to do things wrong before we even know what right feels like. But mistakes do not seem to be a problem for God; they are only a problem for our ego that wants to be pure spirit. Living solely out of our ego splits us off from our body. God is an expert at working with mistakes and failure. It is no different for us than it was for Mary. In some ways it may seem simpler to obey arbitrary rules about diet or sex than to truly honor the living incarnation we are.

The extraordinary thing about Mary is her ordinariness, beginning with her full humanity. God’s favor was not earned by her good behavior. God chooses Mary because she has nothing. Mary is among the most powerless people in her society: she is young in a world that values age; female in a world ruled by men; poor in a stratified economy. She has neither husband nor son to validate her existence. That she should have found favor with God shows Luke’s understanding of God’s activity as surprising and often paradoxical, almost always reversing human expectations. Luke’s account is patterned on the annunciation scenes in the Book of Judges, which would have made excellent sense to any Hellenistic reader who was accustomed to miraculous events accompanying the birth accounts of extraordinary people.

Mary’s statement about her virginity, in light of her own incomprehension of how she could conceive, does not reflect doubt as much as amazement at Gabriel’s message. Her question is a request for information, not proof. She recognizes what all believers must recognize, that we, creatures before the Creator, are incapable, in and of ourselves, of accomplishing God’s will. We are all, in that sense, virgins. How has God’s call in our own lives violated the selves we imagined ourselves to be---transforming us from virgins who are unable to bear and birth God to the world, to creative agents with God?

Gabriel reminds Mary and us that our incapacity in and of ourselves is not the end of the story, that nothing is impossible with God. Doing God’s will is not about fulfilling requirements; it’s about a trusting relationship. When God takes the initiative, it is always a matter of love. It is not human action but divine power. Although Mary cannot comprehend the full meaning of the message, she responds as a willing partner in the holy disruption that befalls her. Her obedience is not forced. She acts freely when she offers herself.

Our life is a dance between the loneliness and desperation of the false self and the fullness of the true self. It’s not so much about what we do; it’s about what God does. God and life itself eventually destabilize the boundaries of the small self, allowing the ego to collapse back into the true self, which is re-discovered and experienced anew as an ultimate homecoming.

We cannot anticipate the ways that God will break into human history---into our history. As with Mary, the indwelling divine moves toward fulfillment in each of us in a personal and unique way throughout our lifetime with different ways and degrees of consenting to it. There are as many ways to manifest God as there are beings in the universe.

We do not create our own salvation, nor do we have the capacity to imagine the ways of God. Luke tells us in Mary’s story that not only is redemption possible; it has already happened. Because of the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Christ, the holy continues to break into our lives, to bring us closer to the completion of creation and the already-and-not-yet reign of God.

As Mary discovered in her life, the spiritual journey is a path of deeper realization and transformation; it is more than a growing up, it is a waking up. It is never a straight line, but a back and forth movement that ever deepens the conscious choice and assent to God’s work in us.

As it was for Mary, may it be so for us. +Amen.

Feast of the Annunciation - Mar 25, 2017

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. John Forbis, OHC
The Feast of the Annunciation - Saturday, March 25, 2017

Isaiah 7:10-14
Hebrews 10:4-10
Luke 1:26-38





Sometimes when encountering such feasts as this morning’s, I can be somewhat distant and even remote from the immediacy of the event.  I don’t have any reference points to an angel making a rather bizarre announcement to a young woman from a small village known as Nazareth in Galilee, a location where many people, particularly those who are “anybody” would avoid.  Who is Mary?  Why her?  Why is she distinguished as different and special?  What was she doing when the angel arrived?  And perhaps the most pertinent question, Why would she agree to such an absurd suggestion from this apparition?

Even when being confronted with the Angelus three times a day every day for the last twenty or so years, there are so many questions.  Yet, do these questions really matter?  Mary responded to Gabriel by saying yes, and I get the idea that she isn’t just accepting this responsibility put upon her with resignation.  She does have enough gumption to question the angel on his peculiar ideas of how a child might be born.  Thus, her affirmative seems to have more will involved.  And even though, I may not understand her reasons, she defies my own doubts and expectations by her yes.  Yes, to God breaking into her at this moment in her life.

This is cause not for questions but for rejoicing, a crying out of our own Magnificat even if it is gravelly and raucous.  (Dare I say this in Lent?!?!)  Because from her response, God breaks into all of our lives.  God, more often than not, also does it in those same absurd and incongruous ways as well.  In the extraordinarily ordinary particulars of our daily existence, God becomes enfleshed in us, our bodies and lives, where we would least look for her, in the daily rhythms and cycles of speech, silence, give and take, eating, rest, work, play, breath, song, and the natural rises and falls of this world.  And suddenly past, present and future can converge on one rather mundane moment and shock us by that moment’s warped sense of humor.  Kathleen Norris’s poem, “She Said, Yeah” has taught me this.  Even Mary’s yes can seem like it is matter of fact as well as the angel’s acknowledgement.

The land lies open: summer fallow, hayfield, pasture. Folds of cloud mirror buttes knife-edged in shadow. One monk smears honey on his toast, another peels an orange.

A bell rings three times, as the Angelus begins, bringing to mind Gabriel and Mary. “She said yeah,” the Rolling Stones sing from a car on the interstate, “She said Yeah.” And the bells pick it up, many bells now, saying it to Metchtild, the barn cat, pregnant again; to Ephrem’s bluebirds down the draw, to the grazing cattle and the monks (virgins, some of them) eating silently before the sexy tongue of a hibiscus blossom at their refectory window. “She said yeah.” And then the angel left her.