12.18.11; Rev. David Williams
There are certain things that I just don’t totally understand.
This is a hard thing for a man to admit. We males are absolutely marvelous at speaking as if we completely and totally understand everything around us, even if we don’t have a clue what we’re talking about. There are several handy techniques we use to do this.
There’s the Self Confidence technique. If you’re utterly self-confident, then you can look at your wife’s dying laptop and, after staring at that error code, you scratch your chin and nod serenely. Then, say something like “I’m pretty sure the problem is the carburetor.”
Then there’s the Jargon Shotgun technique. Here, the male of the species just strings together a few randomly assorted technical-sounding words they know about something and fire away. “It may be that the level 4 DDRAM flash cache interface with the flux capacitor has become corrupted.” Here, it helps to remember which words you got while reading a Best Buy ad, and which words came from the movie Back to the Future. She did watch that movie with you, you know.
Then again, after a while folks do catch on, so if there’s something you don’t totally grasp, it’s better to admit it. There are plenty of things like that. Occasionally, there are things that we won’t get...and that we’ll particularly not get if we’re focused on figuring out exactly how they happen.
Take falling in love, for instance. If you approach love in terms of neurophysiology, you might assume that you know what love is. If you study the reaction of the human brain to love, neural imaging reveals that when an individual is shown an image of the one they love, there is unusual activity in the right caudate nucleus and right ventral tegmental area. These brain locations produce large amounts of dopamine when active, which generates a range of somatic effects.
But if you think that is the best way to explain what love is, then you’re not getting it.
Then there’s the approach that developmental psychologists take in assessing the smiles of babies. Extensive analyses of the role of the smile as a social signal in pre-verbal infants do often indicate the varying roles that differing physiological affects play in establishing the dynamics of interpersonal connection. But if you use sentences like that last one in describing the tiny little person that just cooed sparklingly at you, then you’re missing something.
There are some things that we just can’t quite get, and the harder we grasp, the less sense they’ll make to us.
The story from today’s passage in Luke’s Gospel can be a perplexing one. It’s part of Luke’s prolonged narrative of the birth and childhood of Jesus, which is unique to this story of Jesus. Unlike Mark’s Gospel, which dispenses with anything prior to the adulthood of Jesus, and John’s Gospel, which begins with the beginning of all things, Luke gives us lengthy and detailed personal accounts of significant events in the early life of Jesus.
Luke’s Gospel was, after all, crafted as a history, and history in the ancient world was not dry and mechanical. It was, first and foremost, story. It was retelling for the purposes of understanding, but also for deepening a sense of connection with the story being told. Greco Roman histories were rich with personal details and narrative flourishes.
The story we’re connecting with is that of Mary, and the arrival of the angel Gabriel, who announces to her that she will bear a child, a son. He will be Son of the Most High. He will rest on the throne of his ancestor David. He will reign over the house of Jacob, and his kingdom there will be no end.
Mary doesn’t really get past that first part. I’m going to have a WHAT? She is, as the New Revised Standard Version puts it, “perplexed.” How can this possibly be the case? Her response to the angel, as recorded in Luke’s Greek, sounds like this: Puus estai touto, epei andra ou ginuuskuu. Translated literally, that comes out as, “How will be this, since a man I know not?”
That makes Mary sound a bit like Yoda, but I won’t attempt the voice.
The mechanics of this announcement, as she understands it, are impossible. Even though Family Life Education in the Galilee County Public Schools was probably not all that detailed, she still struggled with how such a thing could be so. It flew in the face of her understanding of the world.
As, I think, it does for many who hear the story of the Annunciation today. We know a great deal about the mechanics of human reproduction, far more than our ancient forebears. We grasp the way in which the genetic material of two parents recombines to form a new and remarkably unique person. We’ve gone deep into the wondrously created complexity of DNA, and the ways in which the twenty-three pairs of human chromosomes function.
From that understanding, it’s easy to become entangled in the mechanics of the story. Is Mary’s DNA suddenly recombining with Divine DNA? Is there a Y Chromosome in the Divine DNA? We want to get into the process. We want to understand the mechanism. And if we take that path as our primary way of getting what is being talked about here, we find ourselves unable to enter the story, unable to process it, unable to enter into it. If mechanics are the mechanism by which engage with the story Luke tells us, then we’re not going to be able to rejoice in it.
The underlying purpose of the story we’re hearing is to establish that the new life that arises in Mary’s womb is, through some impossible happenstance, a life set aside for significance. It is to be a holy life, one defined by a fundamental relationship to the Holy Spirit and the Creator of all things, one marked by the power to change and transform both people and nations. It is a life that is filled with God’s creative intent to change things, for any willing to pay attention and listen.
Even that statement is a challenge. How can it be that this child, born in a backwater province of a long dead empire, can be of any relevance to the world? This child, born under uncertain circumstances, to a powerless and un-noteworthy family, who had neither status nor wealth nor fame. How can this life, this single life, be of any significance to the direction and purpose of humanity?
And yet, here we are. Two millennia later, across oceans unknown, in a nation that had not yet come to be in Mary’s time, in a language that didn’t even exist in Mary’s time, telling the story of deep hope and promise we find in that child.
Had the angel told Mary about today, right now, us here, I think she’d have been equally “perplexed.” As should we be.
There are certain things that are impossible to understand. They tend to be the most important things, the things that we do not grasp, but that fill and transform us. Perplexed though she was, Mary’s answer was to present herself, and to be present in that story. “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your Word.”
Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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