Today the church marks the Feast of the Annunciation, the day when God first took on flesh and dwelt among us. Today is the day when God, the great creator of the universe, the one who divided day from night, heaven from earth, land from sea, poured his divinity into a few dividing cells, the weakest and most helpless of all weak and helpless humanity, utterly dependent on the faith and love and hospitality of a little girl. It was the beginning of the great new phase of God’s dealings with humanity promised so long ago in the garden. This is the day when God came to the very woman whose seed would crush the head of the serpent.
Yet, all of this, all of this new and monumental beginning, hangs on one moment, the moment of decision for Mary. You see, the thing about new beginnings, is that they always come on the heels of endings. The encounter with the Archangel, marks, for better or worse, the end of Mary’s life as she knew it. As soon as the message has been delivered she must decide to accept or reject it, but whatever she does, she cannot just keep on living like she always had. On this day, Mary met what is the quintessential Christian experience. Each of us comes to that moment when we must either accept or reject Christ’s entry into our lives, our very beings. The thing is, if we do, in that moment, decide to accept, it only means that we will spend our lives meeting similar points of decision. Mary did. What do you think it was that she was always pondering in her heart? I’m sure it was the daily Christian decision to maintain faithfulness and obedience, the daily decision to take God’s path even though it means leaving our own. We might call that losing one’s life in order to save it. We might call it bearing one’s cross and following Christ.
Today is the day when the first such decision was made by the first follower of Christ, when the first life was lost in order to be saved, when the first cross was taken up. Today is a good day for beginnings.
And so I begin this work, wherever it may lead. I have just reached myself, a moment like Mary’s, in which the path I was on abruptly ended and I had to decide to accept God’s message or reject it. There was no option to simply ignore it and go on, there never is. The path must change. I suspect the end goal remains the same, but only if I now accept God’s message. I am not without fear, I am not without confusion, I am not with doubt, I am not without disappointment, I am not even without anger but I know that I am also not without God. I know that the same Spirit, who overshadowed the one full of grace, fills me as well. I know that the same God that was with her is with me, the same Emmanuel. And so I pray that with her I might also be able to utter in tones pained but powerful, those life changing, world changing words, those words which cry in defiance against all the voices of the world, flesh and devil which shout “Injustice!” and “Insult!”and seek to get me to force my own way, those words which the Mother of Christians first uttered today, and which so many of her children have uttered so many times since.
“Behold, the servant of the Lord, be it unto me according to thy word.”
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