The sermon title suggests the human desire for an application of reason to a situation. The application of reason always seems to us to be the way through the murky unknown, some technological know-how which sets things in understandable categories, which downsizes the mysterium tremendum et fascinans to digestible bits of common wisdom.
To ask a question like "How can this be?" or "Why me?" suggests that we expect some humanly understandable reason for an anticipated event or a strange occurrence. The question itself is understandable. It has been said that the longest distance one can travel is from the head to the heart. Probably, though, the reverse journey is harder — heart to head — for it is uphill the whole way.
"Mrs. So-and-so, we are sorry to have to tell you that your father passed away in the night." "How can this be?" we wonder, "I was with him just hours before and he looked fine." Hard to move from heart to head at such a time.
The question does more than ask for a reason. The fact that it is being asked at all suggests also some underlying recognition that some things in this world just don't make rational sense and never will. Mommy says, "I love you." The child says, "But how can this be? I just broke your favorite crystal bowl and you have sent me to my room." Some things in this life defy reason, and the question of Mary to the angel typifies our human response. It is hope seeking understanding, heart being satisfied that it may never reach the head.
And what about the grandiose pronouncement of Gabriel, Mary's angel visitor? Many teenagers have trouble speaking with plain old earthbound adults. Why then would God send an angel who sounds for all the world like a frustrated Shakespearean actor — with big assertions such as that the barefoot fifteen-year-old country girl standing before him would become mother to the "Son of the Most High ... the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God!" (vv. 32, 35). Huh? Or as Mary might have responded as a modern teenager, "Dude, whatever!"
There is a lot of interest in angels these days. I'm not sure that much of it is really from any kind of Christian perspective, but I do suspect that the reason for much of it arises from a basic, human, subrational conviction that what we see with our eyes and understand with our minds cannot be all there really is about the universe and our place in it. There must be some force or power or forces which involve themselves from time to time in our world. Who or what are they?
Apparently, the entertainment industry is convinced that angels represent a non-threatening way to address the realities beyond our control or understanding. So periodically we have television series and movies about angels, there are books and magazine articles about how to contact your own angel, people who are producing drawings of angels they have seen, and an assertion that each person has available to them one or more angels to do their bidding. Before we find all this too encouraging, we need to remember that in the Bible, all angels are creations of God and they exist for the purpose of doing God's bidding. Much of our culture's fascination with angels violates this biblical view by conjuring angels who seem to be awaiting our manipulation.
So we may rest assured that when Mary addressed her famous question to Gabriel — "How can this be?" — she was not speaking with an angel of her own bidding. Gabriel was in every sense a messenger of God, placed in whatever place Mary found herself to do the work of God, and not the whims of Mary.
One way to approach an answer to Mary's question to the angel — and a good many of the deeper questions of our own lives — is to remember who the story is about. Did you ever think about the fact that the story of your own life, with all the experiences you have collected over time, that in each and every circumstance including this one as you sit here today, the story is really not about you or me? Your purpose for being, your birth, your life, your loves, your traumas, your relationships, your memories, all are only secondarily about you. I believe that in this story from the Bible, as in the sweep of the stories of our lives, the story is about God and what God is doing or working through us to do.
This story is not about Mary, it is not about angels; it is about God and the purposes of God. The reason we remember it better than the mundane stories of our own or others' lives is the spectacular response of Mary. I once heard an aspiring young Bible student ask, "I wonder how many other stops Gabriel made that day before he found a young girl who would say, ‘Yes.' " We'll never know if there is an answer to that question, because the Bible is only interested in the question asked of Mary, and her answer.
Now, if you are like I am, you will find the thought that Mary's story and life are about God and not about her to be disturbing, and even more disturbing is the suggestion that our own lives are not about us but about God. What silliness this appears to be on the surface. Our culture leads us to believe that in our lives we are free agents who do all the choosing for ourselves. This may be one reason that the missionary initiative of the Christian faith is leaving western culture behind and finding itself more at home in countries where more people are at home with the idea that some things, perhaps most things, are out of their control and they must trust that God will save and provide in his own way and in his own time. The ancient Heidelberg Catechism had it right in the very first question and answer of the catechism:
Question: "What is your only comfort in life and in death?"
Answer: "That I belong — body and soul, in life and in death — not to myself but to my faithful Saviour, Jesus Christ...."
Like Mary, we do not choose to be part of God's work in history so much as we are chosen. Mary was taken by surprise to learn that God had a plan for her, one that we know from this side of Jesus' death and resurrection was not without pain for this young mother.
But why Mary, why any of us? How can this be? In the end, we do not know why God chooses. It is clearly not because we are special. In fact, when God chooses in the biblical stories, it is often in spite of some characteristic which the world might find disqualifying: Moses was guilty of murder, David was too young, Peter was a simple fisherman, and Paul had been a persecutor of the very one who called him. One thing we do know, and that is that God works in particulars. God does not choose us in general, but chooses us in the here and now. When we are chosen, as Mary was chosen, and we ask how this can be, we never get a very good answer. But then, it isn't our story, remember, it is God's.
In the end, Mary wasn't chosen for her sake, any more than you or I are chosen for our own sakes. She was called to be part of God's work of saving people. God's blessings are still available to the world through people who hear God's call and submit to it as Mary did.
Friends, you are chosen of God, and that is why you are here. How can this be? We may wonder together, but we will never get a fully satisfactory answer. We will simply know that it is so, because God makes use of people in particular — rather than everybody in general — to bring the good news alive in the world.
God is up to something in the world. Those who carry the name of Christ are privileged to be part of the task. We aren't fully up to it of course, no one is more aware of our shortcomings than we are. But, as the angel reminded Mary, we, too, are reminded: "With God all things are possible" (v. 37).
This is the irrational season
When love blooms bright and wild.
Had Mary been filled with reason
There'd have been no room for the child.1
Amen.
1. Madeline L'Engle, The Weather of the Heart, (Colorado Springs: H. Shaw, 1978), p. 45.