In Between the Mountaintop and the Valley

Sometimes I think that it would be easier if life just unfolded in the neat and orderly way that we planned, if we were able to check off every little box and narrate every ending according to what we think should happen. Then, I remember that not only is my vision often too limited to plan for every possibility before me but also that more often than not it has been the moments that came to me as interruptions that have brought me to where I am today. In fact, my entire path to ministry was an interruption, one that has not been without cost but an interruption that I cannot imagine my life without. I’m sure you have your own list of “holy interruptions” – those moments, relationships, callings, events and situations that have shaken up your life, that have diverted from the script you had planned, but in retrospect have been orchestrated by the hand of God. If nothing immediately comes to mind, I invite you to take some time in this Advent season to slow down and think about them. For those interruptions are no ordinary inconveniences, they are divine appointments. One of the most beautiful things about these particular experiences with God is that they do hold us captive, as a matter of fact, they demand that we speak, that we consent, that we wrestle.

This model of holy interruption, divine visitation, and exchange is not at all new to the scriptural record. From Abraham, Issac and Jacob, through each of the prophets and great leaders of the people of Israel, and clear through to the apostles and leaders of the nascent Jesus movement of the Second Testament, God calls and humans question. So it is not insignificant that in Luke’s gospel narrative, not only does the angel affirm Mary’s life and status by calling her favored and blessed but also that in Luke’s gospel, Mary talks back. The context of her consent is a response to the question that was her first saying.

“The angel said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God. And now, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren. For nothing will be impossible with God.” Then Mary said, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” Then the angel departed from her.” – Luke 1:35-38 (NRSV)

Mary’s first saying is a question, one that seeks some sense of clarity about the mechanics by which God is going to fulfill the incredible promise of bringing Jesus into the world through her given the biological barriers of her circumstances. And yet, this second saying of Mary reveals that Mary does eventually consent. Gabriel responds to Mary’s question with further detail about what God plans to do to perform this miracle. Not only will God do this for Mary, but God has also already done the miraculous with her elderly cousin Elizabeth and opened her womb after years of being unable to conceive. I don’t know whether that new understanding would have made it better or worse for Mary, but what I do know is that to read her “yes” as quickly and simply as it flows in the text would be to dismiss her previous question and to distort her humanity.

Mary’s second saying is a “yes”, a commitment to a covenant with God, a consenting to having her life entirely upended and transformed by committing to the plan of God. I, for one, have a hard time relating to the idea that there was no struggle in that, no wrestling, no consideration of the dreams she may have had for her own life. I have a hard time believing that there was no equivocation, no doubt, no wavering, no weighing of her options, no vacillating in the knowledge that she was as free to claim the promise as she was to turn it down. In addition to the social dangers of her pregnancy out of wedlock, Mary’s pregnant body would have to continue to keep pace with physical labor demanded by her role as a homemaker in agrarian communal life. If I were Mary, without the benefit of millennia of retrospect, theologizing and political rangling, my “yes” would most likely be anything but loud and bold.

And yet, she still says “yes”. By her consent, she enters into a journey with God, one in which she will continue to discover more and will have to continue to say “yes” to the work of being an agent of God in the world. No matter how soft and trembling your “yes” may be, whisper it you must but please say it. There is somebody in the world who needs what you have to offer. Yes, you with all of your questions and doubts and obstacles and challenges and unchecked privilege. Your “yes” will not call you out your context; it will free you first to serve where you are. Your moment of divine visitation will cost you something, if for no other reason than you cannot pretend that you no longer know that there are great things planned for you. It is not a one time commitment, to stay on this journey you will say “yes” many more times. If you have the sense that you have stalled in the middle of the road, it may be because you need to go back and sit with why you started, remember what God told you on the mountaintop to keep you while you work in the valley.

After her answer, the scripture lets us know that “then the angel departed from her”. At some point for each one of us, our prayers end, our moments with God fade, the mountaintop becomes a memory, the holy interruption is over, and we must return to our lived experience. But if we take the divine mystery seriously, our experiences of God do not first change our circumstances, they first change our perspectives. As we look around the world as it finds us today – filled with rampant injustice that has been made too plain to ignore, the individual and collective strain of trying to survive multiple public health crises with little government support, systems that govern our everyday lives in such a way that we must remind ourselves that no one is disposable, memories of a “former normal” that in so many ways is unsuitable for return and little energy with which to imagine a way forward. Yet forward we must go, dear ones – recognizing that forward means up and down and around and around…from life building in the valley to visions on the mountaintop and back again until we have carried to their expected ends those great and marvelous things God has birthed in the world through us.