Grace and Truth: A word from pastors

Mom, what’s in your belly?” I asked my pregnant mother when I was three years old. “Oh, that’s your sister. You’ll get to meet her soon.” From the look of my puzzled and curious face, she realized her only child needed help understanding. “In a few months, you’ll have a friend to play with, a sister,” she explained. “Her name will be Cynthia, and she’ll live here with us, in our house, in the room next to yours.” I latched onto the idea of having a friend living in my house, someone to play with all the time. One night my dad woke me up and told me that they were headed to the hospital but would soon be back with my baby sister. I couldn’t sleep. With the night light as my beacon, I rummaged around in my closet, cataloging the games, sorting the toys, deciding what to bring to my first encounter with my new best friend. I expected endless hours of fun and wanted to be prepared. The next day, when I heard baby Cynthia in her crib, I walked over to her room with my collection of Hot Wheels and lined up the little cars along the edge of her crib. Who could resist racing Hot Wheels? My sister could, apparently. She paid no attention to my toys and me; she ignored my attempt at friendship. Rejected, I took my cars across the street to play with my friend Matt. Looking back, obviously I didn’t understand my parents’ announcement: that from inside my mom’s belly would soon emerge a friend for me. Neither did I know how to prepare for Cynthia’s arrival: that she would be a friend, yes, but not like I expected, not a friend like my other friends, not another one of the same. While I heard the announcement, I didn’t know what to expect or how to prepare for her life. During the season of Advent, we find ourselves in my position at 3 years old, waiting for the unanticipated, preparing for the unexpected. During Advent, we are drawn into a story that asks us to welcome the Messiah who defies our predictions and assumptions. The Christmas story invites us into a posture of wonder, of curiosity and confusion, of thinking the unthinkable, of believing the unbelievable. In this season of bewilderment, our guide is Mary. We follow the lead of a frightened teenage girl from a town of ill repute (“Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”) as she waits for what is not supposed to happen, the consequence of her unwed pregnancy. When the angel Gabriel says to Mary, “You will conceive in your womb and bear a son,” she can’t imagine what the announcement will mean. We can hear an undertone of uncertainty in her response: “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” Mary knows biology; she knows that sex comes before conception. How can this be? Gabriel’s announcement opens up a dizzying world of impossibility. Even though she doesn’t understand how this news can be true, even though she can’t imagine a baby in her womb, even though she doesn’t know how to prepare for the birth of the Messiah, Mary trusts the word of God’s messenger: “Let it be with me according to your word.” Like Mary, we trust God’s announcement, we live by faith in God’s grace, a grace that comes to us as an unpredictable gift, regardless of our preparations and expectations, regardless of our plans for the future, regardless of our sacred assumptions for where and when and how God is supposed to show up. During Advent, we relearn how to wait for a gift we don’t know how to receive, a guest for whom we know not how to prepare, a savior who arrives in an unexpected place: the uterus of a young, poor, unprepared and frightened girl. God’s presence in the world is utter gift, a gift of grace that unsettles our certainty, disturbs our sense of propriety and opens us to a world alive with new and strange possibilities—disruptive possibilities, perhaps, because they seem like our undoing, because we find them unimaginable, because they seem unnatural: God in human flesh? “For nothing will be impossible with God,” the angel says. And with Mary we pray, for ourselves, for our church: “Let it be done.”