Vulnerable Faith

4th Sunday of Advent

Luke 1:26-38, 47-55

I asked Shelby to read one of the passages this morning, because I figure Mary was no older than 14 or 15 when she received the news that she was going to be the Mother of God – in the flesh. You noticed that Shelby may have been a little nervous – well, you’ve been where she was this morning.

Now, I need you to place yourself in Mary’s position this morning. I need you to imagine that you are a rather obedient Jewish girl, living in a country occupied by a great and mighty power, that you are already “engaged” to a man that may be twice your age – really just a little younger than your parents, and that you are confronted with an angel of God – Gabriel, no less – who announces that you are going to be with child, and that the child will be called the “Son of God.” Can you do it – can you imagine yourself in her sandals that day?

Much has been made over the centuries about God’s choice of Mary. Apart from what the scriptures tell us, we don’t know what kind of girl she was – what kinds of hopes and dreams she had. She was so young. There was so much that she couldn’t know. She was naïve, and maybe that worked in her favor (so to speak) when God chose her. We don’t know. There is so very much we don’t know.

We can suppose quite a lot – I mean, what does a 14 year old girl really know. Oh, I understand that they think they know quite a bit – don’t most teenagers – but the older I get, the more I realize how very little I know, and how very little those who are so very young really know. It’s not a slap on their mentality, or their abilities – they simply don’t have the experience yet, so they can’t possibly know.

I started thinking about this sermon nearly two months ago, when I gathered with some pastor friends in Kansas to talk about our Advent sermons. As they talked, I did a lot of listening – to them as well as to the scripture – and I became most impressed with how vulnerable Mary was – 14 or 15 years old, living in her parents home, not terribly savvy in the ways of the world, or of her faith. As a Jewish girl, she was not privileged to go to synagogue, as were the boys. So anything she had garnered about theological matters, she had picked up from her parents and from her girlfriends. She was about the bottom rung on the ladder in that society, and she was terribly vulnerable.

I have a suspicion that God knew that, and that there may have been something special about Mary and her vulnerability. I have a suspicion that her heart may have been more tender and compliant, while at the same time more confident and committed to that which she had been taught over the years – little though it was. I have a suspicion.

God needed a heart like that to watch over Jesus. Mary was vulnerable – certainly to the world. But I suspect the thing that made her special was her vulnerability to God. He needed someone like that.

I watch with great amazement people in our society these days who purport to be Christian. Too much of the time, their presentation of Christianity comes across as gross arrogance – an attitude that says, “I’ve got it figured out, and no one can convince me otherwise.” I see too much of that mindset in the world of Christendom these days.

My friend, Tim Youmans, wrote a song that I heard for the first time this week. Let me read the words to you. The title is “It’s Still Beautiful.

”Give me some ancient form, something a little bit worn,

With smoothed down edges that cut to the quick of my soul.

Give me a God to bear, like the little girl who was scared,

Who heard from angel, “Mary, you’re his favorite one.

”Under most advent wreaths, there are four secrets waiting beneath

One for the ruin and three you would never share.

Yet, God is so good for me, like mystical therapy,

It hurts just a little, but nothing good is ever free.

Hope, peace, joy, and love will find you

Mixed in with the layers that bind you

(Pain has way of clarifying everything).

From Christmas day to Epiphany

There are moments when you sometimes see

Your faith, in all its ambiguity, is still beautiful.

Second Naiveté, accepting some hypocrisy--

All the deconstruction gets slowly set aside.

The need to rebuild gets overcome

By a little bit of serious fun

That God enjoyed you enough, to become one of us. [1]

His song caught my attention because he spoke about Mary in that first paragraph. Did you hear it – “like the little girl who was scared?” Vulnerability means that sometimes we might be scared by the things that we might get into on account of our faith. Then listen to the chorus again – that last sentence. “From Christmas day to Epiphany there are moments when you sometimes see your faith in all its ambiguity, is still beautiful.”

I’ve watched my friend, Tim, over four or five years, but I have really gotten to know him better this last year. One of the things that I like most about him is his transparency. Tim is so transparent, so vulnerable, that he sometimes gets into trouble with his parishioners. It’s an obvious transparency – kind of a vulnerability to the situation. Last summer, he came over here at my request, and played the role of Jesus during our Bible School. He was great – you know, children see through so much of the façade that we adults construct. They were captured by his transparency, and I’ve never seen children take to someone so quickly. He offered to do something as a part of the “upper room/Lord’s Supper” experience we had in the basement. Rather casually, he got up from the table, and went to each of the children, washing their feet that night. Our boys had been being rather typical boys, and our girls didn’t know what to do with all of this, but as that experience unfolded, a quietness – maybe even a holiness – came over that room that night. And I noticed that the children started putting down their hurriedly built façade’s, and a new found vulnerability started showing.

I like what he says about the ambiguity of our faith. You know, sometimes my faith isn’t as strong as I would like it to be. Sometimes my faith is a little ambiguous. Sometimes I find that my heart and my mind conflict, or that my schooling and my experience clash – and in those moments, my faith feels shaky, ambiguous, vulnerable.

One last idea from his song. It comes from the last verse – He says, “Second Naiveté, accepting some hypocrisy -- all the deconstruction gets slowly set aside. The need to rebuild gets overcome by a little bit of serious fun - that God enjoyed you enough, to become one of us.” Sometimes, we take our faith so seriously that it becomes ineffective for the purpose faith serves in our lives. We construct, and build, and develop our faith to the point that we begin to masquerade and rant and project a faith that isn’t real. And sometimes, by the grace of God, God begins a process of deconstruction in our “faith lives” which brings us back to a point of usability – Tim calls it as a “second naiveté” - not taking our faith so seriously that we can’t actually live by faith.

When I first started thinking about this sermon, I was rather focused on Mary’s vulnerability. But early in the week, it occurred to me that God was the One who was really vulnerable in this story. God was the One who enjoyed us enough to “become one of us.” I like that idea – I like the idea that God experienced the kind of vulnerable faith that we experience when Jesus became one of us. Jesus – struggling with the decision to obey his parents, or stay in Jerusalem, arguing with the teachers in the temple. Jesus – not being really sure if the time was ripe to leave his mother, take off on His own, and begin His ministry. Jesus – not being sure whether He should really ask Judas to be one of His disciples. Jesus – wondering about how far to push the Pharisees and the Sadducees, all while living in Roman occupied Galilee. Jesus – struggling to the point of sweating blood, as to whether He wanted to do what God was asking Him to do, or what His human mind was screaming out for Him to do. Yeah, God became vulnerable when He was born as a helpless child in that cattle stall 2000 years ago, and in the realm of relationships, God is still vulnerable to us when He asks us to reciprocate by being vulnerable to Him.

That’s where we are, this Christmas. I asked you a while ago to put yourself in Mary’s shoes. Have you been able to do that? Have you been able to think about the kind of vulnerability that is required in order to find real intimacy with God? The “watch word” for the last Sunday in Advent is “love.” You and I hear a lot about love, but the Christian has one up on the rest of society – we have seen the vulnerability of God in giving Jesus to us, and we understand the vulnerability that God asks of us in our relationship with God.

I want you to do one other exercise with me this morning. I want you to close your eyes for a couple of minutes, and make yourself as vulnerable as possible to Almighty God. Could those words from Gabriel be for us? “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.” What if that kind of vulnerability on our part produced a deeper, renewed relationship with God in your life this Christmas? What would happen in your life if you opened your life up to the work of God in you? How might you serve God? How might you serve others as a means of serving God? Fredrick Buechner said that “vocation is where your deep gladness meets the world’s deepest need. Is it possible that this Christmas, we might make ourselves vulnerable to God in such a way that a deep gladness changes the way we live and think and serve, and that we might actually encounter our world at the point of its deepest need?

Open your life to God this day. Give God the kind of opportunity in your life that Mary gave to God. Then watch what God is able to do with your vulnerability.

Richard W. Dunn, PhD.

[1] Tim Youmans, “It’s Still Beautiful,” song, found at http://www.garageband.com/song?pe1S8LTM0LdsaSkaVGxYWg