I find our first reading this morning from Second Samuel an interesting choice by the lectionary committee for this fourth Sunday in Advent. We are fully in the midst of our preparations for Christmas, you might have been expecting something more Christmasy. But let’s think about this story for a moment, maybe there’s more here than meets the eye.
So we’ve got the great and powerful King David, chosen and anointed by God as ruler over all of Israel. David, if you remember, came onto the scene when he was just a boy, the youngest son of Jesse, and he defeated Goliath, the great hero of the Philistines, with nothing but a sling and a stone. This earned him a place of honor in the house of the then-king Saul. Saul had been anointed as king by the prophet Samuel but his faithlessness eventually caused him to fall out of favor with God and so David was anointed by God in Saul’s place. This, as you might imagine, did not go over particularly well with Saul, who spent the rest of First Samuel trying to kill David. But eventually David’s forces won out over Saul’s and David was anointed as the second king of Israel.
So here we are this morning in Second Samuel. David is at the pinnacle of his power. After years and years of war, King David was “settled into his house, and the Lord had given him rest from all his enemies.” He was the ruler of an empire that stretched from the Mediterranean Sea to the Syrian Desert and from the Red Sea in the south well into what is now Lebanon in the north. It was a vast empire, and situated as it was on the major trade routes between Assyria to the north and Egypt to the south, it was a wealthy and powerful nation. And so, with all of this power and authority at his fingertips, David decided it was time to build the Lord a house. Ever since Moses had first received them while the Israelites were in exile in the Sinai, the Ten Commandments, the most holy covenant in which God was believed to dwell, had traveled with the people of Israel in a tent. Over the centuries an ark, basically a large trunk, had been created to transport them, but other than that, God’s house was pretty, austere, shall we say. Build God a nice house, seems like a pretty appropriate move, right. King’s got a nice house, people are at peace, God should have a nice house as well.
David’s piety, his faith in God and desire to serve God’s will, certainly played a part in his desire to build a suitable home for God. But it seems like there may be something else going on here. Walter Brueggemann points out that David’s desire to build God a house may also be a bit of royal self-aggrandizement. A powerful house for the powerful God of a powerful king. In a time when wars were quite literally viewed as battles between deities, it would make a big statement. Don’t mess with me, look at the kind of place where my God lives.
But God told David, God didn’t want David to build God a house. God pointed out that through everything Israel had gone through, God had never asked for a house. In fact, God said to David, “I brought up the people of Israel from Egypt, I took you from the pasture, I have been with you wherever you went, and I will appoint a place for my people and will plant them.” And finally, flipping David’s vision of coming into his own on its head, God said to David, “I will make you a house.”
David, for all his good intentions in serving God well, was still focused on what HE was going to do for God, how HE was going to serve God, and HE was going to make God’s presence great. But what God reminded David is that God did not need David to be made great. And, in fact, God was not particularly concerned about being raised up. Because, see, here’s the thing about raising up God, it’s all too easy for it to become less about raising up God and more about raising up ourselves. Do we glorify God because God is good, or because we hope it will somehow earn us more credit or glory? Look how faithful I am, look how good I am at serving God.
So contrast this story from Second Samuel with our Gospel reading from Luke. “In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin’s name was Mary.” Right off the bat, we are dealing with a very different set of circumstances than we had in the palace of the king of Israel. Gone is Jerusalem, center of power. In its place is Galilee, a quiet, overlooked corner of the empire. And not just Galilee, but Nazareth, a tiny village in the backwaters of backwater Galilee. And the person in question? A girl child, in a time when a woman’s value was connected to the men in her life and a child had little value at all. A virgin engaged, but not yet married, to a man named Joseph. Her name, mentioned last, almost as an afterthought, was Mary.
So the angel appeared to a powerless girl from a powerless place in a powerless region and said, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you!” It seemed like pretty good, if unexpected, news, to be called “favored one” by an angel of the Lord. But the text says she was perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. In this moment I think we see Mary displaying wisdom beyond her years. She recognized something David never did figure out, that sometimes being the “favored one” of God is not all it’s cracked up to be. So she paused, perplexed, by this declaration of favor.
The angel went on and it quickly became clear that Mary’s hesitation was well-warranted. “Do not be afraid Mary, for you have found favor with God,” the angel reiterated. “And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus.” Then the angel said a lot more things about how Jesus would be great, would be called the Son of the Most High, would reign over the house of Jacob, and on and on. And I wonder how much Mary heard of that grand speech, or if these words fell on overwhelmed ears. Because despite all this bluster of glory, the angel just told Mary that her prize for being the favored one of God was to be an unwed girl-child with a child of her own. It may have sounded like good news to the angel, but to Mary I kind of think it was down-right terrifying.
I wonder about the pause that followed that pronouncement by the angel. I wonder if Mary’s voice quavered in the moment, if she hesitated, or if she found herself answering before she was ready, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”
As we sit on this last Sunday of Advent, in this pregnant tension before the coming of the Christ child, I think the juxtaposition of these two stories tells us something powerful and profound about the way God chooses to be born. There was no question that both David and Mary were God’s chosen. That both David and Mary were favored ones of God. That in both great work was accomplished and God’s glory was made known. But what we see in these stories is that’s God’s manifestation in the world is always in God’s hands and always to our benefit. God did not have David build God a house, because God wanted to be the one to build it. God came to a girl-child in a forgotten corner of the world because God is always showing up in the lost, the least, and the lowly. What we hear in these stories is that God’s presence is not dependent on us. We do not have to get it together to herald God’s coming. But in fact it is in our weakness that God comes. It is in our brokenness that God comes. It is in the quiet voice that steps forward despite ourselves and says I will try again that the Christ child is born.
Christ comes to us in the simplest of wrappings, in bread and wine, in water and word. In phone calls and hand-shakes and frozen hams. When we are scared, God comes. When we are unsure, God comes. Whenever and wherever and whoever we are, God’s presence is made known in our midst. And as Mary sung in the psalm today, in our soul and our spirit and our lives, God’s presence is magnified.
Mary questioned the angel who told her she would carry the Son of God. “How can this be since I am a virgin?” The angel, always the boisterous bearer of answers, responded, “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…For nothing will be impossible with God.”
The Almighty God, creator of heaven and earth took on flesh and was born among us. God came in Christ to experience the gamut of human emotion. God came in Christ to walk and teach and heal. God came in Christ to save us. There is something wildly impossible about a God whose love is so deep and real and vulnerable. But like the angel told Mary so many years ago, nothing is impossible with God. Amen.
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