Living in the in-betweenness

November 27, 2022 • First Sunday of Advent
Scripture Readings: Luke 1:46b-55 and Matthew 1:18-25 NRSV
Rev. Jeff Wells

[You can view the full worship video recording at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhRQw-qSRlo

Our lives are filled with dichotomies: joy and pain, beauty and suffering, great anticipation conjoined with anxiety. We experience great goodness alongside injustice and oppression. Hope coexists with despair. Our reality is almost never “either/or.” Rather, it is “both/and.” Moreover, we live continuously in a state of transition and transformation – in-between our current realities and our deepest yearnings, and always facing an uncertain future.

Today, we begin a new Advent worship series, titled, “Held Between Earth and Heaven.” Our journey through the season of Advent is a remembering and retelling of a story that speaks directly to our experience of “in-betweenness.”

In today’s message, I want to reflect with you on the fragmentary stories we have about Mary and Joseph as they sought to respond to God’s invitation to make risky choices and act for the good of the world. First, we need a bit more context to understand what’s going on in the Gospel lessons we heard. Earlier in the Gospel of Luke, Mary had a vision of an angel, who announced to her that she would conceive and bear a son by the power of God’s Holy Spirit. The angel told her to name him Jesus, which in Hebrew means “deliverance” or “salvation.” We know that Mary and Joseph were engaged, but not yet married. 

There are many important details missing from the Gospel stories of Mary and Joseph, but we can fill in some from what we know historically about the Jewish people and Judaism in Judea and Galilee at the time. Mary was quite young – probably 15 years old, which would have been a common age for marriage. She had never been pregnant before, let alone had a baby to care for. She was still living with her parents. How was she going to hide her pregnancy from them? Or from the neighbors? How was she supposed to break this news to Joseph and how would he respond? Mary must have known she could be disowned or even killed for disgracing her family and disobeying the strict rules of patriarchal society. She had no means to support herself. She was in a socially vulnerable and weak position. She could not know what might happen to her or to her son. She must have been very frightened and anxious.

Despite all that, Mary experienced her circumstance as a calling from God – as an invitation to do something good and important and as a challenge to have faith and be courageous. Regardless of how Joseph or either of their families might respond to the news, Mary was determined to go forward with what she perceived to be God’s invitation to act. She felt fear and courage, anxiety and determination at the same time. Mary was confronting the uncertainty and in-betweenness of life yet choosing to act out of the conviction that she was moving according to God’s desire.

Within a few days of realizing she was pregnant, Mary left home to spend time with her much older cousin, Elizabeth, who was also pregnant. Luke reports Elizabeth saying, “Why am I so favored, that the mother of the Messiah should come to me?. . . Blessed is she who believed that what our God said to her would be accomplished!” To this, Mary responded with her song of justice, liberation, and praise to God: 

You, the Almighty, have done great things for me,
and holy is your Name. 

Your mercy reaches from age to age for those who fear you. 

You have shown strength with your arm;
you have scattered the proud in their conceit; 

you have deposed the mighty from their thrones
and raised the lowly to high places. 

You have filled the hungry with good things,
while you have sent the rich away empty. [1]

Now, it is surely true that God had done great things for Mary. Through her faith and very likely good parenting, she was a strong and confident young woman. But is the rest of this believable? We know and Mary knew that God desires and tries to lead us to scatter the proud, depose corrupt leaders, raise up the lowly, liberate the oppressed, and redistribute the hideous riches of the wealthy. Yet, we know and Mary herself could see that these things do not always happen – God does not simply make them occur. She lived in a time when the Jews were under the thumb of a Roman occupying army; when there surely were many who suffered and died for lack of having their basic needs met. Mary’s song was a plea of faith and hope that God’s vision might come to pass – that the reality of her life and the lives of her people would be transformed. Her song reverberates in our own lives, where our own present reality and our deepest longings intersect with God’s deepest longings.

Then, we come to Joseph. In Matthew’s Gospel, he, too, receives a message in a dream from an angel telling him to wed Mary rather than sending her away. Joseph’s choice to follow what he hears in the dream is presented as a simple, straightforward decision. But in making it, Joseph was going against the prevailing religious law followed by his ancestors for generations, and quite likely against the ethos of his own family. I wonder if Joseph had qualms about raising this child with Mary knowing he was not the biological father. Did he tell his parents right away? Or did he keep it from them and then return from Bethlehem with a new baby? “Hey, Mom, Dad –have we got a surprise for you!” Whatever he and Mary decided about telling their parents, they must have feared how they would react. Imagine the internal struggle, fortitude, and faith in God’s leading it took for Joseph to discern a right way forward.

We could go on following Mary and Joseph on their dangerous, arduous, risky journey to Bethlehem. It was a grueling 90-mile trip that likely took 8 or 9 days. Bandits were common along this route, so they probably traveled with a group for safety. Moreover, this time of year, it would have been cold during the day and freezing at night.

After all that, they arrived in Bethlehem with thousands of other people to register for the Roman census. They were forced to spend at least one night, if not more, in a stinking donkey stall. That very night, Mary gave birth to her first child, Jesus. So, alongside all the hardship, anxiety, uncertainty, and danger, they experienced great joy, tenderness, love, and laughter. Perhaps one of the visitors that night offered some wine to celebrate – mazel tov!

Clearly, Mary and Joseph confronted the in-betweenness of life all along the way, as did Jesus and his followers throughout his life and ministry. They learned, as we all do, that life isn’t a binary “either/or” and it isn’t linear. No one, including God, knows what the future will bring. But each of us has a role to play, under God’s luring and guidance, in what will come to pass. In this way, the story of Mary and Joseph connects with the experience of all people in every time and place.

So often, we face pain, suffering, trauma, even terror in our own lives or observe them in the world. Yet, just as often and alongside of these, we are surprised by joy, love, celebration, generosity, creativity, beauty, and hope. 

With hindsight, we can say that the Advent story and the birth of Jesus are a premonition of the dream that comes alive later in the Gospels – the vision of the kin-dom of God that Jesus later proclaimed. We try our best to live into this vision today – partially, imperfectly, and always having to struggle against evil, injustice, oppression, and inequities of all sorts. Together in community, along with many around the world, we seek to practice the way of Jesus – allowing his Spirit to live in and through us. In that way, we see glimpses of the kin-dom, which is both already present and still far from being fully realized. 

I think most of us, at some level, would prefer to have certainty, to know what is going to happen next, to be freed from making difficult decisions that will impact – positively or negatively – the lives of ourselves and others. We would like to avoid having to deal with multiple simultaneous feelings that sometimes seem at odds with each other. But the “in-betweenness” IS our reality. And maybe the in-betweenness can never be fully “resolved.” We can never get to the point where we are no longer “already” but “not yet,” because if we were, there would be no room and no reason for growth, creativity, and change. It seems to me that God calls us to embrace the in-betweenness and embrace our role in moving toward the dream of the kin-dom, envisioned and striven for by so many, from generation to generation. 

The kin-dom of God is not yet here, but to the extent we learn to love extravagantly, learn to break free from systems and ideologies of oppression and destruction, we are moving in in-betweenness, on our way toward the kin-dom. As we are transformed by the experience, we are helping to transform the world and realize God’s dream for creation.

Copyright (c) 2022 - Jeffry Wells
All rights reserved.

[1] - Luke 1:49-53 (Priests for Equality. The Inclusive Bible. Sheed & Ward. Kindle Edition.)

            201 West 13th Street, New York, NY 10011               
212.243.5470