"Nothing is Impossible with God…"

Deacon Greg has posted his homily for tomorrow, and as usual, it’s a home-run, with real meaning and application to our lives.

…The Annunciation. Artists have painted it, sculpted it, and imagined it more than any other. It towers over the popular imagination.

You can speculate on the reasons why. It’s certainly dramatic: this is the true beginning of the life of Christ, the very moment when our salvation began. And it is a perfect marriage of heaven and earth, the human and the divine.

But there is something else to it that I think speaks to us in a powerful way in the 21st century.

It is this: the Annunciation is wildly, defiantly countercultural. It is rebellious. It is a challenge that is offered – and, to our amazement, accepted.

Gabriel comes to a virgin and tells her something stunning. She will bear a child. It is an event she never anticipated, one she never planned for. She’s practically a child herself, in a poor town, and she is being told that God wants her to play a critical role in salvation history. The angel makes clear: what is about to happen to her will change the world.

And in that moment, Mary utters her first words in the gospel…words that speak for all of humanity, in all our confusion:

“How can this be?”
…
On this final Sunday of Advent, Mary is challenged. And so are we. The gospel asks us to look deeply at the unexpected, and the miraculous, and the mysterious.

It asks us to consider possibility. And it asks us to look into our own hearts.

How do we respond to the Gabriels in our own lives?

How do we react when God suddenly knocks on our door to announce a change in plans?

When the doctor calls…

When the market fails…

This is an exhortation to belief, and to surrender. Yeah, those of us who call ourselves Christians say “we believe.”

But it’s one thing to “believe” and quite another to “surrender.”

Believing is the easier of the two. But surrender is what makes us holy.