Luke 1:26-38

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. And he came to her and said, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.” But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. The angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.” Mary said to the angel, “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” The angel said to her, “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; he will be called Son of God. And now, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren. For nothing will be impossible with God.” Then Mary said, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” Then the angel departed from her.

On Friday when most everything was cancelled, I took the opportunity to begin preparing my little house for Christmas. Because of all the snowy weather this year, getting a jump on preparing the house has been hard, if not impossible. But because I had nothing else I could do on Friday, I went to the Safeway at the top of the Hill, bought a tree, asked the tree man to tie some rope to the end of it, and dragged it the eight or so blocks to my house.

“Keep on the ice and snow the whole way!” the tree man shouted after me as my tree and I made our way out of the Safeway parking lot.

It turns out that it’s hard work to drag a six-foot tree eight or so blocks, even if you do stay on the ice and snow. But as is often the case, hard work has its rewards—rewards like cars yielding you the right of way, just so that they can watch you and laugh, rewards like dogs barking at you in that they’ve never seen a person walk a tree before, rewards like the smell of a freshly dragged tree in the living room.

Preparing the house is oh, so important during Advent, isn’t it? Preparing a place where something wonderful can come to visit us at Christmas, even if that wonderful Christmas presence stays just for twelve special days.

And so it’s interesting that our first lesson this morning is all about houses. In it, we hear King David worrying about how best to house the presence of God. David, the shepherd turned king, we learn, has finally arrived and is now living in a cedar house. Why then, David muses, should God, the one who has traveled with him from shepherd to king to triumphant king, the one who has traveled with the people in the tabernacle sheltered by a tent, why should this God not at least have a house of cedar to live in?

And so David consults the prophet Nathan who initially tells him to do whatever he is moved to do about this.

But then, according to the story, God intervenes. God comes to Nathan in the night and gives him a message for David.

“Tell David this,” God says to Nathan.

“I, God, do not need a fine cedar house to dwell with you and my people Israel. I, God, have never yearned for or asked for a fine cedar house. David, I took you from living in the pasture, from following the sheep, to be prince over the people Israel; and I have been with you wherever you went. It is not your job to make a house for me to keep me with you. I, myself, am the one who chooses to dwell with you.”

Which in a sense is also what our Gospel shows us this morning: we have the familiar story of Mary, the peasant teenager, caught by surprise by an angel bearing the news that she, a seemingly unremarkable girl, will be the dwelling place, the “house” if you will, of the most high. We have the mention of her cousin Elizabeth an older woman thought to be barren and, therefore, useless, also housing another child who will play an essential part in the drama, John the Baptist, the one heralding the coming of God in Christ. And we have the song of Mary, herself, the Magnificat, a hymn to God’s liberating favor toward the lowly.

The lowly, the tented, the barren, the downtrodden, the unprepared as the place where or with whom God chooses to dwell over and over again. David, Mary, Elizabeth, you and me. God choosing to dwell with us, not because we have created a worthy, fancy dwelling place, finished and prepared, but because God meets us, chooses to dwell with us and with those who are not ready, who are not deemed worthy but who are loved, who are loved.

Most of us will prepare our houses in some way, won’t we, as we wait in Advent for the coming of God once again, a coming that is now only 4 days away. We will prepare our houses in whatever way we can in the snow, the slush, the mess that is life in Seattle this season, that is life at the end of 2008 in what has been a most messy, remarkable, challenging and surprising year—a year that most of us were not prepared for. But we will prepare our houses.

But know this: that after filling up our houses with wreaths and trees, miniature villages and candles, Christmas cards displayed on the mantle, lights and greenery, after filling up our houses with all these things, the way that we can most prepare for the coming of our God, the God of David, Mary, Elizabeth and Jesus is to empty ourselves, to make more room in our houses, to become a vessel waiting to be filled by the love of a God who chooses over and over again to be with his own, who chooses to live on this messy and unprepared earth and with us, his own people.

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