Preached by the Reverend Canon Durrell Watkins at the Sunshine Cathedral on Sunday, December 10, 2006, at the 8:40 and 9:50 am services.
The grace of our Master Teacher — the love of God in the unity of Spirit — be with you all.
Heavenly Parent, forgive us as we only move toward you when it’s time for a baby of all things! Yet, you knew it would take something unexpected to get our attention. Be with us as we edge toward the manger again this year, both from curiosity and habit, pausing to kneel there because we are finally getting the message.
Still too often we only see Jesus as a tiny baby, an ancient myth. Lord have mercy.
We fail to see him as the Supreme Example of our potentiality. Christ have mercy.
We miss out on the experience of the Divine Peace he brings to our world. Lord have mercy.
In this very moment loving God, restore us to the joy of anticipation for the surprises you bring to us in the form of a tiny baby. Let your life be born anew in us as it was born in Mary. Let is flow through us as it did through Jesus, in whose name we pray. Amen.
The Second Advent Candle: PEACE
We live in a world where people are not at peace with one another or at peace within themselves. Many years ago, the people of God dreamed of a better world and hoped and expected that God would bring about their desires for peace.
Listen to the words of Isaiah the prophet:
“The Almighty shall judge among the nations, and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation; neither shall they learn war any more.”
Loving God: thank you for the peace that comes through Jesus the Anointed. Help us to be peacemakers in all we do and say. Amen.
Today we light the candle of Peace—the Peace that Jesus brings.
The second blue candle is lit.
How I Used Truth
A reading from the Light of Emilie Cady:
We all must recognize that it was the Christ within that made Jesus what he was, and our power now to help ourselves and to help others lies in our comprehending the Truth…that this same Christ that lived in Jesus lives within us. It is the part of himself that God has put within us, which ever lives there with an inexpressible love and desire to spring to the circumference of our being, or to our consciousness, as our sufficiency in all things… It is the “I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one”* of which Jesus spoke.
H. Emilie Cady, How I Used Truth, published in Complete Works of H. Emilie Cady (MO: Unity, 1995), p. 142.
*John 17:23
The Light of Wisdom!
Luke 1:26-38
26The following month God sent Gabriel the archangel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, 27to Mary, a virgin pledged to be married to Joseph, a descendant of David. 28The heavenly messenger said to her, “Greetings, blessed lady! The Holy One is with you!” 29Mary was startled, wondering what in the world this was all about!
30“Don’t be frightened, Mary,” the angel told her. “God is delighted with you! 31You’re going to have a child; you’ll name him Jesus. 32He will be famous, known as the Son of the Most High. The Almighty will give him a dominion like his ancestor David, 33with full authority over his people. His reign will never end!”
34“How is that possible?” Mary asked the angel. “I’m still a virgin?”
35“It’s like this,” replied Gabriel. “The Holy Spirit will come upon you — the power of God will envelope you — so this holy child will be called the Son of God. 36Your cousin Elizabeth is also going to have a child. They said she was unable to conceive, yet she’s already six months pregnant! 37So, you see, nothing is impossible with God.”
38“I’m the servant of the Almighty,” said Mary. “Let it happen just as you’ve told me.” And the angel left her.
I love Ethel Merman.
There. Now you know.
I mean, I feel close to you, close enough to reveal one of my deepest secrets:
I love Ethel Merman.
She was brassy, classy, tough and rough, full of life and still larger than life. She was strong, independent, self-reliant – or so it seemed to me. She didn’t need a microphone. Her voice could fill a 1500 seat theatre, all the way to the upper balcony. She faced her audience head on, flapped her arms in an overly exaggerated manner as if to claim all the space around her and to seize control of the magic moment at hand.
Elaine Stritch tells a story of Ethel Merman once stopping in the middle of a performance, right in the middle of a line of a song on stage, to walk off the stage and physically throw a heckler out of the theatre. She returned to the stage and picked right up where she left off as if nothing had ever happened.
She inspired me. I wanted to be the kind of strong person she always represented, the kind of person that was never defeated, even when she didn’t win; the kind of person who could face her own past, her own fears, her own mistakes, her own dreams, and belt out courageously, “How do you like those egg rolls, Mr. Goldstone?”
She could be campy, as if not afraid to make fun of herself, or just to have fun because to do so adds joy to life. The same person who commanded the stage in Panama Hattie and Annie Get Your Gun and Anything Goes and Gypsy wasn’t afraid to play a harping shrew in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. She could gracefully play the buffoonish bad-guy sidekick Lola Lasagna on Batman and even play herself with a wink and smile on That Girl or do a self-parody in the film Airplane.
In a time when female actors played nuns and widows and sex symbols, Ethel Merman played an Ambassador, a show biz terror, and a markswoman. She defied social expectations, revolted against gender stereotypes, and one thing she never played on stage or off was the helpless victim of life.
Now, as a youth, my adoration for, my devotion to Ethel Merman was well known. I was in rehearsals for a play the day she died. The entire cast was shocked when I showed up to rehearsal. To a person, they just assumed I would be too overcome with grief to show up. But Ethel wouldn’t have missed a performance or a rehearsal, and neither would I.
As a young person, struggling with issues of self-acceptance, trying to come to terms with who I was and what that meant and how I would live and love throughout my life, figures like Ethel seemed like messengers from God.
In the musical, Call Me Madam, a young man describes himself in ways that sounded fey or nelly to me when he was singing about being in love. He sings, I hear singing and there’s no one there/I smell blossoms and the trees are bare/All day long I seem to walk on air (light in the loafers much?), I wonder why, I wonder why?
And Ethel’s character responds with, You don’t need analyzin’/It is not so surprisin’/That you feel very strange but nice…She goes on to belt out, There is nothing you can take, To relieve that pleasant ache, You’re not sick, you’re just in love!
I would later hear in the depths of my spirit that I was what I was supposed to be. I would pray for God to make me other than I was, but in the depths of my soul I one day heard, “not even God can cure what is not sick.” But God had said that already, from a Broadway cast album, “there is nothing you can take, you’re not sick, [this is just how you] love.” Ethel prophesied an important message – YOU’RE OK, JUST AS YOU ARE. No wonder I loved her. She was an angel reminding me that though I was different and my situation was not always easy, I was favored by God.
I have been criticized over the years, I don’t mind telling you, for my “God is good and so are we” approach to religion. The critics will invariably mention some story from the bible where God acted with wrath and judgment. And I’m sure the people who wrote those stories truly believed the agenda they were promoting. They wanted to believe, and perhaps did, that God disliked their enemies as much as they did and would smite them. But as honest as it is for those feelings to be included in our scriptures, that is not the total witness of the bible. The larger witness is something better. And it is that larger, better witness that I find to be good news and it is that good news that I continue to share: God is good. So are we. Dare to imagine it and to enjoy the peace that it offers.
In today’s Gospel reading, a young woman named Miriam, or Mary, hears that same affirming message from God. A messenger comes to her and says from the beginning, “Hail Mary full of grace, the Lord is with you.” Later her cousin Elizabeth would confirm the message, saying, “Blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb.” The affirmation that came first from Gabriel and later from Elizabeth has been stitched into the fabric of every Catholic soul in the form of the ancient prayer that we call the Hail Mary. Protestants and Catholics alike are often amazed to learn that the entire first half of that prayer comes right from the Gospel of Luke.
Decades after Jesus had been executed, at least 2 writers, Matthew and Luke, felt the need to imagine how his life might have begun. We caught a glimpse of Luke’s vision of Jesus’ beginning today. A young woman, unmarried, discovers that she is pregnant. She is instantly disenfranchised, or at least she knows she could be. What if her family rejects her? How will she care for her child? How will people treat her child? What will become of her and her child? But Luke imagines an angel, no less an angel than the Archangel Gabriel showing up, to greet Mary with a message assuring her of her dignity and her sacred value. GREETINGS BLESSED LADY! THE HOLY ONE IS WITH YOU.
Luke’s creative imagination lets him think about how Mary would respond to this. What is this all about, she might say to herself. How am I blessed? How am I favored? How can I know that God is with me? I’m different. If people knew my truth they might treat me differently, might shun me, might reject me, might despise me, might ridicule me or even try to hurt me. And Luke, using the license that a creative writer does, has Gabriel respond to those racing, fearful thoughts: Don’t be frightened, Mary. God is delighted with you. Of course, Luke knew that Jesus had a powerful ministry and that a movement continued to be inspired and encouraged by his memory, so he knew that Mary’s child was blessed and that Mary was blessed to have given life to such a person and that she was no doubt instrumental in shaping the person he became. So Luke creates a story where that can be known up front: You’re OK. Whatever anyone else says, whatever has happened, whatever might happen, you’ve got something important to do in life, and only you can do it. God created you to be you and God loves you for who you are. And Luke’s Mary was encouraged, saying, “let it be as you have said.”
Mary, Luke, Gabriel, Elizabeth, Ethel, Durrell….hear it from whomever you will, the message is the same. Don’t be frightened. God is delighted with you. This IS the Good News. Amen.
