Luke 1:26-38

Our reading this morning is familiar, and not just because the Annunciation is such a beloved story. It’s familiar, because we heard a lot of the same story beats, and even words, yesterday, in Gabriel’s announcement to Zechariah, which directly precedes it in Luke’s gospel. We are meant to hold the details, and differences, of these two stories in mind.

I am struck, this morning, by how differently Gabriel responds to questions about his revelations.

Gabriel renders Zechariah mute for questioning God’s power. A miraculous, late-in-life pregnancy? You should know God can do this; Scripture shows that God has done it before. Why wouldn’t you just believe?

Meanwhile, Gabriel explains to Mary how God is acting through her. With Jesus’s conception, God is doing something new, something that may require at least a bit of an explanation. An act of trust.

God comes down to meet us on our human plane, taking on human flesh. But on this human plane, that begins with an act of trust. Gabriel’s explanation to Mary is an expression of God’s trust that, in Mary, God has found someone who will participate in God’s plan of salvation. And Mary’s yes, Mary’s consent to bear God to the world, is an expression of her trust in God, her trust that God will be with her through it all—through pregnancy and childbirth, potential shame and ridicule, fear and anxiety, suffering and grief. Trust that God will be with her every step of the way, as God is with her now.

The story of the Annunciation invites us, like Mary, to participate through our own trust in God.

But I am aware, especially this morning, of the other participant in this dialogue. I am aware of Gabriel, the angel of annunciation, who bears wonderful messages of God’s saving acts in the world, all bundled up into a simple expression of trust that his message will be heard, pondered, and consented to.

If in the figure of Mary we are invited to trust in God, in the figure of Gabriel we are invited to notice in what ways we too might be angels of annunciation. To notice how we too may bear messages of comfort and courage, of peace and reconciliation, of all the ways that God is at work in our world and in our lives. And, in it all, how we too may announce God’s trust in us to be participants in God’s purposes, co-workers in God’s ongoing creation.

Amen.