Readings: 2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16; Canticle 15; Romans 16:25-27; Luke 1:26-38

When I was a child, one of the things I looked forward to about visiting my Grandma Countryman was an old contraption called a “stereopticon.” The stereopticon wasn’t one of the prime attractions, the foremost of which was grandma herself, and, at a level not too far down from grandma, her chicken stew with home-made noodles. But the stereopticon was fascinating. If you’ve not seen one, it was like looking through binoculars that had a rod pointing outward from the bottom of them. And there were cards, each with two photographs on it—the same scene, side by side—that you put into a holder on the rod. And you could move the card in and out along the rod. In most positions, all you saw was a blur, but at just the right point, they sprang into three-D. 

Now, why am I thinking about this today? Several reasons. It’s getting close to Christmastide, which can evoke old memories. That’s one thing. And another is the fact that we’re still locked in by Covid-19, which is depriving us of time with friends and family. But our first reading today is also at fault in the matter. It gives us two pictures of the same thing that don’t really match up. 

David wants to build God a house. Nathan the prophet says, “Great idea! God will like that.” Then, next thing you know, he says, “No, not a great idea.” What could be the problem? Why doesn’t this whole story come into focus? We all know that the Temple at Jerusalem was the great focal point for ancient Judaism, right up until its destruction by the Romans in AD 70. How could there have been any question about building it in the first place? David’s son Solomon would do it in the next generation with full divine approval. Why was it okay then, but not in David’s time? 

And how does the Bible go about merging these two diametrically opposed parts of the story? Well, essentially, it doesn’t bother. As so often, the Bible doesn’t offer us a single, simple formula. It just gives us two sides to the question, side by side, like the photos on a stereopticon card. Let’s call the image “The Presence of God.” Where do we go to find God? How does God reside among us? 

We know that God can be present in a place, a temple, a church building. We sheep of the Good Shepherd have had some experience of that. I think we’re all, in varying degrees, missing the sense of God’s presence that we used to find in our beautiful church building, which we’re currently shut out of for the second time in recent memory. There’s a great sense of God’s presence there, partly the work of the architect, Charles Bugbee, and partly the work of a century and more of prayer that has hallowed the place. We understand the value of a temple. 

But as Nathan reminds us, there’s another way of thinking about God’s presence. We can find God trekking around with us and among us. Sometimes we go to God in a special place; other times, we find God coming to us where we are. All through the long years of wandering in the desert, Israel had a tent that moved with them. It was kind of like a temple—same floor plan, roughly—but is wasn’t some place you went to on pilgrimage. It was a reminder that God moved with you.

We sheep of the Good Shepherd know something about this, too, I think. We miss our church, but we’ve also been finding ways that God meets with us in our own worlds and in the community we still share in worshipping together from our homes or in taking counsel together online or in ministering to the broader world through Pan de Cielo and other ways. 

Two pictures of God’s presence. . . And how do we shift them along the stereopticon’s rod in order to get the three-D picture to pop out? It’s one of the ongoing challenges of faithful living. The Bible doesn’t settle it for us. It leaves us to look for the moments in our lives when things fit together and we know we’re in God’s presence.

So—a shrine where we go to find God or God coming to find us in our own lives? If the Bible refuses to come down decisively on either alternative, that may be in part because there’s also a danger in each of them. There’s a danger in temples by themselves. If we think of God as found exclusively in the temple, worshipped there with religious rites, we are apt to forget that God is also at work in the great world. And there’s also a danger in seeking God only in the great world—­the danger that what is available everywhere may seem to be nowhere. Like the air we breathe, we may take the God who is everywhere for granted and forget to watch for the divine presence. Then we’re in danger of lapsing into indifference, imagining that life is just a space to ramble through, with more or less satisfaction, when we could be finding it an encounter with awe and joy and grace. 

And all these reflections bring me to our gospel reading this morning—to Mary and her part in the story. When the prophet Isaiah had his great encounter with God, it happened in the Temple. When God transformed Mary’s life, it happened in her own house, busy, no doubt, with her chores. The standard image of the Annunciation in art genrally shows Mary at her prayers, startled by the appearance of Gabriel. Luke doesn’t say anything like that. Maybe she was praying—but given the nature of an average work day, it seems more likely that she was sweping or doing the dishes or mending a torn tunic. 

The angel says, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you!” And she’s utterly perplexed. She has no idea what this is all about. Her private space, we might say in modern lingo, is being invaded by the Holy without so much as a “Do you mind?” It’s a bit like Moses’s encounter with God at the burning bush; God just moved into his life and everything changed. And, in both cases, the results were of enormous significance, world-changing significance.

God doesn’t always walk into people’s lives with such drastic effects. But God does walk into our lives in ways big and small, a nudge to our consciences, a sudden new awareness of need or injustice around us, some recognition that we have gifts to give and could be sharing with others. . . . .

So, Mary’s story starts out as a God-meets-us-in-our-own-world story. But then something unheard-of happens: God proposes to take up residence in Mary’s womb. And Mary herself thus becomes a temple of a new kind. She becomes something impossible: the mother of God, the house of God. Her womb contains the Uncontainable. Pilgrims will come—shepherds and magi—to worship. Yet, she is not an immovable shrine, but a single human being, a woman, still moving about her daily tasks as her child grows inside her. She is God’s dwelling-place in the midst of this daily world of ours. 

This is the great mystery of the Incarnation. And this is a doctrine that I know many modern people find pointless—or, perhaps more precisely, meaningless. Christians of the Fourth Century and later got into big fights with one another over the exact metaphysical language to use in describing it,which can make it seem even stranger. But it wasn’t metaphysics that the earliest Christians were struggling to express when they first began using divine language to speak of Jesus. They were searching for a way to say that when they met Jesus, they sensed that God was meeting them—not just in circumstantial ways, ways in which any of us may become, for a moment, someone else’s point of contact with God. In Jesus God was always, reliably present, seeking us. God resided in Jesus. God risked taking on a human life in Jesus, with all the dangers and uncertainties that that entailed. 

And it was Mary who made this possible. Mary—the Tabernacle, the Tent of the Presence, living and moving among us in all our wilderness wandering. Jesus—the very presence of God, entering into our world as one of us. It didn’t mean that the earliest Christians quit going to the Temple in Jerusalem. They went right on doing that till the Romans destroyed it. They went right on seeking God in the synagogue as long as they were allowed to. They formed their own congregations. Eventually they built splendid buildings for them. They made pilgrimages to places famous for God’s presence. We can’t just do without our shrines. 

But we also know, in a new way, that God is loose in the world in another, ultimately more important form. God encounters us in our daily lives, in folk needing to be fed or clothed or healed, in folk who mirror God for us, in blessings that give us hope, in moments of distress that help us recognize our limitations, in friends who give us new strength, in enemies to be forgiven, in moments of awe and joy and grace.

Mary is the mother of all this for us because God came to her in her own daily life and she said, “Yes.” And that was a “yes” that made the whole world different. God asked for help from an ordinary woman, and she gave it. And as she said in her Magnificat:

[God] has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.

Surely from now on all generations will call me blessed.

. . . . . . .

[God] has brought down the powerful from their thrones,

and lifted up the lowly.

[God] has filled the hungry with good things,

and sent the rich away empty.

God is here for all of us—when we gather to reflect and pray, when we are at home or at work or enjoying a long walk or singing or drying dishes or serving the needy or whatever. We’ll be glad to have our temple back again, when that becomes possible. But God is not less near for the temporary loss of it. Mary has planted that truth at the heart of our faith. Jesus has confirmed it. 

Thanks be to God!

Preached at the Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd, Berkeley, California on December 20, 2020, the Fourth Sunday of Advent.