Luke 1:26-38 "From Womb to Tomb - and Beyond"

         Many of you know that I was not here in church last Sunday because Joe and I were attending a wedding in Florida.  The ceremony was lovely, and the reception was wonderfully fun.  We became reacquainted with a few of our son Tim’s friends from high school.  I watched a young man about to turn 30 that I have known since he was in second grade take his wedding vows.  And, I will admit, Joe and I have not danced until 2:00 A.M. since college!  A point of pride it was – keeping up with the young folks!

         Because the wedding was not until the evening, we had a good amount of free time that day.  And so we visited a place nearby called “Butterfly World.” It turned out to be almost as awesome as the wedding festivities.  In addition to a museum that displayed hundreds of butterflies from all over the world as well as live insect and bird exhibits, we saw the lab where hundreds of chrysalises were in various states of preparation to emerge as butterflies. 

         However, the most amazing part of Butterfly World were the three aviaries where we shared the paths and foliage with thousands of live butterflies of all colors, sizes, and varieties – monarchs, swallowtails, blue morphos, green ones, yellow, red, and orange ones.  The experience was magical. 

         I was so aware that butterflies not only appear to be such delicate creatures, but they also evoke such a sense of freedom as they fly and flutter about uninhibited. And to think that they were caterpillars (can’t get much lower to the ground than that!) before their astounding metamorphosis!

         I do not know what it would be like to change from a caterpillar into a butterfly, and I am reasonably sure that the caterpillar does not give it a whole lot of thought the way a human being would.  However, if I were a caterpillar, I think I would be a bit apprehensive about being drawn so uncontrollably into the unknown. 

         Yet, I also like to think that I would be like Mary, who was only a teenager in Galilee when the angel Gabriel, traditionally God’s most famous messenger, suddenly stood nearby to her one evening as the sun was setting.  His task was to announce to Mary that, if she consented, she would momentarily make a hairpin turn into the unexpected, and her life would never be the same again.  Nor would the world be the same either - though the angel did not tell her that.  Nor did he whisper that even God held her sacred breath until the young woman gave an affirmative reply. 

         The story in Luke, of course, is usually read around Christmastime when we in the church are preparing for Jesus’ birth.  However, it is interesting to note that the Feast of the Annunciation (this remembrance of the conversation between Mary and Gabriel) takes place more or less nine months prior - during Lent - as we prepare for Jesus’ death and resurrection. 

         And so the womb and the tomb are inextricably linked.  The womb creates, and we are given birth.  The tomb re-creates, and we are re-birthed – or transformed.

         The story itself is short on details – as most Gospel stories are.  We know only that Gabriel managed to make contact with Mary, she who was engaged to be married and in the midst of wedding planning – having nailed down the reception venue and dinner menu and hired the band, but still needing to come to terms with her dress and the gowns of her attendants, the photographer, videographer, flowers, and just who would be making the wedding cake and how some of it at least would need to be gluten-free. 

         Mary could barely make out Gabriel’s heavenly form silhouetted against the twilight that evening. He was standing so silently by the ancient olive tree.  And so she was quite startled when he spoke to her. 

         “Greetings, you who are highly favored!  The Lord is with you….Good news. This is your lucky day. God has chosen you for a special blessing.” No wonder Mary was a wee bit fearful – as well as perplexed by it all. 

         “Congratulations!” Gabriel continued.  “You’re going to have a baby!”

         What??  Surely that proclamation was the most preposterous one Mary had ever heard.  How was she supposed to respond to it?  As one blogger I read this week noted, “Do you argue? Do you ask for clarification? Do you call 911? Do you say, ‘Who are you and how did you get in my backyard?’ Do you laugh out loud?

         (Our blogger continues.)  What God asks Mary to do will change her life forever.  Gone are the happy dreams of a beautiful wedding; gone are the days of sweet anticipation; gone are the carefully-thought out plans for the wedding feast;

gone are the hopes for ‘the most beautiful wedding to the most wonderful man who ever lived;’ gone are all her girlish hopes of a quiet life in the home she would personally decorate. Most of all, gone are the visions of a houseful of children conceived in love and raised with tender care.

         She will be married, but not before rumors spread through the countryside. There will be a wedding feast, but not the way she planned. She will have a home, and it will be filled with children, but over her family will rest an uneasy cloud of dark suspicion.  It will all happen, but not the way she expected.”

         The angel must have sensed Mary’s acute apprehension.  You see, in the midst of his proclamation, he looked down at her and perhaps gently smiled as he said (almost like an aside), “Do not be afraid.”

         And Mary, for her part (and perhaps this is why she is blessed even today) had enough trust in the angel and enough faith in her God/Yahweh that she was able to look deep into Gabriel’s eyes, put aside her fear, and come up with only one question – that of the mechanics of it, just how it would happen, she being unwed and all. 

         As our blogger writes, “In essence she says to Gabriel, ‘All right. I’m willing to do my part, but you need to explain how we’ll handle this one little problem.’”  And in that moment, the world was suddenly and irrevocably pregnant with possibility – in spite of Mary’s fear and the unknown she faced.

         Like Mary, it seems that we too have a lot to be fearful of in our world today – North Korea’s nuclear program and the increasing likelihood of its capability to strike the United States, our nation’s tenuous relationship with China, the security of our jobs, the world we will be leaving to our children if we do not wise up, recognize our role in climate change and dis-regulation, and alter our patterns of consumption – just to name a few.  The world is changing at a breakneck speed and often seems to be spinning out of our control. 

         It is hard not to live our lives in fear.  But that is how it is with any sort of change, right?  We encounter something new and strange, and we get confused and apprehensive.  Our usual routines are interrupted, and those pesky little alarms start going off in our head, a built-in defense mechanism that we all seem to have.

         And yet, just as the angel Gabriel whispered to Mary – “Do not be afraid” – perhaps we too need to take those words to heart.  Perhaps we too need to hold on, even if it is to just a tenuous tendril of faith, hold on to the belief that with God all things really are possible.  Or maybe faith is too much for some of us, and the best we can do is simply hope that we do not live in the best of all possible worlds.

         Maybe we need to remember – we who profess to be Christians at least - that in the darkness of the tomb, Christ was somehow resurrected, and we know that to be true because we continue to encounter him in the darkest places on earth – the back streets and alleyways, the homeless shelters, the soup kitchens.  We encounter him as well in the most desolate of times – the moment of diagnosis, the death of a child, the loss of a job, all those experiences when we encounter pain and such a sense of loss. 

         Maybe we need to remember above all that we are not the people God created us to be, and so we are called to come out as men and women into a new identity.  Like Mary, in spite of her fear, in spite of the unknown she faces, like Mary who answered God’s call to both trust and embrace the unexpected, so maybe we are called to personal transformation - in spite of it being filled with anxiety and unknowing, even as it is also brimming with hope – and, in the end, our only real hope. “Do not be afraid.”  To put it another way, maybe we need to remember the caterpillar and what it will become. 

         Do you know what happens inside that chrysalis before the butterfly emerges from it?  I read a fascinating article in Scientific American that described the process. 

         We all know, of course, that the story begins as the children’s author, Eric Carle, say it does - with a very hungry caterpillar hatching from an egg.  The caterpillar eats its way through many a leaf, growing more and more plump, shedding its skin to accommodate its changes in size.  Then one day it stops eating, hangs upside down from a twig or leaf, and molts one final time into the protective casing we call a chrysalis.  What happens next is nothing short of miraculous. 

         The caterpillar first basically digests itself, releasing enzymes to dissolve all its tissues.  It forms a sort of caterpillar soup.  But – and here is the amazing part – it is not all an amorphous mass.  Certain cells called imaginal discs – and only these cells - survive the digestive process. 

        There is a disc for each of the body parts a butterfly will need – antennae, wings, eyes.  These discs then use the protein-rich soup they are floating around in to fuel the rapid cell division required to form the wings, antennae, legs, eyes, reproductive organs, and all the other features of an adult butterfly.  Only then does the chrysalis split open, and the butterfly emerge.

         Perhaps that is what we, in a sense, are called to do – enter the darkness – like a chrysalis - with God – who beckons us with outstretched arms, holds our hand along the way, and always whispers “Do not be afraid.” 

         Perhaps we are meant to let go of everything we are – all the grudges we hold, all the resentment that barricades our hearts, all the forgiveness we have not been able to give, all the greed that grips us, all the despair that haunts us, everything that drags us down and makes us less that who God created us to be. 

         Maybe only when we do that can we be like Mary who, according to Lutheran scholar Karoline Lewis, “entrusts herself to a new self, to a willingness to imagine a future beyond her present, to embrace an identity of which she has little knowledge or understanding but to which she willing to commit.” 

         Maybe we are meant to let go of everything until all that remains is the divine spark that is hidden deep within each one of us - rather like our own imaginal disc.  It is all that we need to be truly human. “Do not be afraid.”

         Maybe we are meant to be like the caterpillar that emerges from its chrysalis when everything is put back together, and it is changed forever into a butterfly.  Maybe we too are meant to emerge, with God’s help, from the darkness in which we enclose ourselves, trusting that from that tomb, that chrysalis, that place of darkness a new identity will have been created. 

         I like to imagine that, just as the caterpillar has within itself all it needs to become a butterfly, so we have all we need within us to be transformed into that which God dreams for us as humans to be. I like to believe that there is a path, a process that will take us from womb to tomb – and beyond – and that Gabriel’s words are whispered to us as they were to Mary:  “Do not be afraid.’