We find in our four passages of scripture this week an amplification of humanity’s commitment to trust in God, and an assurance that, amid uncertainty and distress, God is with humanity: “Let it be.” “Immanu-El.” “Here am I.” 

In this week’s psalm of thanksgiving for deliverance and a prayer for help, we witness the words of the psalmist commiting to the will of their God: “Here am I…I come to do your will” (v. 7-8). The psalm progresses from words of commitment and trust to a closing cry for help in the psalmist’s distress: “You are my help and my deliverer; do not delay, O my God” (v. 17). Faith and fear, confidence and concern exist together in the complexity of making sense of God in our challenging realities.  

Mary does the same in our Gospel text after her meeting with the angel Gabriel. In the divine encounter, she is greeted with “God is with you!” Immanu-El. Despite her startling call she proclaims her faith and commitment as a “servant of God,” responding to the unfathomable news by an angel with, “Let it be done to me as you say.” It is easy for those of us familiar with this annunciation story to overlook the terrifying, life-altering, power-dismantling implications of this calling of a young woman from a small town on the margins of an empire. Let us explore deeper into the sheer scale of impossibility and empowerment that this moment of the Annunciation brings. 

This text is not solely an illumination of Mary’s act of submission and obedience to God. While her acceptance displays great faith, we lose so much if we stop here. Not only would the weight of the world fall on Mary’s shoulders upon hearing from an angel that her divine childbearing would inaugurate the ministry of “God with us,” but the social, cultural, and physical context in which she would bear this prophecy would have been heavily against her. Unlike her kinswoman Elizabeth, Mary was a young girl from a rural small town on the margins of political, economic, and social significance. Her status as a virgin, yet pregnant with a child, risked social ostracization and judgment. Her pregnancy would lower class status further as a poor, pregnant young woman in ancient Palestine. And yet, she says yes. Why would she? How can she? In the context of her positionality as a rural, young girl of low economic and social status, her openness to welcome a seemingly impossible transformation reminds us that there was much at stake in her words “let it be.” 

What does this say about the spirit of Mary and the nature of God? The liberating message in this text is that the Annunciation of the Lord is the beginning of the disruption of power: God Incarnate is chosen to be birthed among the powerless, the threatened, among those

placed on the margins. The power of God could have easily entered this world through the strongest positions of class and empire, and chooses instead the care of a young mother of Narazeth. The angel Gabriel calls for rejoicing at this news. Why could this be? 

With much at stake, Mary’s response to the angel’s call is also an embodied sacrifice of deep faith, paralleling the words of Jesus quoted in our Hebrews reading, “I have come to do your will,” (v. 7, 9). It is a commitment in faith to the will of God, a sacrifice of one’s own physical self, greater than the burnt offerings of animals that, according to the Hebrews text, are of little value to God. 

St. Benedict invites us to “listen carefully…with the ear of your heart” (The Rule of St. Benedict). Oftentimes in my community at Holy Wisdom Monastery, this is done by sitting in silence after the eucharist, after the singing of the Psalm, and after each scripture passage is read. As you engage with this week’s readings, what might you notice as you listen deeply? First, engage with the Isaiah text. Read through the text. Notice the voices in the text. YHWH, Ahaz, Isaiah. What do you hear from each of them? Who else/what else do you hear? Engage them with the Gospel text. Read through the text. Notice the voices in the text. Mary, Gabriel. What do you hear from each of them? Who else/what else do you hear? How about those mentioned in the texts indirectly? What might they illuminate/what do you notice in them? 

Mark Allan Powell illuminates how the story of the Annunciation in Luke follows the form of an Old Testament call narrative: Greeting, startled reaction, a call to not fear, commission, objection, reassurance, and confirming sign. Where in our walk with the Divine are we needing our own encounter of annunciation? What good and humanly impossible news do we need right now? 

• Imagine the greeting. Imagine your reaction. 
•  How might you object? What reassurance do you need? 
•  Is there a sign of this promise?

As we currently witness the erasure of transgender history and voices on government records and 

sites like the Stonewall National Monument in New York, we highlight and celebrate the life and liberative work of LGBTQ+ activist Marsha P. Johnson, one of the mothers of the Gay Liberation Movement. She co-founded the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries group, which supported houseless LGBTQ+ youth, advocated for those affected by HIV and AIDS, and was present at the Stonewall Riots.

Marsha faced poverty, homelessness, abuse, racism, and police harassment, and ostracization due to her public activism and LGBTQ identity. Despite the precarity of her safety, she energized a movement for LGBTQ+ liberation locally and globally, bringing attention to the AIDS epidemic, speaking up for the voiceless, and humanizing a community seeking authenticity, dignity, safety, and justice. During a time where LGBTQ+ liberation faced harsh cultural and legal resistance alongside a dominant apathetic response to those suffering with AIDS, imagining a future of queer freedom and thriving may have felt impossible to materialize. In all of this, Marsha found her call and commitment to trust in what was worth fighting for. Her ministerial life story is not far from the stories of the figures in our tradition who fought for the sake of love and justice despite the systems and forces against them. 

Marsha P. Johnson described her Christian faith as one where she experienced the Christ “Emmanu-El” (God with us). She said, “He’s like a spirit that follows me around…he helps me out in my hours of need and listens to all my problems and never laughs at me. He takes me very seriously…He’s the only man I can really trust.” 

May we contemplate what liberation looks like when we say “let it be,” despite all that threatens the birth of our freeing.