July 27, 2025 Sermon

Traditions are funny things. In the scrubby, dusty hill town of Nazareth up in Galilee, there are two separate locations venerated for the Annunciation, the Gospel passage where the angel Gabriel comes to announce to Mary that she will be with child. The first is the Greek Orthodox Church of the Annunciation, and it is located over the ancient and still present wellspring in Nazareth, where everyone would come and draw water on a daily basis. The presumption there is that Mary, as a young woman, would have been the one in her family to retrieve water from the well for their daily usage, and it was there at the well that Gabriel came to her. You probably have seen images depicting this scene.

The other, just across town, is the large Roman Catholic Basilica of the Annunciation, and it is centered over the grotto home, hewn out of rock, that is historically associated with the parents of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Anna and Joachim. And so there is, in the Western Christian tradition, this association of her parents with the Annunciation.

Now, where Anna and Joachim come from is a little bit of a tenuous connection. We don't have their names anywhere in scripture, but as early as the second century and maybe possibly even late first century, there's an association of those names with the parents of the Blessed Virgin Mary and a veneration of them in their role in raising her up. We also have traditions sort of like Elizabeth and Zachariah of Anna and Joachim being of an advanced age themselves when they conceived the Blessed Virgin. So there are all sorts of echoes and kind of memories of history and the past as well. One reason why we hear this great narrative of Abraham and Sarah, that is a motif throughout Scripture, of faithfulness being rewarded even at a latter and late stage in life.

But when we come to ask what the impact of their life, of their witness has on us today, that is the witness of Anna and Joachim, I think we're kind of left with an uncertainty there, especially if we limit ourselves to the Annunciation. More provocatively, more profoundly, I think we know something of them in a passage that comes just after this. A little bit later on in the first chapter of Luke, Mary leaves this experience of the Annunciation and travels down into Judea to visit her cousin Elizabeth. And there, at that moment of the two connecting, we have what is referred to as the Song of Mary, the Great Magnificat.

And I want to suggest to you all today that in listening closely to Mary's song, we have a sense of the values that Anna and Joachim held, the ways that they shaped and formed her in her faith so that she would be able to be the person that God needed her to be. Beginning in verse 46 of Luke's Gospel, in the first chapter, we hear, "And Mary said, 'My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior. For he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely from now on all generations will call me blessed. For the mighty one has done great things for me and holy is his name. His mercy is on those who fear him from generation to generation. He has shown strength with his arm. He has scattered the proud and the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty. He has helped his servant Israel in remembrance of his mercy, according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and his descendants forever.'"

So what do we hear in all of that? First, we have this sense of proper orientation. The place of departure for everything else is worship, is magnification of the Lord, is rejoicing in God's presence, in the creative power that has brought us about, in experiencing that love, honoring it, and worshiping it. But then, we have the second turn towards humility. "The mighty one has done great things for me." That it's not what we do ourselves. It's not the accomplishments we have in our lives. It's the places in which we can be humble and open to God's presence in our lives and the things that that presence, that work on us brings about. And what is that work of fruitfulness when we are humble? When we are open? When we are the vessels that God asks us to be? They are the fruits of justice: of lifting up the lowly, of scattering the proud in the thoughts of their hearts, of filling the hungry with good things.

Those are acts of God, the power of God righting the wrongs of this world. But so often, that act of God is manifested through us, through us, the church, through us as individual Christians, being the humble vessels of his work in our lives, the motivation, the activation of us to do those works of charity and love that we are called to do. And then it is a return after humility, after action, after care. It is the return to remembrance, to the memory of what God has done and what God will continue to do in the future. The promise that he has not made just in the past, but the promises he continues to make for us going on forever.

It's remarkable that we have this profound and powerful commitment and promise because not unlike what we experience today in our current climate and world, the first century Palestine that Jesus was born into, that Mary was raised up in, was one that was very and difficult in its own way. The Jews of the first century were very much under the oppressive thumb of the Roman Empire. It was very much a time of struggle, of pain, of suffering. And there's an easy impulse to be cynical in those moments of fraughtness. But instead of cynicism, Mary expresses optimism. Optimism for the good things that are promised, the good things that can be, and frankly, the good things that are in the very moment of this present state in her life. When it would be so very easy to be angry, to be distressed, to give up, she turns that into goodness, into charity, into love and celebration. And Anna and Joachim, the unnamed hidden forces in the background, surely must have formed and shaped her to respond in that very way.

And today, as we celebrate and honor them, and as we lift up especially our patron mother, Saint Anne, I invite us to be present to those places in our lives where not only can we hear and be instilled with the values of the Magnificat for ourselves, but to be mindful of the way that we shape and form others and the values that we express to them and how we lift them up and make them better attentive and better responders to the work that God is doing in their lives.

Many years ago now, when I was in my mid-twenties, I had a passion job. I was the religious outreach director for the Arkansas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. I've talked some about that before. It was me, an Episcopalian, a young Jewish guy who was our executive director and the legal force behind the work, and then a whole bunch of really salty and hard-edged Roman Catholic nuns who kept us focused on what we were doing. But that job, in as much as I loved it, didn't pay very much. So I was a barista at Starbucks at the same time. It got me insurance, it paid the bills. And I happened to befriend one of my co-workers. I have to admit, I actually don't even remember his name. It was the kind of thing that I would go and do for a few hours, then go home and focus on the place that really brought me nourishment and fulfillment.

So all of that period of life ends. Julie and I move out here. We start graduate work. And sometime after we had moved out here, we went back to Arkansas for a friend's wedding. And during the reception, this same young man came up to me. I had really not even paid attention and had kind of forgotten him. I didn't recognize him when he addressed me. And apparently, in those conversations and talks that we had, in that little side gig I had at Starbucks, I profoundly impacted him. He had decided to go back to college and finish his degree. He had gone on and really focused on the things that were valuable and meaningful in his life. And he profusely thanked me for the ways in which our time together had helped him see the clarity of what he was called to do.

I was floored. I hadn't given him a second thought. It had been a totally unintentional and inconsequential experience for me. And yet, I had very much impacted and shaped his life. And I think in some ways we can very much be that same kind of presence in the world around us. Sometimes we are the Anna and Joaquins, the silent, sometimes forgotten presences. That even in our humility and faithfulness and the work that we do, the work that may go unrecognized, nevertheless has an impact far beyond us, a goodness and grace that exudes out in waves far beyond what we are capable of seeing or imagining.

And so this morning as we celebrate their legacy, as we memorialize them and lift them up as the faithful servants that they were, may we glorify in the things that they show us through their daughter, our mother, the Blessed Virgin. But may we too take inspiration from their humility. See the places of impact that we can have, even if they're seemingly inconsequential or unnoticeable. May we have the faithfulness and humility to keep on doing what we are called to do. And recognize that in our witness, there may be ripples and effects that long outdate us, that go far beyond what we can even imagine. And may we have the charity of spirit, the fulsomeness of faith, to honor and respect that. And never more come back to the memory as the Blessed Virgin does of God's promises, remembering that even in dark times, even in uncertain times, he will be with us. His mercy will extend over us. And the promises he made to our ancestors remain the promises to us now and always. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.