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Lord, open your Word to our hearts this Easter,

and our hearts to your Word always.  AMEN.

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The Weight of Wings, by Christine Woolgar

“Tread lightly,” you said,
And I did.
But still she heard me touch the earth.

“Greet her,” you said,
And I did.
But still my words seemed strange to her.

“Reassure her,” you said,
And I did.
But still her eyes were poised upon me.

She saw my feathers ruffling at the softest breeze,
And yet she knew my wings were heavy.
The contradiction didn’t seem to trouble her.

“Tell her,” you said,
And I did.
But still she examined my words.

“Explain to her,” you said,
And I did.
Though I still long to look into these things.

“Listen to her,” you said,
And I did.
And I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was.

I did everything you asked,
And now my wings are tired.
But, as you’ll know, that’s the cost of treading lightly.

‘The cost of treading lightly’.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian, martyred at the end of the Second World War, wrote a book called, ‘The Cost of Discipleship’, in which he discussed what he called ‘Cheap Grace’.

Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate…  Costly grace is the Gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a [person] must knock.

But he could equally well have written and spoken about ‘The Cost of Love’, ‘Costly Love’.  For where there is true love, there is always a cost.

We’re in the Octave of Easter, focussing chiefly on the Resurrection of Christ, but this afternoon, suddenly, we’re thrust back to his Incarnation, in this delayed, or transferred, ‘Feast of the Annunciation of Our Lord to the Blessed Virgin Mary’, to give it its full title.  The Annunciation can’t be celebrated in Holy Week or Easter Week, so tomorrow is the first day to which it can be transferred from March 25^th, nine months before Christmas Day.

And yet it’s good to be forced to move between Incarnation and Resurrection, because, of course, they are all part of the same great sweep of Salvation History, the pattern of God’s love ‘for us and for our Salvation’.

‘Where there is true love, there is always a cost’.  We see that in Creation, Incarnation, Resurrection and the whole story of God’s love for us.

Nearly 50 years ago, the great WH Vanstone wrote a book which had a huge impact on a generation of clergy and theologians.

‘Love’s Endeavour, Love’s Expense’ is a concise but exacting meditation expressing its author’s conviction that ‘to love is to create and to create is to suffer’.

For Vanstone, God is not some inscrutable or imperious monarch detached from his handiwork, but one who is passionately involved in the laboured endeavour of integrating tragedy — that which has gone wrong — into the overall divine purpose…  The world is not to be understood as a pleasing bauble in the hands of the Almighty. It is a costly, precarious thing, for ever caught between the possibilities of triumph or tragedy, and calling forth from God unceasing commitment [Rod Garner, ‘Love without a Price Tag’, CT, 14/IV/22]

Vanstone describes true love as ‘Limitless, precarious, and vulnerable’ [Love’s Endeavour, Love’s Expense, p. 53].

We see that in the Annunciation, when God chooses to make himself vulnerable by handing himself over, as it were, to a young woman, possible a girl, named Mary, in the pretty obscure village of Nazareth. We see that in the Annunciation, when Mary chooses to make herself vulnerable by handing herself over, as it were, to the will of God and saying, ‘Yes’.

In part of her poem, Annunciation, Denise Levertov puts it like this:

Called to a destiny more momentous
than any in all of Time,
she did not quail,
only asked
a simple, ‘How can this be?’
and gravely, courteously,
took to heart the angel’s reply,
perceiving instantly
the astounding ministry she was offered:

to bear in her womb
Infinite weight and lightness; to carry
in hidden, finite inwardness,
nine months of Eternity; to contain
in slender vase of being,
the sum of power –
in narrow flesh,
the sum of light.
Then bring to birth,
push out into air, a Man-child
needing, like any other,
milk and love –

but who was God.

This was the moment no one speaks of,

when she could still refuse.

A breath unbreathed,

Spirit,

suspended,

waiting.

She could have said ‘No’, but she didn’t – instead she said, ‘Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word’ [Lk. 1:28].

What might we reflect on at this Feast of the Annunciation?  I think we’re fairly safe in assuming that we won’t be asked to take on anything quite as momentous as Mary was when the Angel Gabriel visited her that day.

But there will be other tasks to which we are called, to which we also can respond, ‘Yes’, or ‘No’.  And more than that, we’re called to model the ‘Limitless, precarious, and vulnerable’ love, which Vanstone describes, to live out the ‘Costly Love’, which I’ve derived from Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Denise Levertov again:

Aren’t there annunciations
of one sort or another
in most lives?
Some unwillingly
undertake great destinies,
enact them in sullen pride,
uncomprehending.
More often
those moments
when roads of light and storm
open from darkness in a man or woman,
are turned away from
in dread, in a wave of weakness, in despair
and with relief.
Ordinary lives continue.
God does not smite them.
But the gates close, the pathway vanishes.

[Annunciation]

We can only pray for grace that, like Mary, when these Annunications appear, we might be ready to say, ‘Let it be with me according to your word’.

AMEN.