The last couple of hours before company arrived were always a mad frenzy at my house growing up. Maybe yours too? We each had our job. Mine was always sweeping out the entryway (I think partly because it kept me out of the way). In eager expectation, we cleaned the house and seemingly surface in it to prepare our home for the guests who were coming.
I understand it better now. But I have to admit: as a kid, I didn’t really see the point of all that cleaning. After all, our guests knew that we lived there. Why should we be trying to make it look like we didn’t? “But we want the house to look NICE for them,” my mom would remind me. And I would roll my eyes and get back to sweeping. But mom had a point.
And I mean, maybe there was an element of vanity at play—wanting to keep up appearances and make a good impression. Lord knows none of us are immune to that sort of thing. But I think the familiar ritual of cleaning for visitors also points to a natural desire to welcome our guests by preparing a space that reflects our love and respect for them.
We see this impulse in action with David in today’s reading from Samuel. David is livin’ the dream. His enemies have been subdued, and he’s settled into a grand palace. But one day he stops and realizes that, while he’s living in a palace, the Ark of the Covenant—the symbol of God’s presence, the site of God’s presence with Israel—it’s still kept in the Tabernacle. This is the same Tabernacle the Israelites schlepped through the wilderness. It’s a tent… A nice tent… A sacred tent… But still a tent. And that doesn’t seem right! That a human king should live in a mansion while his God camps out in a tent?
So David makes up his mind to build God a temple—a grand house fit for divine splendor. It’s a great plan. Even Nathan is on board, and he’s a prophet—(not a caste of characters who are typically gung-ho about kings’ ambitions). This ambition seems like a praiseworthy one, though. So Nathan says, “Go, do all that you have in mind; for the Lord is with you.” David’s gotten the green light, and he’s good to go…until God intervenes.
Before long, Nathan comes back and puts a hold on David’s plan. God’s got something else entirely in mind. Not once—God reminds David through Nathan the prophet—did God tell the Israelites wandering in the desert that they should build a grand temple out of cedar, as though the Tabernacle were an unworthy dwelling for God’s presence. Moses and the elders of Israel did not take it upon themselves to build a stationary house for God. And neither should David. In fact, not only is David not going to build God a house, God is the one who’s going to build David into a house—a house and a kingdom that will be established forever.
It’s not that David’s creative impulse is bad. He wants something good—to prepare a suitable dwelling to honor his God. But the problem is that David misunderstands what kind of dwelling God wants. And we read this story today, as we look with expectation to the birth of our Savior, because in the Incarnation, God reveals that while temples of cedar are all well and good, God is most interested in a totally different sort of mansion.
See, in today’s Gospel, we hear God reprise Their promise to David: “You’re not going to build me a house; I’m going to build you and your descendants after you into a house for myself—a house unlike anything you might expect.” Today, in the example of the Mother of God, we see the kind of temple the Lord truly desires. God tells David ‘no’—not because what he desired was bad, but because an even greater ‘yes’ was still in store. And in that ‘yes,’ uttered by the Blessed Virgin Mary, we hear what it means to build a dwelling truly fit for God. Today we learn again that God doesn’t intend to dwell in cedar-paneled temples erected by kings out of (earnest) ambition. The Lord our God, the King of the Universe, chooses to dwell in the womb of a young woman named Mary, who welcomes her God with bold humility.
That bold humility—that spirit with which Mary welcomes God’s favor and proclaims God’s great deeds—that is how God wants us to build Them a temple. Today we see Mary become that unthinkable dwelling—the house of God that David couldn’t even conceive of. Mary’s open heart—her total willingness to be part of God’s plan—is the door through which the long-awaited kingdom which God promised to David finally breaks into this world. Mary’s womb is the throne from which Jesus—the Son of David—will rule, lifting up the lowly and filling the hungry with good things.
From the beginning of time, God has intended for Mary to be the living Tabernacle of God’s Incarnate Word; so that it would be through her—not the efforts and intentions of men—that God would dwell among mortals and turn the world upside down. So when Gabriel visits Mary with a message and declares to her that God intends to make all things new, Mary is ready. She has prepared herself and fixed her desires on the promises that God made to her ancestors. She is ready to say ‘yes’—to welcome God’s Word into her heart and her womb, to become a temple of God’s ineffable justice and love made present—made flesh—in her baby boy, Jesus.
As her children—as the very members of her Son Jesus—we Christians are called to share in this single-hearted openness right alongside Mary. Our opening collect today invites us into a life of preparing ourselves daily to welcome the Word with the same bold humility as the Mother of God, so that Christ can be born in each of our hearts, just as he was born in the Virgin Mary’s womb. God strengthens us and purifies us by Their “daily visitation”—by meeting us, day after day, right where we are, in the Words of Scripture, in the Sacraments of the Church, and in the faces of our Neighbors around us.
And as we approach the climax of this season of Advent, Mary shows us how to respond to this daily visitation from God, how to prepare for Christ’s coming—how to prepare the kind of house, the kind of temple, that God truly desires to dwell in. God’s inviting us to set aside both our delusions of grandeur and our self-flagellation and to embrace the bold humility we see Mary embody. God is calling us to see ourselves clearly—not as the world sees us, but as we are in God’s eyes: lowly and weak and awaiting God’s promises, but nevertheless treasured and honored just as we are. God is calling us to cultivate Mary’s single-hearted devotion, not desiring power, security, or others’ good opinions, but desiring only to help birth God’s loving justice in the world.
Company’s coming—in the person of Jesus. And God is calling us to prepare—to welcome the Spirit who visits us daily, transforming us into more than we could ever be on our own. So that with the Mother of God we can build and become the temple that God promised to David—the temple prepared for God’s Son from before the foundation of the world.
Company’s coming—and it’s time to prepare. So that when Christ arrives we can sing with his Mother: The Lord has looked with favor on Their lowly servants. From this day all generations will call us blessed. For the home of God is among mortals. And God has prepared us as a house, a mansion, a tabernacle for the Word made flesh.
Company’s coming.
How will you prepare?