Like JN last week, LK is definitely marginal to MK, but in the spirit of our title, let's see what we can find out there.

Rather than using it as a softening up ready for Christmas, this LK passage cries out for better  treatment. It's a very disturbing, disrupting passage; for Mary, &, by implication, Joseph. Our God is a disturbing, disrupting God. Not the God of peace & joy & all that sort of thing we usually preach at Christmas. Christmas is a disruptive event, & can take place only because Mary (& Joseph!) are prepared to have their lives disrupted by & for God. 'Get a life' takes on new & deeper meaning when Gabriel confronts Mary, &, after some bewilderment, Mary 'goes for it'! Do we need to bring a different perspective to our Christmas preaching, even if it puts comfortable noses out of joint?

Note, too, that though the higher-ups & heavies, political & religious will be threatened as events unfold, the story starts way out in the margins of life with one of God's little ones, the nobodies. (Christmas is a way-out story in more ways than one!) It spreads to her betrothed, then no doubt bounces around among their families. There will be no congratulations. Only, indubitably, reproah & shame! Christmas disruptive? Shameful? Surely we can all connect with one or other aspect, even both, if we're at all connected with our own family goings-on?

Mary's choice of the word 'slave' ('hand-maid', & 'servant' are a bit too soft an option) in her eventual response confronts us with another dimension of disruption. To those of us who live in a democracy (give or take a little!) slavery is inconceivable. We see ourselves as volunteers in God's service, free to opt in & drift out of God's service at will. Mary knows it's not like that, but she also knows, or is prepared to risk finding out, the 'whose service is perfect freedom' bit as the old collect put it. As we live in the light thrown by today's passage, out there in our own margins, isn't  much of our talk of freedom just talking through our hat. Unless, that is, & until we have given up any thought of freedom in favour of becoming God's slave. Then to find we've become perfectly free in God's service. But that's not democratic, many will cry!

We might summarise the Advent Gospels as (1) Social Disruption - earthly & apocalyptic; (2) Baptismal Disruption - for a change of heart; (3) Messianic disruption - "He's arrived!" ; & (4) The Disruption of Slavery (or, 'The Cost of Discipleship', as Bonhoeffer put it). Which leaves me, now, pondering how to disrupt Christmas! But that's really God's job, not mine.