September 7 · Forefeast of the Nativity of the Theotokos

Forefeast of the Nativity of the Theotokos · Read aloud

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The Church remembers more than one name on the seventh of September.

She remembers the Martyr Sozon, and other holy names. Those are true days. We will not tell those whole lives this morning.

Today she asks us to keep a Forefeast.

Tomorrow the Church will keep a Great Feast — the Nativity of the Most Holy Theotokos.

Today is not that day.

Today she lights the lamp before the feast has come. She sings the words that belong to waiting. She looks toward the girl-child God has been preparing, and she has not yet sung the feast in full.

That is how God works with His people. He prepares a place. He shelters the ones who wait. He does not hurry the door open before it is time.

On the Forefeast the Church takes out old words — the ones she will read at Great Vespers when the feast is at the door.

Jacob was in a lonely place, and he dreamed of a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. When he woke he was afraid, and he said, "How dreadful is this place! this is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven."

The Church hears those words and thinks of Mary. She would be the place where heaven and earth meet. She would be the house God prepared. She would be the gate.

Then the Church reads about a gate in the sanctuary that faces east. God enters by that gate, and it is shut, so that no one else may enter by it. The Church hears those words and thinks of Mary again — the living Temple, the east gate, the place filled with the glory of the Lord.

Then she reads about the house that Wisdom has built.

These are the Church getting the house ready. We will not turn them into tomorrow's feast before tomorrow comes.

The girl the Church is waiting for was not born in a palace, and her name is not first written in the Gospels. The Church has kept her parents' names, and their waiting, as her own tradition.

They lived in Nazareth of Galilee. His name was Joachim, of the tribe of Judah, of the house of David. Her name was Anna, daughter of Matthan the priest, of the tribe of Levi, of the house of Aaron. The couple was without child, because Anna was barren.

Among their people a house without a child felt like a house God had forgotten. They had not forgotten Him.

They reached old age. They did not lose hope in God's mercy. They had strong faith that for God everything is possible, and that He could do for Anna what He had once done for Sarah, the wife of Abraham. They vowed that if the Lord gave them a child, they would dedicate that child to the service of God in the Temple.

They had to endure abuse from their own countrymen. They never grumbled. They prayed. They trusted Him.

Then came a feast day in Jerusalem.

The elderly Joachim brought his sacrifice to offer to God. The High Priest would not accept it. He considered Joachim unworthy, because he was childless.

Those are the Church's words. We will not invent others.

Joachim was in deep grief. He did not go home. He went into the wilderness, and there he prayed with tears to the Lord for a child.

Anna learned what had happened at the Temple. She wept. Never once did she complain against the Lord. She prayed, and asked God's mercy on her family.

The Lord heard them when they had come to extreme old age, and when they had been prepared, by a long faithful life, for a calling almost too large to say: to be the parents of the Most Holy Virgin Mary, the future Mother of the Lord Jesus Christ.

The Archangel Gabriel brought them the joyous message that their prayers were heard by God, and that of them would be born a most blessed daughter, Mary, through whom would come the Salvation of all the world. The Church also says the angel told them she would be blessed above all other women, that she would remain a virgin, that she would be dedicated to the Lord and live in the Temple, and that she would give birth to the Savior.

We will not invent the angel's sentences. The Church has told us what the message was.

Obeying the instructions of the heavenly messenger, Joachim and Anna met at the Golden Gate in Jerusalem.

That is the scene on the old panel we looked at. Two people who had waited a long time, meeting at a gate. God had not forgotten them. He had been preparing them.

Then, as God promised, a daughter was born to them, and they named her Mary.

We will not tell that birth this morning as if the Great Feast had already come. Tomorrow the Church will keep it. This morning it is enough to know the name, and the promise, and the parents who said yes by waiting.

The child God was preparing would grow up to say a word the whole Church still lives by. When the same Archangel came to her, years later, in Nazareth, she said, "Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word." That is Mary's faithful yes. This morning we do not tell the Annunciation. This morning we watch God preparing the girl who would say it — preparing a house, a gate, a shelter for His people.

The word we heard this morning is a weekday word, not a feast pair: "a man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ." Joachim's rejected gift did not open the door. Faith did — the faith that kept praying when the Temple said no.

And the Gospel is a woman who had suffered twelve years. She had spent all she had. She came in the press behind, and touched His garment. She said, "If I may touch but his clothes, I shall be whole."

He turned. He looked for her. He said, "Daughter, thy faith hath made thee whole; go in peace."

Do you hear it? A daughter. A reaching. A shelter. Go in peace.

That is how God prepares His people. He does not wait for them to be strong enough. He lets the small faith that reaches be enough, and He makes a place for them under the shelter of the God of heaven.

The Forefeast hymn already dares to speak as if the child were here: "The barren woman has conceived the Theotokos, the nourisher of our lives." The Church can say that today, because she is getting ready. She has not yet sung the Great Feast. She is standing at the gate.

And today, so many hundreds of years later, we say the names once more, out loud, together — Most Holy Theotokos, and holy and righteous Joachim and Anna — and they are praying for us still.