Quick Summary:

These scenes we’re privy to this morning in the first chapter of Luke's gospel are so personal and the scale is so intimate; and we love Luke for that. Our longing to see God on a human scale, to get close enough to touch him, is insatiable. And Luke feeds that appetite.

In her essay, Pondering Mary, Peggy Schultz-Akerson writes:
"Mary knows the delight of opening wide to an emptiness within us that isn’t a void but a spaciousness. A void [implies] an unfortunate loss or lack. Spaciousness is intentional. It invites the possibility of relationship. It makes room for a holy hunger, a yearning to be filled with the Christ who hungers to come also to us. Holy hunger is arrived at by a decisive refusal to let the inner chambers of our hearts be filled with anything less than God’s word of life.”