Let It Be With Me (Luke 1:34-35, 37-38)

Let It Be With Me

 June 8, 2025 - Pentecost Sunday

Luke 1:34-35, 37-38

By: Pastor Mike Conner 

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Then Mary said, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word” (Lk 1:38). This is the prayer at the heart of Christian faith, the prayer that opens the way for Christ to join us where we are. When the Holy Spirit arrives to move us, this is the prayer we must be ready to pray. Our other practices of prayer – disciplines of scripture reading, silence, fasting, journaling – are really on in the service of this prayer; they prepare our hearts to say Yes to God’s arrival, to ready us for God’s readiness. Let it be with me according to your word.

Today we celebrate the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the gathered disciples. Jesus had told them to wait together in Jerusalem until they were clothed with power from on high, and then he ascended into heaven. They went back into the city and committed themselves to prayer and worship. Mary was there. In the first chapter of the Acts, Luke writes that the eleven apostles “returned to Jerusalem. …They all joined together constantly in prayer, along with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brothers” (Acts 1:12, 14).

Is it a stretch to imagine that Mary, who alone among them had once before been visited by the Holy Spirit and overshadowed by Highest Power, would in these moments of waiting and expectation be the teacher and champion of prayer, promoting patience, offering her words, helping each one prepare a heart ready to say Yes when the Spirit arrived? Just as she had carried and nourished and given birth to the Savior, these men and women would also carry Jesus’ presence into the world.

Let it be with me according to your Word.

     It’s a prayer of consent. A prayer of surrender – of openness and alignment. Mary prayed that prayer not knowing how she would conceive a child without ever having been intimate with a man. Most of the time God doesn’t give us the how, or the when, or the why. God does promise us that the Spirit will be in it and that “nothing will be impossible with God.” We are called to freely respond, Yes, yes, yes. Let it be so with me.

     The capacity to say Yes or No, to give or withhold our consent, is one of the things that makes us most deeply human. When our heart and mind and will are in alignment, no external pressure, no circumstantial suffering, can negate a Yes or a No. We might not be able to control much of what happens to us in our daily lives, in our families, in the political systems, but in large part we can control our responses to these things. We can say, No I will not go along with that, or Yes I will go along with that. The enduring power of African American spirituality has its origins in the suffocating horror of the slave ships, when certain men and women, who from a worldly perspective had had their humanity utterly stripped away, decided to believe against all evidence that God saw them and knew them, and the called or sang out to God and summoned God out of that darkness. The great African American teacher, writer, and spiritual director, Howard Thurman once wrote this meditation:

There is in every person an inward sea, and in that sea there is an island and on that island there is an altar and standing guard before that altar is the 'angel with the flaming sword.' Nothing can get by that angel to be placed upon that altar unless it has the mark of your inner authority. Nothing passes “the angel with the flaming sword” to be placed upon your altar unless it be a part of 'the fluid area of your consent.' This is your crucial link with the Eternal.

You get to say who, at bottom, you are. And who you are, from a Christian point of view, is a child of God, an image-bearer of God, a person in whose deepest center stands an altar jealously guarded for the love of God. Mary let the word of God pass that flaming sword, she opened her heart to God’s dwelling. All of us can do that, because the Spirit helps us. All of us are made to do that. Let it be with me according to your word is letting ourselves be caught up in the movement of God.

I want to dwell for a minute on one of the words in this prayer. According. Let it be with me according to your word, according is the word doing work bring the me and the you together. When we are of an accord, then we agree. We are in harmony. If two countries sign a peace accord, then they have made some sort of treaty or compact with one another, committing themselves to the same ideal. This words accord comes from an Old French word acorder meaning to reconcile, harmonize, agree, be of one mind. That word traces its roots back to Latin, to a verb accordare – to be in harmony, to be united, to give or grant with one’s heart. This word is created from the prefix ad, meaning “to, toward, or near” and the root cor – heart, or chorda –musical chords, or strings. Near the heart, to the heart, toward the heart.

When Mary says yes to God, she’s not going through some well-practiced gesture of submission. She’s not powerless here. She’s standing fully and freely in her power. She’s granting God her heart. She wants to be in harmony with what God wants. She wants to be of one mind with God. She wants her intent and God’s intent to be harmonized, like two notes played together on the piano. She invites the promise of God close to her heart. Discord – far from, away from the heart. (reveal this in next section?)

It is true in principle that nothing is impossible with God. But for that to be true on the ground, in our lived experiences, God needs a way in – an open mind, a willing heart. God needs the Yes to be spoken from our deepest place. And I want to emphasize again: Even if we’ve messed up in the past. Even if we feel inadequate or ill-equipped. Even if we haven’t had the experiences we think we need to have had, or read the books we think we need to have read. Even if we’re at our lowest point when the Spirit shows up. None of our mess is an obstacle to God if our heart desires to be of one accord with God’s heart.

Those men and women gathered in the upper room praying – they weren’t the stuff of the movement. They didn’t have assets – property, wealth, endowments, foundations. They didn’t have weapons. They hadn’t hired any experts or consultants. God doesn’t give the Spirit to the Roman aristocrats, the Jewish scholars, the platoons of soldiers. God gives the Spirit to those who seek him with all their heart. Who wait for him to come. Who say Yes to him. When this group of people emerged from that room speaking in the languages of the known world, the crowd that gathered was “utterly amazed, asking: Aren’t all these who are speaking Galileans?” Not much later, this surprise is echoed by the religious and civil authorities that arrest Peter and John for preaching about Jesus being risen from the dead and healing people in the way that Jesus had healed people. They interrogated them, but “when they saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished and they took note that these men had been with Jesus.  [And] since they could see the man who had been healed standing there with them, there was nothing they could say” (Acts 4:13-14).

In Jesus’ name, Amen.