And Gabriel came to Mary and said, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.” But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. (Luke 1:28–29)

The Annunciation tends to pass us by. You might think that this day—when the angel Gabriel announces to Mary that she will give birth to the Messiah, the Son of God—would be a big one in the Church year. But the holiday itself falls on March 25 (you can do the math), right around Easter, and it often gets rescheduled if it falls during Holy Week or Easter Week. (This year, the announcement will be delayed slightly to April 8…) We tell the story again on the Fourth Sunday of Advent, but of course this year, that falls on the morning of Christmas Eve, and once again, few will hear it. And of course, when I say “we” here I mean “we Protestants,” who’ve always been a bit skeptical about the role of the Mother of God, relative to our Roman Catholic friends.

But an obscure Annunciation is somehow appropriate for the day.

An angel of the Lord—scratch that, not just any angel, but the Archangel Gabriel!—appears to a young woman with an extraordinary message, and a greeting: “Greetings, favored one!” (in some traditional translations, “Hail, full of grace!”) “The Lord is with you!” And Mary is not frightened, or impressed, or flattered, but perplexed. The angel goes on at length, describing the amazing thing that is happening: “you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus! He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David! He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end!” And Mary is not shocked, or terrified, or lost in rapturous praise. She simply asks the obvious question: “How can this be?” And the angel gives an answer I’ve always loved for its wild inadequacy: “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.”

Thanks, Gabriel. That clears things up.

The angel of the Lord appears to announce the most important event in human history, one which is completely fundamental to Christian theology, and this is as clear as he can be? This is as public an announcement as God wants to make? One angel, to one person, with a few short, confusing sentences?

But sometimes that’s all that we get. The world moves underneath us, and no one else notices. God reaches out to touch us, and no one else sees it. God speaks into our lives, and the message is confusing, and we are perplexed.

And we’re left with a choice. We can ignore that message from God, or shrug it off as something else. We can try to make perplexity precise, transforming ambiguity into fundamentalism in pursuit of something we can wrap our heads around. Or we can simply accept that we’re going along for the ride, and echo Mary’s words: “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”