Sermon preached at the Sung Eucharist on the Annunciation of Our Lord 2026

Florence is a city full of pictures of the Annunciation. Earlier this year, an incredible exhibition of the work of Beato Angelico, the beatified early rennaisance Dominican painter, was held at the Palazzo Strozzi, bringing together hundreds of gold-ground paintings, illuminations, and altarpieces. But in the courtyard of the Palazzo, an altogether different scene had been installed. The American artist, Kaws, had been commissioned to create an installation of two massive sculptures, posed as if they were somehow in dialogue with each other. Made of wood, these two figures, popularised in Kaws’s work as ‘Companion’ and ‘BFF’ follow a traditional annunciation pattern, one standing with a gesture in the direction of the other, kneeling. They face one another. But they appear to be communicating through smart phones. The kneeling creature – positioned like Our Lady – is engrossed by the screen. The standing figure – positioned like the Archangel – holds out its phone in one hand, whilst the other hand placed across the chest, demure at the significance of the moment which is being communicated.

This is a form of Pop Art and it is called ‘The Message.’ Engaging different facets of our culture, Kaws depicts a dialogue suspended in the traditional iconography of the annunciation. The artist intended it to blend historical resonance with what he called ‘a digital melancholy’; both figures communicating through the medium of the smartphone screen. Technology has become the privileged vehicle of instant and universal communication for our age; we even borrow bits of terminology from religious language to describe it. We talk about ‘icons’ on our screens. This technology shapes our relationships and our perception of the world around us, often better, sometimes for worse. Kaws’s installation is intended to make us think about our hyperconnectivity, how we are thoroughly networked into vast spaces we will never visit, and with people we will never meet; but also provocatively lulling us, perhaps, into that false sense that our levels of knowledge and understanding are more rounded and more complete than ever before. As a piece of art, The Message is playful and subversive. It certainly speaks of a kind of hyperconnectivity.

But the traditional picture of the Annunciation is already such a scene. Mary is the most connected and connecting figure at that point in human history. In representative, or so-called typological tradition, she is the new Eve, the one whose ‘Yes!’ to God and to God’s promises unlocks the disobedience of Eden which has characterised human life throughout the time of the world. She represents the whole history of God’s covenant with the Jewish people, throughout the Exodus, experience of exile, and into the ministry of the prophets. Theirs is a voice she claims and theirs is a message she holds. As a first century young pregnant woman, vulnerable to the cultural stereotypes and norms of her day, Mary represents in a particular way those who live at the margins of society. And as the one human from whose flesh will come Christ’s flesh, she represents every single person baptised into Christ’s life and promise. Mary is a figure of hyperconnectivity, and this is a scene which will have the most permanent and transformational, cosmic-yet-grounded effects on the world and its salvation. Imagining this scene in the twelfth century, St Bernard of Clairvaux preached a sermon which captures in the silence between the Archangel’s question and Mary’s answer something of the longing of humankind for Mary’s response,

‘The angel awaits an answer; it is time for him to return to God who sent him. We too are waiting, O Lady, for your word of compassion… The price of our salvation is offered to you. We shall be set free at once if you consent… In your brief response we are to be remade in order to be recalled to life…  Tearful Adam with his sorrowing family begs this of you, O loving Virgin, in their exile from Paradise. Abraham begs it, David begs it. All the other holy patriarchs, your ancestors, ask it of you, as they dwell in the country of the shadow of death. This is what the whole earth waits for, prostrate at your feet… Answer quickly, O Virgin. Reply in haste to the angel, or rather through the angel to the Lord. Answer with a word, receive the Word of God. Speak your own word, conceive the divine Word. Breathe a passing word, embrace the eternal Word.’

The ‘Yes’ that Mary utters on the day of the Annunciation cascades down the centuries, as she places her life in God’s hands, and therefore participates in the unrestricted sharing of God’s promises. The Church lives in the echo of that moment, accessing its connectivity every day, through prayer, proclamation and sacramental ministry. Mary’s is a ‘Yes’ to which we are umbilically connected.

The hyperconnectivity symbolised by those smartphones in Kaws’s sculpture is a mediated connectivity. Those phones are barriers as well as brokers. The screen and the webs of complex technology behind it are surely enablers of certain kinds of connection. But the connectivity which we see in the Annunciation itself, and which flows from it, does not need mediation in that way. Through Mary’s ‘Yes’ to God’s promises, as a result of her total openness to God’s love, Christ takes flesh in her womb. See where that kind of trust might lead?! Mary’s DNA becomes Jesus’s DNA, hers are the features Jesus must have shared, the dispositions, gestures, about which people must have said, ‘Oh yes, he’s Mary’s son.’ Jesus Christ, God incarnate, is a person who lives amongst people, face to face, from birth to death, from manger to tomb.

The scandalous reality is that this flesh – God’s flesh – is our flesh too. When we speak of the Church as the Body of Christ, that is not just a metaphor. To slightly misquote St Teresa of Avila, ‘Christ has no body on earth now but ours, no hands, no feet on earth but ours. Ours are the eyes with which he looks with compassion on this world, ours are the feet with which he walks to do good, ours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.’ Our humanity, baptised into Christ and intimately connected across the centuries to millions of other believers whom we have not met and who may not be like us, is the locus of God’s self-communication with the world. No screens needed. Distance overcome. Separation broken down. Promises kept, shared, fulfilled, enfleshed, enlarged.

Whether we are present here today in the Abbey, or whether we are joining this service online, we participate in these promises, ‘heirs through faith’, as St Paul puts it. We do so alongside countless Christian believers in contexts thoroughly unlike our own and with the Church Triumphant in Heaven. Truly, as Christians we do not know where our debts begin and end. We can’t wriggle out of that. We don’t get to decide with whom we share the life of faith. Wherever or whoever we are, through our baptism, our faith, and our life of prayer, each of us shares in Mary’s hyperconnectivity to the profound depths of God’s faithfulness. That faithfulness promises that our humanity itself will ultimately be transfigured in Christ, its brokenness and its scars healed by the unmediated fullness of God’s mercy, first announced to a young unmarried girl from Nazareth.