Mid-Advent 1
Lk
1:26-38
12/2/15
How is your Christmas planning
going? I can tell you that here at
church everything is scheduled out and ready to go. On Friday at 1:30 p.m. we will help pack food
boxes at the Marion Ministerial Alliance food pantry. On Saturday at 6:00 p.m. we will have the
congregational Christmas party. On
Sunday at 3:00 p.m. the youth will shop for and wrap gifts for children in
foster care, and the congregation has already donated money to pay for the
gifts. Next Saturday at 9:30 a.m. is the
rehearsal for the Sunday school Christmas program, which will then take place
during the Sunday school and Bible class hour the next day. The mid-week Advents services for the next
two weeks are all planned, as are the services on Christmas Eve and Christmas
Day.
Christmas is a time of tremendous
planning and preparation. It is here at
church, and of course, it is for you as well at home. You plan where you will be spending
Christmas. You prepare as you strive to
get all of your Christmas shopping done.
You prepare as you put up the Christmas tree, the decorations around the
house and lights outside. You plan what
you will be having for the holiday meals.
We expend tremendous energy planning
and preparing to celebrate Christmas.
And yet the text for tonight reminds us about an important fact. For Mary the first Christmas was entirely
unplanned. It was something for which
there had been no preparation on her part.
Instead, God acted in a manner that was surprising in several different
ways. In those surprises we learn about
how God works. And in Mary’s words we
see how faith responds to God.
Luke begins by telling us, “In the
sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named
Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of
David. And the virgin's name was Mary.”
We meet Mary, who is a virgin betrothed to be married. In the setting of
first century Palestine, this description tells us that she was probably in her
early teens. She lived in Galilee, in the northern part of Israel. However the man she was betrothed to marry
was from the house of David – a lineage that originated in the south – in Judah
… Bethlehem to be exact.
A woman – and a young unwed virgin at
that - living in a village in Galilee. She is the picture of someone lowly and
unimportant. A nobody. Yet we learn in
our text that all of that changed in an instant. It changed when the angel Gabriel was sent to
her with an announcement.
He said, “Greetings, O favored one,
the Lord is with you!” Just like you,
angels did not bring announcements to Mary all the time. She was frightened as she tried to understand
what was happening and what it meant.
Gabriel responded with an assuring
word: “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold,
you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name
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 father David, and he will reign
over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.”
The angel declared to Mary that she
would give birth to a son – a royal son who would be called the Son of the Most
High and would rule as the descendant of King David. Gabriel told Mary that she would give birth
to the Messiah.
Mary was a nobody, not royalty. She was about to marry Joseph – who was a
carpenter, not a prince. They lived in
Nazareth, not in the Jerusalem where a king would be found. So many things about this did not add
up. But apparently what really caught
Mary’s attention was the question of how
this was going to happen. Though
betrothed to Joseph, she apparently did not think Gabriel was talking about a
child produced by that marriage for she asked, “How will this be, since I am a
virgin?”
Gabriel’s answer must have taken
Mary’s breath away. He said, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power
of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be
called holy—the Son of God. And behold, your relative Elizabeth in her old age
has also conceived a son, and this is the sixth month with her who was called
barren. For nothing will be impossible with God.”
Gabriel said that there would be nothing
normal about this pregnancy or child. Mary the virgin would conceive through
the work of the Holy Spirit, and would give birth to a holy child – the Son of
God. A miracle would take place, because for God, nothing is impossible.
This is not what Mary had planned.
This is not something for which she was preparing. This news was utterly unexpected. It was a surprise to her. And frankly it is
surprise in another way. God announces
through Gabriel that he is fulfilling the mighty and awesome promises that he
had made in the Old Testament about the Messiah. He is sending the descendant of King David
who will reign forever. And he says that
he is going to do this … through Mary.
He is going to carry out his mighty saving act by means of a nobody.
Everything about our text is
unexpected and surprising. It’s not what
Mary is planning. But it is what God has
planned. It is not at all the way we expect God to do things. But it is the
way God chooses to do things.
And we need to take note of
this. For often, this is how things work
in our lives. There are circumstances
and events that we have not planned on happening. There are times that we find God is guiding
our lives in ways that we did not in any way expect. There are times when we are confronted with
the truth that we are not in charge. We
don’t like that. We especially don’t like it when this brings changes that we
consider to be undesirable or difficult.
At those times, the temptation for us is to doubt God; to express our
displeasure with God.
Mary hadn’t planned on being
pregnant with the Messiah – the incarnate Son of God. Her life would never be “normal” again as she
gave birth to and raised a son who could call God “Father” in a way that no
other being in the universe can. She
would follow his ministry until she saw him die on a cross. And then on Easter she would learn that her
son had begun the resurrection of the Last Day. She would find herself
worshipping her son as God because he is the Son of God.
Gabriel described Mary as “favored
one.” He meant that by God’s grace he
had chosen to bless her with the role of being the mother of Jesus the Christ –
with being the mother of God. It was something that would transform her life –
and not always in ways that we would consider desirable. And what was Mary’s
reaction? She said, “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me
according to your word.” She received this role in faith, trusting in God’s
word.
Mary is the model for us of how we
are to respond to the unplanned and unexpected circumstances and occasions of
our life. She responded in faith as she
acknowledged that she belonged to God and his will; as she expressed the wish
that things be done according to God’s word.
Our text leads us to respond in this
way as well. Yet in doing so we are
aided by the fact that we have seen what God has done through the Son of God
conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary. In Jesus Christ we
have seen God work in an unexpected and surprising way.
Yes, the One conceived in Mary is
the Son of the Most High. Yes, he is the
Son of God. And yet he will submit himself to suffering, humiliation and death
– even death on a cross. He comes to
bring God’s mighty act of salvation, and yet he does it in the midst of
rejection and weakness. The eye test
says that there is nothing “good” about Good Friday.
Yet in this case sight is
deceiving. For what appears to be
weakness and failure is in fact the Father’s will for your salvation. It is surprising and unexpected, yet it is
God’s will. It is God’s plan. And the
confirmation of this is found on Easter. Jesus dies because of the sin of Adam;
he dies because of your sin. But he
rises from the dead as the second Adam.
He comes forth from the tomb and begins the resurrection of the Last
Day.
Because you have seen God work in
this manner in his Son Jesus Christ, you are now able to trust in him when the
circumstances of life are surprising and unexpected. The Spirit of God uses the good news of this
Gospel to strengthen your trust; to increase your assurance.
Your life is now shaped by what God
has done in Christ. Jesus becomes the
One through whom you view all of the things in life that you experience. The death and resurrection of the incarnate
Son of God for you enables you to say with Mary, “Behold, I am the servant of
the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.”
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