Finally
we’re getting to the Christmas story. But no, it’s not Christmas yet. About
every six years, the fourth Sunday of Advent falls on December 24. This means
during the day that Sunday is Advent. When evening comes, so does Christmas. So
if by chance you came expecting a Christmas service, please do come back
tonight.
For those of you who have been
here every Sunday, you’ve listened patiently to three weeks of weird lessons.
The first Sunday of Advent brought us Jesus speaking about the end times. The
second and third Sundays told part of the story of John the Baptizer. Now, in
this final Sunday of Advent, we get to hear about Jesus. A nice safe gospel
reading about how Jesus came into being.
Except it’s not so safe as we
might like. It does, after all, stretch the bounds of our contemporary
credulity by asking us to believe in things like angels and virgin births. But
still, the story is, at least, familiar. And it is, at least, finally about
Christmas, more or less.
Yet today’s Gospel story still places
us squarely in the anticipation and waiting of Advent. While today’s gospel may
sound like Christmas, no birth has yet occurred. Before conception can take
place, belief must enter. Both for Mary and for us, believing and conceiving
are strongly entwined. The prophecy of the birth and the belief in the birth
itself are things for our hearts to dwell on in this last Sunday of Advent.
Today’s gospel is yet another story about prophesy and prophets, just
like the last three weeks.
The first Sunday of Advent we heard Jesus speaking of the end of all
time. The second and third Sundays of Advent we heard John the Baptist’s
prophecy about Jesus. This final Sunday of Advent we hear the prophecy of the
birth of Jesus.
Biblical prophecies often have common
themes. In birth prophecies, for example, the couple is beyond childbearing
age, or the woman is unable to bear children, or there is some impediment to
having children.
In addition, the stories of those whom God asks to become prophets have
certain elements as well. And Luke’s Gospel tells us how insignificant Mary is.
The angel visitation happens in an insignificant part of the country: Galilee,
in the most insignificant of towns: Nazareth. Mary was a young girl, probably
twelve or thirteen, and girls were insignificant people in her time.
Never in scriptural history has an insignificant young girl in an
unimportant town been asked to do the most significant thing of all: to bring
forth the Messiah, the Christ, from her own body.
To this insignificant girl in this
unimportant town comes an angel. The angel calls Mary “favored one.” Mary must
have wondered about this. Here she was, like thousands of other young girls in
hundreds of other towns and an angel came to her? An angel did not come
to Mary because there was anything that made her particularly favored. Instead
an angel came to her and that was why she became the “favored one.” Yet this is
exactly the kind of reversal God has in mind: the poor and lowly are lifted up
and the proud and the rich are brought down. In Mary herself, begins the
reversal Jesus the Messiah brings to the world.
The angel says to Mary: “The Lord is
with you!”[1]
This also is a reversal. These words are said throughout scripture to warriors
and prophets such as Moses, Gideon and Jeremiah. These words have never been
said before to an insignificant girl in an unimportant town.
Mary is asked to bring her body to the prophecy
of God. This also is something God has not done before. There are other women
in the bible, most notably Elizabeth, the mother of the John the Baptist, who
bore children for God with special roles or lives. But never in human history
had any woman been asked to use her body to bring the flesh of God into the
world as human flesh.
Finally, in Mary’s acquiescence to
bring God’s flesh into the world, Mary does a new thing as well. Mary responds,
“Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.”[2]
“Here
am I” is a typical response to a call from God. What is new about Mary is that
she responds after she is told the
enormity of God’s plan.
Most of us are willing to respond, “Here am I” when we don’t know the
details. How many of us have said yes unthinkingly before the entire proposition
was explained to us? Yet here is Mary, knowing
what God has in mind for her to do, and she responds, “Here am I, the servant
of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.”[3]
Mary, an insignificant virgin in an unimportant town, does the most significant
act of all. She says those words knowing what God has in store. Martin Luther
put it this way:
…most amazing of all is that this maiden should
credit the announcement that she rather than some other virgin had been chosen
to be the Mother of God….had she not believed, she could not have conceived.
May we also, as we celebrate Christmas, believe so we may
conceive: Christ in our hearts, and in our hands, and on our lips. AMEN.
The Rev Nicolette Papanek
©2017
