13 January 2018

Sermon, Advent IV, Year B, Luke 1:26-38, 24 December 2017

         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



[1] Luke 1:28b (NRSV)
[2] Luke 1:38 (NRSV)
[3] Ibid.

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